Demographics

Before you voluntarily vacate your comfortable real estate in semi-rural Ontario in order to take up residence in a brand new city like St. Petersburg, it's understandable to want a little information on the 248,000 people who will soon be your neighbors. Obviously you can't go around knocking on doors and chatting with every single person in town about their hopes, dreams, and marital status, before you decide; but luckily you don't have to. The US Census Bureau has done it for you and posted the results on their website. Here follows a summary of what they found.

As we've mentioned already, the number of people living in St. Petersburg is hovering around the 248,000 mark, having shrunk slightly between 2000, when the last census was done and 2006, when they updated their estimates. While we can't translate that into the number of houses that would be needed to house them all, we can tell you that it amounts to about 109,500 households, which belong to over 61,000 families. With the city spread over about 60 square miles, this amounts to a population density of about 4,000 people per square mile.

Of these 248,000 people, about 58,000 are children between the ages of 'just born' and 'just graduating from high school.' Around 47,500 of them are younger people just coming into or recently established in the workforce between the ages of 20 and 35. About 107,000 people, the largest subset of the population, are established professionals looking ahead to or approaching retirement. They range in age from 35 to 65. People of retirement age number about 42,000 on a permanent basis, with their numbers being augmented in the winter by tens of thousands of snowbirds migrating down from snowy Toronto lofts. The median age for the permanent population is 39.3.

As far as income levels go, the average annual income of a person living in St. Petersburg was about $21,000 while the median income for a household was around $34,500. Of the 109,000 households on the Census, around 12,000 were earning less than $10,000 per year, while around 16,500 were earning more than $75,000. The rest were situated in between these extremes, with the largest subgroup being the $35,000 to $50,000 earners. On an income like this, the family probably couldn't afford Toronto Beaches homes but would be doing well enough to be able to buy a small-to-medium sized house in a safe neighborhood. About 9.2% percent of the population lives below the poverty level.

St. Petersburg's population is decently diverse, with only about 36% of people having been born inside the state, a number which is around the same as what you would find shopping for a house for sale in Mississauga. 71% of the population is of Caucasian descent, while African Americans make up about 22%. Just over 4% are of Hispanic descent while around 2% identify themselves as Asian or Pacific Islander. Native Americans make up about .3% of the population. English is the dominant language for about 88% of people in St. Petersburg, followed by Spanish at about 4.5% then German and French, each at around .75%.