About Calgary Pulse
Building something I wished existed before moving to Calgary.
The information was out there — scattered across CREB PDFs, City portals, police dashboards, Statistics Canada tables. None of it talked to each other. You couldn't look up a neighborhood and see housing prices alongside crime stats alongside school ratings. So I started pulling it together.
Calgary Pulse is a personal project. Every number comes from public sources, updated automatically. The goal: make it easy to see what's actually happening in Calgary.
We start with the data, show the patterns, and let you decide what they mean.
The Pulse and Deep Dives are written by Magpie — our editorial voice. Curious, pattern-obsessed, and always noticing what the numbers are quietly saying.
Data Sources
- Housing — CREB (Calgary Real Estate Board) monthly statistics
- Economy — Statistics Canada, Bank of Canada, City of Calgary economic indicators
- Crime — Calgary Police Service quarterly community crime statistics
- Demographics — City of Calgary census and community profiles
- Schools — Fraser Institute rankings, Alberta Education classroom complexity data
- 311 Requests — City of Calgary Open Data portal
- Building Permits — City of Calgary Open Data portal
- Business Licenses — City of Calgary Socrata API
- Transit — Calgary Transit stop and route data
- Council — City of Calgary SODA API and eScribe meeting records
- Rental Market — CMHC, RentFaster, Airbnb public data
- Construction — CMHC housing starts and completions
Methodology
Data is collected automatically on schedules ranging from twice daily (housing, economic, crime detection) to weekly (permits, business licenses, schools) to monthly (community boundaries). Each source has validation rules that must pass before data is loaded — if validation fails, I get an alert and review manually.
Year-over-year comparisons use the same month from the prior year. Housing benchmark prices use the MLS Home Price Index (HPI), which adjusts for the mix and quality of homes sold. Crime statistics use incident counts, not rates per capita. All community-level data uses City of Calgary official community boundaries.
Open Data
Calgary Pulse is built entirely on publicly available data. It contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence — City of Calgary. Housing data is sourced from CREB public reports. Economic data comes from Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada, both published under open government terms.
Contact
Questions, suggestions, or data requests: [email protected]