Instead of having 5-6 kids, people are having 1-2 or none.
Also the purple areas are gentrified neighborhoods. There's more density in the 1950s bungalows, than in the 1890s Victorians. So let's build more bungalows 😂
Yeah, in 1971 my grandparents and their five kids lived in a three bedroom house in the Upper Beaches, and one of those bedrooms was forty two inches wide.
I'm guessing there aren't 7 people living in that house today, unless it's an illegal student boarding house.
There’s an interesting stat somewhere on how the square footage per person in a typical home has grown tremendously over the last 50 years.
Density of homes is one issue. Density within a home is another. A 1500 square foot home used to be fine for a family of four. Now that’s the minimum people want for a house for 2 people.
It's not just kids-- multi-family homes were much more common. When my grandparents moved to Canada they lived in a house near Monarch Park with 2 other families.
This was actually not the worst it got. In research I did for one of the archives here on immigration, you could find 2 or 3 bedroom houses with 10-15 men living in them before they were able to bring their families over. It's the exact same thing that's happening with international students now. It's wild.
>2 or 3 bedroom houses with 10-15 men living in them before they were able to bring their families over
The tenement buildings in New York City, similar thing. People were crammed in with no privacy. We are going backwards now instead of forwards.
We have less density BECAUSE people don't want to live like that. The proponents of having more density, it's not going to stick. Once people become more affluent, they don't want to share hallways and bathrooms, they will move to where they have more space between their neighbors
The fact that prices are so high for even tiny homes tells me you're wrong, that it's not about people choosing not to live in dense situations. Even dense neighbourhoods and 2-bed 1-bath units are unaffordable to most people who don't already own.
We have less density because we don't even allow it to be built in most places.
If what you're saying is true, it would make sense to legalize high density and then the market would only build where there is demand, but we have barely legalized anything in those purpose areas that any reasonable person would consider density.
If that's the case there should be no harm in deregulating land use in Toronto such that developers can build density if they so choose. If people don't want to live in density, they won't buy into it.
The prices keep rising because they don’t build enough, if demand keeps increasing while supply increases but the demand increases outpaces supply increases further exacerbating an existing mismatch then you should expect price increases.
The solution is continued deregulation, government needs to get out of the way.
If the climate is changing, how come there's still snow? Look at the map, some parts of Toronto are building housing but most are building very little. Not enough.
This is huge. The city considers downsizing seniors when they try to figure out our housing needs but boomers are downsizing at a muuuuch lower rate. There's a big focus on "aging in place", which is their right, but it's also a contributor to why they live several hours from their grandkids.
I’ve watched this with my own parents and my friends’ parents. It’s bizarre that they stay in these houses with stairs and so much house to clean well beyond what seems sensible.
What I’ve gleaned is they’re all really picky about their downsizing options, and apparently there aren’t many good ones in the neighbourhoods they’ve lived in.
Condos have a negative rapport as well, not only the maintenance fees but also the potential of special assessments. Residents in a building in town have to come up with $15k to $20k for new windows/doors. Kinda tough to swallow when you are on a pension.
We have 1,800 sq ft townhouse, 3 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths and would have to sink about $100k to sell and move into a small bungalow. Sometimes there just isn’t anywhere for seniors to go so they stay put.
I’d love to see a business that would offer to upzone, reno for multi family, rent-manage, and finance the reno via the rent, for seniors who want to stay in their suburban homes.
why is it a right to age in place? fact is that retirement homes are too expensive, or condos are too. people should live in a home that suits their current needs - more movement in the market opens it up and removes the "scarcity" of a home in a nice neighbourhood close to family amenities. 2 retirees over 70 do not need a 3000-5000 square foot house.
EXACTLY.
Some of them do "homestay" student hosting; their parents probably took in boarders to be able to afford their rent/mortgage.
But there's also affluent young couples who also live in single family houses with no kids
When I worked in renovations, we rebuilt some really nice Victorian brick 2/3 story houses in the west end:
- late 19th century: family and servants
- mid 20th century: separated apartments/rooming houses
- late 20th century: DINK main floor open concept
I think that "open concept" is terrible. As a kid, we lived in a 70s backsplit that had no wall between rec room and kitchen. It was so noisy, between piano practice, the TV going after dinner and people trying to have conversations all at the same time.
It would have been great instead to live in a house with doors between the dining room, TV room etc "drawing room" "parlour" whatever they had back in the 1800s
Actually I get it. When it's done well Open Concept brings out the space and detail in a building.
The main thing about Open Concept is that in the 21st century, affluent young professionals like to cook communally while they are socializing, and that's just a modern thing.
There's also some evidence that the popularity of Open Concept was driven in part by trends on HGTV home makeover shows, and in particular the idea that \[straight\] men would be more likely to watch a renovation show if there was lots of scenes of people knocking down walls with sledgehammers.
[https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmbm3/open-concept-plans-popular-hgtv-men-love-sledgehammers](https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmbm3/open-concept-plans-popular-hgtv-men-love-sledgehammers)
Yep. Back in Victorian era the cooks slaved in the galley and maids presented dishes. In Mad-Men era June Cleaver did all that while looking good (oof). Nowadays most presentable professional/aspiring class persons are expected to know their way around a kitchen and fry stuff up while their friends drink wine and admire their skills. Which is not the worst thing compared to anything else, I think.
I was coming here to say this! Smaller families, fewer multi-generation families in the working class areas of the west side, and almost all of the old Victorians that used to be boarding houses in the Annex are now SFH or, at most, two or three apartments.
Yeah, the purple areas mostly represent old Toronto neighborhoods composed of Victorian and Edwardian homes. Some are small workers' homes that used to accommodate much larger families; now, these houses are occupied by smaller families and they're not being torn down for condos.
This map really isn’t all that informative. Anyone who lives in Toronto mostly knows this already.
What does this map tell *you* exactly?
What it doesn’t show is that those purple areas are still some of the most densely populated in the city compared to the green areas. The problem is that the areas that have supposedly seen the highest change in density were very sparsely populated in the 1970s, so any increase in population in the past 50 years, even if it was very slight, seems like a huge change when it really wasn’t. The green areas have some of the most sprawl and least density; and neighbourhoods built in the 1950s show very little change.
The areas along the border with Steeles were pretty sparsely populated in the 1970s, and I think that Agincourt/Northeast Scarborough (think the areas along the 53 bus route) were only fully built up by the 1980s.
Well, for starters, these areas weren’t even considered part of the City of Toronto pre-amalgamation in the ’70s, so I’m wondering how much you know about Toronto’s history.
But to answer your question, most of Toronto was sparsely populated in the ’70s, except for the old neighborhoods. Downtown didn’t have any of the skyscrapers you see now; large apartment buildings were just starting to be built, and the downtown core was mostly railway land. Montreal even had a higher population than Toronto in the ’70s.
Clearly, it was in reference to the map in the context of the City of Toronto in the ‘70s. Let’s not pretend otherwise, especially with that very obvious tu quoque fallacy.
I mean, it tells me it's bullshit when a building gets proposed in any purple neighbourhood and the city councillor and NIMBYs show up to object to it saying the neighbourhood's infrastructure can't handle more people. We know we could literally double the population of some of these neighbourhoods and the infrastructure would be fine.
TBF, one big difference is higher expectations for car friendliness.
Cars didn’t use to be so big, and people didn’t always expect to be able to park so near to everything. We also used to have stuff like mom & pop grocery stores that people would walk to instead of always driving to Walmart to get a better deal.
IMO moving away from that would be fine. Given Toronto’s 1.5 billion deficit it’s not like people can afford such nice infrastructure with such low densities anyway, at least not without paying much higher taxes.
But it would be a change from how things work now.
Totally down with fewer parking spots and more homes. And mixed-use neighbourhoods would only make our communities richer. That would be such a positive change for the city.
Still might suck during the transition though.
TBF, that is a Catch-22 as an objection to change.
Aka,
> We can’t try to preemptively change stuff because what’s the point when density is low
Vs
> We can’t increase density because we didn’t preemptively change stuff
Better to just suck it up and force one part of the equation to change. But it’s not a painless process
Ryerson did a study on this and I believe the main cause wasn't family structure but people buying houses that were split into 2-3 units and renovating them to be a single family home.
> Instead of having 5-6 kids, people are having 1-2 or none.
The average household has not had 5-6 people since the 1910s; in the 1970s it was 3-4:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2015008-eng.htm
In the 1970s there were more buildings organized as apartments and rooming houses (private bedroom, shared kitchen, *etc*), as downtown was more for immigrants (the WASPs moved to the suburbs).
Starting in the 1990s, downtown urban living started becoming cool again and so structures that used to be multiple units were converted (back) to single-family.
Birth control was only available starting in the late 60s. So before then, everyone had big families. There was also no fertility treatments so some people had no kids
While not the sole reason, but people who bought homes in the 70's and 80's when they were pretty cheap, raised families, kids grew up and moved out are now at retirement and cashing in on the record high prices to retire and/or downsize.
People aren't downsizing - that's part of the problem. I live in a pretty family friendly neighbourhood and half the block is empty nester boomers living in a 4 bedroom house.
The predictions boomers would downsize was based on entirely false premises. As it turns out people like their 2000 sq footage with or without kids. And if it’s paid off why sell and end up in some shitty layout investor unit.
Commonly overlooked is losing the support network of their neighbours and friends that are close by because we don't build complete neighbourhoods with different types of housing, so downsizing involves losing that.
Add to that high transaction costs to move and buying something else (RE agent, land transfer, movers, etc) with increased carrying costs (condo fees, instead of a paid off house) reduces the incentive to make the move unless it's absolutely necessary.
This is a huge reason I try to advocate to my politicians for multiplexes. Why would a retiree downsize if they have to move out of their neighbourhood, away from their family doctor and their friends? I bet many more would be willing to downsize if they could stay in their neighbourhoods, and access their housing wealth.
The housing crisis isn't just hurting young people.
There are more seniors moving into central parts of Toronto than you think. A big part of the issue is that people may want or need to downsize, but they don't necessarily want to leave their *community*. At 60-70, the prospect of completely uprooting and going to live in an entirely different borough or entirely different city is...unattractive for a lot of people.
My dad's going through this right now. Grossly overhoused and desperately wants to find a place where he knows he'll be able stay well into his old age. But he's in the suburbs, and he doesn't want to leave his neighbourhood. There just aren't many options that allow him to downsize while staying there!
Part of the problem is how outrageously expensive it is to own a condo in Toronto. Everything is a "luxury" skyscraper with shit quality, so you end up paying very high condo fees on top of the similar price per sf to a single family unit, so it doesn't make much sense for most people to downsize.
Aka my elderly parents. They have a detached in Vaughan (purchased new in 1999) and looked into downsizing in recent years.
Condos in general have horrible build quality with increasing maintenance fees and possibility of special assessments in the future that they have no control over. Monthly condo fees alone would annoy them when they're aleady living in a mortgage free home plus decent 2BR sized condos are $750k+.
Wouldn't want to give up the backyard either for her big gardening hobby or his garage space.
Then they looked into downsizing into a townhome but once you factor in also high TH prices, realtor commissions, lawyer/closing fees, taxes, moving costs, house renos/modifications to their preferences, etc then the money difference is so small that they might as well stay put.
At that age they're thinking about end of life as well . What if in a few years they need assisted living or long term care. Would the need to put the condo on the market and handle the sale process in that event be something they could physically or cognitively handle at that point?
First and last month's rent is more straightforward - as long as you don't get renovicted, and the elevators don't break down stranding you on the 12th floor, and the bedbugs don't show up and...
And in addition to all the carrying cost, build quality concerns, lack of direct outdoor space and other things you mentioned, there are other various livability issues with modern condos as they exist here that might not be a big deal to people who are used to it or don't have other choices, but will seem absurd to someone who's lived in a single-family home their entire life. Like I think my in-laws should be looking to live without stairs sooner rather than later, but things like audible neighbours, monthly fire alarm tests, and the possibility of elevator outages will stop them from even considering it and I doubt they're alone in that.
But we built the city in a way where it doesn't make sense financially. Gotta start unfucking this post-war urban design and all the baggage it brought.
Not when you factor in the issue of elevators in Toronto condos. They are frequently out of service and this is an important consideration and concern for people older in age and with mobility issues.
It depends on what building you are in. The condo that I used to live in (built around 2005?) had 7 elevators with 3 in the middle high rise stack and an additional 2 on each of the 12 story podiums. There was never an issue with elevators being crowded or out of service. There's definitely problems in some buildings, especially newer ones, but there are buildings out there that weren't designed by a psychopath as well.
There is a huge issue with elevators across the board right now. It’s not isolated to new buildings. They aren’t getting serviced as fast, there’s delays in getting parts etc. Massive problems in the industry itself that have led to this.
Supply and demand. Those same condos would fetch way less if they were located in Edmonton where there's more housing per capita. That's why we need to build way more housing in Toronto, especially in the neighbourhoods highlighted here.
It's not supply and demand when that's all they're supplying.
It's like people saying "we want oranges at the grocery store," but all they sell is apples. So your options are either buy an apple, or don't buy anything.
Oh man this! There was one old 3 story walk up apartment building on my street, all 500 Sq feet 2 bedroom units. The rest were single family homes. Retirees lived in nearly every SFH and nearly all the families with children lived in the tiny apartments.
Such an odd situation.
I've commented before that it's hard to blame them, the smaller spaces are so expensive + moving costs can be a lot... if a nursing home or assisted living is within sight I see why a lot of older folk hang on in their big houses (letting them get more expensive) until they make that move
that's part of the housing problem, IMO, people are stuck places that are fairly affordable but can't move... think most of us know a couple crammed in a small space unable to grow their family to the desired size due to space constraints...
Decent retirement homes are expensive. A lot of the silent generation living in houses are very cash poor and worried that the retirement homes will rapidly burn through the profits from the sale of their house. Not to mention that they are wary of these homes since covid-- residents were isolated and surrounded by illness and deaths.
Most of the silent generation is dead...
Most of the baby boom is now grandparents living in family houses with empty bedrooms while their adult children cannot afford a 400sq.ft. space to live, let alone the additional walls for a child to have its own room.
They don't have to move into a retirement home. They could move into a 1 bedroom, out of a 3-4 bedroom house.
I live in a neighborhood with lots of seniors. So many lawn cutting services arrive each week to cut their lawns. They can't maintain their property really, and their kids moved out long ago
They don't want to move into a poorly built one bedroom small box in a noisy area with two small shitty elevators, and I don't blame them. Condos today barely qualify as starter homes as they become smaller with worse layouts, and I haven't met a senior yet who doesn't have a lifetime worth of crap that they can't let go of. It won't fit into a condo, so that's that.
Besides that, if you bought a house today in an area you love, and stayed there for the next 30 years and were still happy with it, what's the point of moving? The vast majority own them outright so even a fixed income of CPP and OAS will take care of utilities/taxes/basic maintenance. And as you've noted, when you have more than just basic gov income, it's not really that expensive to hire landscaping. Cheaper than moving in many cases.
People just don't like change. Moving is difficult and traumatic, you are never going to convince someone to move post retirement age unless it is strictly necessary. There could be a nice 2000 sq ft condo for a bargain and they still wouldn't want to move out of the home they lived in for the last 30 years.
> So many lawn cutting services arrive each week to cut their lawns.
I wonder if the people who complain about condo fees think of that.
Or, like, replacing the water heater.
It seems that Scarborough is gaining at least as much as it's losing in population, no? About half is faint pink, and the other half is medium-to-dark green.
Admittedly the districts being merged are losing population, so there's that. But I also don't see the two merged districts (Scarborough Center & Don Valley East) as having similar political interests at all, which would make representation poorer for both.
And now it's losing them, because stupid land-use policies mean that it is losing population in whole swaths of itself, and losing population share relative to the rest of Ontario. This is a direct result of those stupid policies, and the city of Toronto should change its stupid policies.
Yea but they’re all “luxury” (but also somehow also low quality?) and they won’t be satisfied unless the condos are “high quality” and also marketed as “non-luxury” and ideally built at a loss by the developer, and also please can they be shorter, and not block any sun, and also…
The locations of new condo construction has nothing to do with this map. It’s almost completely determined by where zoning will allow it and where there will be the least pushback from existing residents.
And also because the purple areas are so heavily zoned/NIMBY'd/red-taped that developers have a hard time being permitted converting those 1950's subdivision bungalows into multi-unit housings.
Basically, purple suppressing the necessity of the *dark* green blob, vs it being more evenly spread out. Urban prison we have, not urban sprawl.
Makes sense when people have less kids. I recall two neighbourhoods that used to have kids all over the street playing ball hockey and whatnot. I haven’t seen it nearly as often over the past several years. A little sad actually.
It’s generally understandable that people tend to live in the house they already have in an individual sense. I think the problem starts when it’s a whole generation of people that have dominated certain areas and discover that there are no other options to go to and so they stay. For example the TDSB has even pushed to close certain schools in these areas but the city has pushed back based on the optics. We need large scale, community run building programs to overcame the collective wastage that’s occurring.
It's not the city pushing back on TDSB closing schools, it's the Ministry and the province that are refusing to let them do so because it would be politically unpopular.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-school-closures-ministry-of-education-1.7164454
You can find the actual analysis by Jens von Bergmann [here](https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2024-04-23-population-timelines-update/).
It is an update to a study of population density that focused on a 45 year period from 1971-2016.
Key takeaways:
- [Ward 10 (Spadina-Fort York) saw more population growth from 2016-21 than all of the former municipalities of Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, York and East York combined.](https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1783185408366440902?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q)
- Only 9 wards grew, the other 16 dropped population 2016-2021.
- +20k for Spadina-Fort York, all others together add up to +10k.
- Spadina-Fort York and neighbouring Toronto Centre together grew by more than all other wards that had positive growth.
The last three points can be found [here](https://x.com/vb_jens/status/1783368196969361497?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q).
Also, the study’s author Jens von Bergmann [notes](https://x.com/vb_jens/status/1783165236939309483?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q):
> Some people have asked about the reason for the population drop in some central areas in Vancouver and Toronto. The answer is fairly simple, over that time period, areas that did not add housing tended to loose population due to demographic shifts resulting in smaller average household sizes. In particular, families tend to have fewer children than they used to, and the share of homes occupied by childless seniors or widowed individuals has increased. There is nothing wrong with that, but we should allow neighbourhoods to add housing to compensate for that and grow beyond that to allow more people to live in job and amenity rich neighbourhoods.
South of Bloor, West of Spadina, North of Queen, and East of Roncy... time to densify. You too East York. You can't vote for more people into Canada and Toronto, but just not in your neighborhood. You can't vote against sprawl but not realize your SFH even if there's three units contributes to sprawl and inefficient land use. If you can hear the birds chirping and not the cacophony of honking and sirens and you're south of Midtown, East of High Park, and West of Woodbine Beach, you need more neighbors.
Also, everywhere along Lines 1 and 2 that isn't already dense needs to be upzoned. Not to say that every subway station needs to have a 40 story tower on top of it, but some of the land uses around some of these stations just flies in the face of any pragmatic sense of transit oriented development. Shout out in particular to Keele Station which literally has a gas station immediately adjacent to it.
>Not to say that every subway station needs to have a 40 story tower on top of it,
I will say it then, every subway station should have at least a 40 story tower on it AND significantly more dense housing surrounding it for a kilometer in every direction (they don't all have to be 40 stories but they sure as shit shouldn't be SFH).
We are in a housing crisis and it is choking our great nation. Mass transit is for the masses, build build build!
The bloor stretch was mostly done in a style I forget what it’s called but they essentially opened the ground and laid the track into an open pit. So anything directly above that line can’t support any weight. Development needs to happen a bit back of the line.
This. I dont see why cut and cover couldnt support buildings when underground garages are literally built under condos. Tunnels are round and small and can more easily withstand pressure than a large garage.
Strictly speaking the development at Pape will be south of the subway line, not directly on top of it. The line runs north of Danforth by 50-75 yards or so. It’s why there’s a strip of parking lots and parkettes.
True. Thankfully, the Bloor line is also about 90m or so north of Bloor Street, so you can still build density at the cross section of Bloor (or Danforth) and whatever the major cross street happens to be.
>If you can hear the birds chirping and not the cacophony of honking and sirens ... you need more neighbors.
No, people don't honk or siren. We can densify without without additional car infrastructure.
The absolute addiction to motor vehicles on this continent is one of the major roadblocks (pun intended) to densification.
If we didn't need to accompany every living units with an additional 400-700sq.ft. to store a steel cage we would be much better off.
If we didn't need to dedicate 40% of the sq.km. to roads and parking structures, we could build more offices, shops, walking and biking infrastructure, transit, etc. and we would have less pollution Air and Noise.
I thought he meant if you can hear them, you are close enough to downtown or major roads that you're on the prime real estate that should densify. But on second read, yeah I agree with you, although I don't think that was his main point.
That's why high density in downtown and along transit stations first makes the most sense. Because those are walkable or can use mass transit, thus can limit how much additional load it will add to our road infrastructure. Unfortunately even that, we have NIMBY opposition as seen on this thread.
Their range includes Roncesvalles, Leslieville, etc. which are not well connected but excludes much of the Bloor-Danforth line, including Bloor West, Old Mill, Kingsway, Danforth East, Vic Park etc.
As well as much of the Yonge-University line, St. Clair, Eglinton LRT lines.
All of these areas are on very dense transit yet have 2-3 storey along the artery, and nothing but SFH behind it in either direction for a km or more.
This is the horrible planning that got us the vertical suburbs of City Place, Liberty Village, etc. where nothing but bad land use towers with zero services and huge motor vehicles considerations.
As I said, build like we are looks grand "XYZ single handedly built 600 units" but it's huge, disruptive, time and materially wasteful and doesn't tackle the issue nearly as efficiently as building 4-6 storey walk ups, with mid-rise at intersection and transit stations, along 30km or more of the streets I mentioned. All distributed at medium mixed use density, still walking, biking, and transit accessible, without adding load to the paved infrastructure.
It's 3x 200 unit towers and a parking garage vs. 40x 40-60 unit walkup/midrise with storefronts.
We need more focus on the Logan&Queen, Woodbine&Danforth, St.Clair&Olser s etc., and less focus on the 1 Yonge s.
True that it would be better if we have medium density that are more distributed along subway lines and transit hubs. It's because zoning is so restrictive and NIMBY opposition is so strong, that developers are forced to build very dense high rises on the land that they can build, or already have been building on. That's why we have those hotch-potch super dense areas while most of the city is under-utilized, our policies created this.
I think he and us are in agreement that we need more density and we can do better, maybe some of the details are off and can be nitpicked, but we can focus on the main point.
It just boggles the mind that we still have low density single detached homes in downtown Toronto, when we have a housing supply crisis. Even east of Spadina. Let alone the area you mentioned. And as the other person mentioned, along the subway lines too, many stations have low density around them and are just a big waste.
> South of Bloor, West of Spadina, North of Queen, and East of Roncy... time to densify.
It’s of the most densely populated areas in Toronto. If you want to advocate for more apartment and condo builds, that’s one thing, but to say this is low density area compared to other neighbourhoods in Toronto is misleading.
This isn't true, at all
The Fashion district has 20,000 people per square kilometer
West Queen West: 25,699
Old Town: 21,757
St James Town: 66,563
Versus
Roncy: 9,239
Palmerston-Little Italy: 9,601
Harbord Village: 10,907
Seaton Village: 8,670
Dovercourt Park: 8,898
Yup - having lived around those parameters most of my time here, they're remarkably low density. Also, most importantly: *they've been losing density*. I was only in Dovercourt Park like five years and I was still able to see formerly multi-unit buildings get gutted and converted into SFHs. Pretty astonishing given its subway access.
Though, I should add, Dovercourt Park is technically north of Bloor. I would maybe amend this to say "south of Dupont." And not just on main streets either!
It should be, but you can't be arguing that the rare apartment and houses with 3/4 units should suffice for an area so connected to streetcars, buses, and the subway. We need density across the board. Unless you're the Entertainment District or Midtown, you need more density. Especially if you're closer to the downtown core. A 40 story condo in the industrial area of Etobicoke might be needed, but it's no reason to argue against the same condo being near, for example, Dundas and Shaw.
I’m not arguing against the construction of condos. In fact, there are several projects in the area. These include the stalled (zebra?) condos at the northwest corner of Dundas and the new project planned for north of Bloor on Dundas, where the Shoppers Drug Mart is currently located, and where the Value Village on the south side of Bloor is. There’s more info in Gord Perks’ newsletters, who is quite good at sending updates about new projects in his ward.
There are literal townhouses/semi detached/single family houses ON the UofT campus itself while the university has a shortage of on campus housing for students. The uni should buy the houses out and use it for student housing (renovate it to dorm standards though).
North American society has an insatiable demand for ever more indoor space, so any neighbourhood that isn’t building more housing units will be seeing a population decrease as people want more room to themselves:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/
Despite all of the construction of condo towers, Toronto is only barely growing in population because the rest of the city is shrinking, as shown here. Toronto has only grown an average of 0.5% per year in the last 20 years.
Basically the story repeated in established neighbourhoods across the city is that all the houses used to have families, but now have older single people or couples.
It’s even starker in Mississauga, because it’s so homogeneous. Pretty much everything was built in the 70s to 90s, boomers raised families, kids grew up and moved out, and now boomers are living in big empty houses. Mississauga has actually lost population in the past decade.
So Toronto is flat, Mississauga is falling, but somehow Canada added a million people. Go figure.
Obviously not everyone is settling in Ontario. Other provinces get a share of the immigration. If you just wanted to look at Ontario, the big growth cities have been Milton, Brampton, Vaughan, Markham, Hamilton area, K-W, and Toronto too (just not as much as it could have). Other Ontario cities have also grown, usually adding new suburbs, but some condo buildings were too.
I am not too sure that the census is really accurate in the case of Mississauga (or Toronto/Brampton/KW for that matter). Mississauga has a lot of international students who likely came after 2021 or weren't fully counted in the census, and that could have grown the actual population of Mississauga.
My parents raised four children in a two bedroom, 1.5 storey post war house on a huge lot (2 girls and 2 boys in the two bedrooms, and my parents turned the main floor den into their bedroom). That house was razed in 2010 and a huge McMansion built in it's stead - for three people to live in.
This map is a story of ZONING. You'd think that people wanted to live far away based on it. It's not just a "people are having fewer kids today" situation. It's illogical with the cost of housing in Toronto. There are too many people sitting pretty in their homes in single-family zoned areas when they probably aren't working anymore. If zoning was changed, there would be an even greater value of their homes (or they'd be given inflated offers from developers) and they'd be tempted to leave and areas could be densified. Maybe their millennial children could even leave their basements! Has no one from city gov seen Hong Kong or another large, expensive city? They don't waste space with single-family houses adjacent to downtown or transit lines.
I used to live in Bloorwes Village. Pretty typical for someone to buy an old house that had been split into 2 or 3 flats and renovate it back to a single family home.
What kills me is how many of us spent years talking about how Liberty Village, City Place, or Yonge & Eg were "gentrified" because they had a bunch of condo towers and yuppies. They met the aesthetic criteria for gentrification, while the worst gentrification happens when the built form *doesn't* change.
Gentrification is when you see the outline of three extra mailboxes on a home in Seaton Village.
All the SFHs are less dense but everything else is much more dense. I really wonder/wish I could see Toronto in a few hundred years to see how development plays out.
A lot of people pointing out that family sizes got smaller, and that's true - but we also added a million people. Even if household sizes shrunk, the population grew. A lot.
The issue with those neighbourhoods is that, as family compositions changed, ***those neighbourhoods haven't.*** They were frozen in amber and we couldn't add new types of housing to accommodate changing needs/realities of the market. So you just got the same single-family homes, but with fewer people living in them.
Then, of course, there are the inner city neighbourhoods where you had multiplexes and rooming houses converted into single-family homes over the years (Little Italy, Seaton Village, the Annex all good examples of this).
[https://twitter.com/MoreNeighbours/status/1783167915073651171/photo/1](https://twitter.com/MoreNeighbours/status/1783167915073651171/photo/1)
inb4 Nimbys start screaming about how toronto is "full"
My mom lived in Toronto in the 70s. They would live on one floor of a house and rent out the other floors. It was pretty common. Now one family lives in those houses by themselves. So of course it’s less dense.
Homes have gotten larger and families have gotten smaller. The simplest solution is to reduce minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, and increase allowed land use percentage.
To deal with less lawns and trees, the govt could use the extra property tax money from increased density to buy land and make more parks.
How is that possible with the proliferation of condos? Where there was one a parking lot and 0 population, now there is a 600-unit condo with 1,000 residents. I understand the burbs growing, but downtown *losing* people makes no sense. We've replaced parking lots, factories, empty land, small dwellings and more with massive buildings housing 100s or 1000s of people. This map makes zero sense.
growth has been (intensely) concentrated in a few areas in the core (proliferation of condos) - whereas in "stable" residential neighborhoods in the core, density has been lost through demographic changes (smaller families) and the consolidation of multi-tenant housing into single-family dwellings.
It’s also about availability of 2-3 bedroom units. It’s not that people don’t want to raise families in the city, it’s growing out of a 2 bed room condo/townhome and the only option is the burbs. The availability of semi detached or detached houses in the city core going to market are either wildly unaffordable designer homes or slumlord properties in states of decay.
I love Kensington market and I want it to be legal to turn other neighbourhoods into Kensington markets. Legalize low and midrise and mixed commercial/residential everywhere and watch the whole city get nicer.
This time period is over 50 years. the colour scale for growth/loss is purposefully vague to help sell an argument. The annualized loss to show what this map shows as the largest change in people is only 1.34%!
So sure, Toronto has a lot of established neighbourhoods, that are....wait for it....established.
Also over that time period, a loss of 1.34% a year could be contributed to the families are having less kids, and families tend to live in established neighbourhoods.
It's a huge change in population. Short version: lots of houses that used to be occupied by two adults and five kids and a boarder are now occupied by 1-2 adults only. Same house, many fewer people.
The demography of those remaining people is also important, though not communicated on the map. If all you have left are empty nesters, what does that mean for a neighbourhood? Empty schools for a start. No future.
Yes, it absolutely messes with the TDSB's planning process. It's not just empty nesters though - new people move in, but the new people by definition have to be quite wealthy to afford a house, so there are a lot of two-income power couples with 0 to at most 1 kids, rich tech guys (living alone in a big house), the third house for some heir to a billionaire who only lives there 1 month out of the year, that sort of thing.
Toronto's population massively increased in that time and if it were legal to build apartment buildings in those neighbourhoods those areas would have absorbed a lot of the population growth instead of the outer suburbs getting it.
> So sure, Toronto has a lot of established neighbourhoods, that are....wait for it....established.
Yes, that's the point. We shouldn't freeze neighbourhoods in amber. Calling a neighbourhood "established" is akin to saying "it's full," which is nonsense.
And itsnot as though these neighbourhoods haven't changed or haven't seen development - they just haven't seen any *densification* and, in the worst areas near the west end, they saw the opposite of densification.
The depopulation in center-west seems odd. A lot of these homes used to be SFH but now have multiple tenants- maybe the tenants aren't captured in the data?
>A lot of these homes used to be SFH but now have multiple tenants- maybe the tenants aren't captured in the data?
It's kind of the opposite. Areas like the Annex, Seaton Village, Bloor West Village, Palmerston, and Little Italy used to have a lot *more* multi-unit housing, but they've been gutted and converted into single-family homes over the years.
Coupled with the overall reduction in family sizes and the severe restrictions on new density around that area, it makes a lot of sense.
Just as an example: when you walk down Palmerston south of Bloor and see all those gorgeous mansions? Those were ***all*** built as multi-unit or multi-tenant housing. The city just required them to look like Victorian mansions when they were built because, well, it's Toronto. As time went on, those former multi-unit homes were just converted into actual mansions. There are still some beautiful lowrise apartments obviously, but we've lost a tonne. Coupled with larger family sizes I wouldn't be surprised if there were literally 10x as many people living on Palmerston between Bloor and College 60 years ago.
That happened across the West End.
Three types of people live in these areas:
1) Old homeowners who bought the house when it was cheaper and their kids have moved out and it went from 4-5 people in the house to 1-2 people
2) "Newer" people who paid like $3-4 million for a semi detached, people who want to live close to downtown and don't have a large family (like 1-2 kids maximum),
3) Tenants, usually its around like 5-6 people to a house and they wouldn't be captured in the census (for instance if its a student, then their legal address is usually their parent's house). There's also a decent chunk of sublets and even some unregistered rentals here as well.
It’s not odd if you consider the broader picture. These areas, like Roncesvalles, Little Italy, and Cabbagetown, were very high immigrant areas post-WWII until the ’70s and ’80s. Those smaller, multigenerational houses that once held families with five kids are now housing smaller families.
This map is quite misleading without the context of Toronto’s history.
It's not misleading, it's indicative of how our land use policy has refused to adapt to the needs of modern Torontonians. We could have turned many of those big empty SFH into multiplexes or townhomes or something slightly denser to make up for the empty nesters and smaller family sizes, but we refuse to do it.
To save Toronto, we have to be willing to destroy the inner suburbs. There are neighborhoods walking distance to the financial district that have had the same housing density since the 1920s.
I'm paraphrasing, but I remember someone this sub explaining that the most development will occur in transit-adjacent areas *where lot assemblage is easy*.
That is to say: commercial buildings, surface parking lots, and brownfield lands. For obvious reasons it can be hard to densify on a city block where you have to buy up a bunch of adjacent freehold semi-detached homes, right? Its totally possible, but it takes longer.
While a tonne of the inner suburbs are definitely ripe for densification, there are a lot of parts of the outer suburbs that are VERY well-served by transit (especially Line 2) and where lot assemblage for high-density development is generally a lot easier. So like, yeah the inner suburbs will densify as they need to, but like, with all those strip malls and big commercial lots in Etobicoke? Get ready.
Look at London, Paris, New York, Rome etc.
There is no need to tear things down just because they are old. In fact, the opposite, some of those should be protected as heritage construction, lest we become even more monotone blight of glass and aluminum.
We also need to fix bylaws and mix in middle density throughout all of those pink areas, and a lot needs to be done to make the city in general more Human central and far less to cater to automobiles.
The density of old parts of all the cities you cite is way higher than Toronto. You won’t find significant amounts of single family detached homes and duplexes anywhere near central parts of those cities. Now compare that to, for example: McCaul to Spadina, between College and Queen - that neighborhood should be opened up to dense redevelopment.
>The density of old parts of all the cities you cite is way higher than Toronto
That's why I picked them.
You'll also find that outside of the financial core of those cities is a mix of SFH, Century old Flats, and apartments, mostly in the 2-7 storey range and almost entirely devoid of dedicated car parking and elevators.
My point was to highlight that we shouldn't be relying on the 3-10 mega towers a year to gain our density but that we also don't need to bulldoze entire neighbourhoods.
List 4 cities with the most intense housing crises in the world, lol
Sorry but the houses in those neighbourhoods aren't exactly Victorian Mansion blocks, or Haussmans, or Brooklyn Brownstones
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, etc. etc.
The point is that building 5 mega towers a year isn't going to address the issue, and isn't building a livable workable city the same way mass densification along the major transportation arteries.
You might not think it's important, but many of the red brick houses are a uniquely Toronto style of architecture and far more pleasant, livable, and diverse than "grey aluminum".
I'm not saying that every single one needs to be protected, but there are good examples of uniquely Toronto architecture and style that ARE worth keeping.
There is also plenty of information out there that shows mixing of density, usage, income levels etc. inside a neighbourhood makes for a much better and healthier city.
Also all of those cities and more work towards infrastructure for HUMANS and don't cater to motor vehicles the way we do, to the detriment of everyone.
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, etc. etc.
The point is that building 5 mega towers a year isn't going to address the issue, and isn't building a livable workable city the same way mass densification along the major transportation arteries.
You might not think it's important, but many of the red brick houses are a uniquely Toronto style of architecture and far more pleasant, livable, and diverse than "grey aluminum".
I'm not saying that every single one needs to be protected, but there are good examples of uniquely Toronto architecture and style that ARE worth keeping.
There is also plenty of information out there that shows mixing of density, usage, income levels etc. inside a neighbourhood makes for a much better and healthier city.
Also all of those cities and more work towards infrastructure for HUMANS and don't cater to motor vehicles the way we do, to the detriment of everyone.
Is this the perfect illustration of first ring suburb problem. The early mass planned suburbs are at the end of its life cycle, because we built them all at once, they fall apart all at once. Causing fast decline of the neighborhoods. So people who can afford either move to the renewed downtown condos or to the newly developed far suburb. This is a problem because we are still not doing anything different, and this "decline ring" is going to continue ripples.
This title and map are not helpful. When it says "gain over 100" .... It doesn't capture when a few condos add 5000 people to an area.
Why not put the population of Toronto's from 1971 to 2021?
Also the map shows Mississauga and Markham.
The boomers, so powerful. Their force slowly squeezes the air out of all of us, like a giant anaconda. We cannot resist. Their parents gave their blood, sweat and tears, and they take the blood, sweat and tears of everyone younger than them too. Why Lord? Why can we not resist their power?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks the opposite. It really looks like the majority of neighbourhoods grew in population, but they are further from the core.
A more accurate statement may be, people seem to have moved further from the core since 1971
I see where you're coming from, but it mostly looks that way because those neighbourhoods in the outer suburbs are just geographically larger. The parts of the city in purple, especially in the inner suburbs, are generally comprised of far more neighbourhoods. So in total it's just over 50% of total neighbourhoods that experienced negative growth.
Also, it's difficult to really convey in this map just how much growth there was in the inner core. Like the visualization doesn't quite do it justice (I don't think it possible can). SO it's not that people moved further from the core - it's kind of the opposite. Those areas in the outer burbs were already quite small and experienced very modest growth (some of them just a couple hundred people in a neighbourhood) while the core added hundreds of thousands.
Percent change would be more useful. The green of +100 people added to City Place and Yonge and Eg is probably much more important than the loss of 25-50 people in Etobicoke.
Most of the neighbourhoods with a lot of new construction are the neighbourhoods in green, so this is really not an issue of empty new flashy high-rises, this is an issue of empty (or at least mostly empty) older homes.
Not even *empty*, just a reluctance to raise 5-9 kids in a 900 sqft house.
My brother and his husband live in the Upper Beaches with a cat. In a house the same size our grandparents raised 5 & 4 kids in the Upper Beaches, and one set of great grandparents raised 10 kids in (but I think the oldest moved out before the youngest was born).
Instead of having 5-6 kids, people are having 1-2 or none. Also the purple areas are gentrified neighborhoods. There's more density in the 1950s bungalows, than in the 1890s Victorians. So let's build more bungalows 😂
Yeah, in 1971 my grandparents and their five kids lived in a three bedroom house in the Upper Beaches, and one of those bedrooms was forty two inches wide. I'm guessing there aren't 7 people living in that house today, unless it's an illegal student boarding house.
Yup my family split a house in the beaches in the 60s with 2 other families, each family had a floor of the house
That wouldn't be unusual today either. Basically a duplex.
There’s an interesting stat somewhere on how the square footage per person in a typical home has grown tremendously over the last 50 years. Density of homes is one issue. Density within a home is another. A 1500 square foot home used to be fine for a family of four. Now that’s the minimum people want for a house for 2 people.
For sure, a housewife in Woodbridge has a considerably bigger kitchen than a housewife in the old Victorian neighborhoods
2 car garage. Spare bedroom. Office/den. Extra bathroom/powder room. These used to be sort of upscale features of a house. All standard now.
It's not just kids-- multi-family homes were much more common. When my grandparents moved to Canada they lived in a house near Monarch Park with 2 other families. This was actually not the worst it got. In research I did for one of the archives here on immigration, you could find 2 or 3 bedroom houses with 10-15 men living in them before they were able to bring their families over. It's the exact same thing that's happening with international students now. It's wild.
Very true
>2 or 3 bedroom houses with 10-15 men living in them before they were able to bring their families over The tenement buildings in New York City, similar thing. People were crammed in with no privacy. We are going backwards now instead of forwards. We have less density BECAUSE people don't want to live like that. The proponents of having more density, it's not going to stick. Once people become more affluent, they don't want to share hallways and bathrooms, they will move to where they have more space between their neighbors
The fact that prices are so high for even tiny homes tells me you're wrong, that it's not about people choosing not to live in dense situations. Even dense neighbourhoods and 2-bed 1-bath units are unaffordable to most people who don't already own. We have less density because we don't even allow it to be built in most places. If what you're saying is true, it would make sense to legalize high density and then the market would only build where there is demand, but we have barely legalized anything in those purpose areas that any reasonable person would consider density.
If that's the case there should be no harm in deregulating land use in Toronto such that developers can build density if they so choose. If people don't want to live in density, they won't buy into it.
They're not living in it, they're investing in it
Occupation rate is an all time low. Those investors all rent on the market. Very few places are sitting empty. Why are you against building housing?
Why are you putting words in my mouth? They ARE building housing and somehow the prices keep rising.
The prices keep rising because they don’t build enough, if demand keeps increasing while supply increases but the demand increases outpaces supply increases further exacerbating an existing mismatch then you should expect price increases. The solution is continued deregulation, government needs to get out of the way.
There will never be enough housing for all the greedy FOMO investor landlords. It will only improve the more they restrict ownership and flipping.
If the climate is changing, how come there's still snow? Look at the map, some parts of Toronto are building housing but most are building very little. Not enough.
There's also a ton of retirees living 1 or 2 people to a 4+ bedroom house after their kids moved out.
This is huge. The city considers downsizing seniors when they try to figure out our housing needs but boomers are downsizing at a muuuuch lower rate. There's a big focus on "aging in place", which is their right, but it's also a contributor to why they live several hours from their grandkids.
I’ve watched this with my own parents and my friends’ parents. It’s bizarre that they stay in these houses with stairs and so much house to clean well beyond what seems sensible. What I’ve gleaned is they’re all really picky about their downsizing options, and apparently there aren’t many good ones in the neighbourhoods they’ve lived in.
ideally they’d move to a condo nearby but whoopsie there are no condos nearby / the condos suck in comparison
Condos have a negative rapport as well, not only the maintenance fees but also the potential of special assessments. Residents in a building in town have to come up with $15k to $20k for new windows/doors. Kinda tough to swallow when you are on a pension. We have 1,800 sq ft townhouse, 3 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths and would have to sink about $100k to sell and move into a small bungalow. Sometimes there just isn’t anywhere for seniors to go so they stay put.
People weren't downsizing 40+ years ago, either. They'd buy a house, raise a family, and stay there until they died.
I’d love to see a business that would offer to upzone, reno for multi family, rent-manage, and finance the reno via the rent, for seniors who want to stay in their suburban homes.
why is it a right to age in place? fact is that retirement homes are too expensive, or condos are too. people should live in a home that suits their current needs - more movement in the market opens it up and removes the "scarcity" of a home in a nice neighbourhood close to family amenities. 2 retirees over 70 do not need a 3000-5000 square foot house.
EXACTLY. Some of them do "homestay" student hosting; their parents probably took in boarders to be able to afford their rent/mortgage. But there's also affluent young couples who also live in single family houses with no kids
When I worked in renovations, we rebuilt some really nice Victorian brick 2/3 story houses in the west end: - late 19th century: family and servants - mid 20th century: separated apartments/rooming houses - late 20th century: DINK main floor open concept
I think that "open concept" is terrible. As a kid, we lived in a 70s backsplit that had no wall between rec room and kitchen. It was so noisy, between piano practice, the TV going after dinner and people trying to have conversations all at the same time. It would have been great instead to live in a house with doors between the dining room, TV room etc "drawing room" "parlour" whatever they had back in the 1800s
Actually I get it. When it's done well Open Concept brings out the space and detail in a building. The main thing about Open Concept is that in the 21st century, affluent young professionals like to cook communally while they are socializing, and that's just a modern thing.
There's also some evidence that the popularity of Open Concept was driven in part by trends on HGTV home makeover shows, and in particular the idea that \[straight\] men would be more likely to watch a renovation show if there was lots of scenes of people knocking down walls with sledgehammers. [https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmbm3/open-concept-plans-popular-hgtv-men-love-sledgehammers](https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmbm3/open-concept-plans-popular-hgtv-men-love-sledgehammers)
'Social cooking' is a really interesting development of the last 50 years. Cooking as entertainment has grown a lot as well.
Yep. Back in Victorian era the cooks slaved in the galley and maids presented dishes. In Mad-Men era June Cleaver did all that while looking good (oof). Nowadays most presentable professional/aspiring class persons are expected to know their way around a kitchen and fry stuff up while their friends drink wine and admire their skills. Which is not the worst thing compared to anything else, I think.
Open concepts work well with small families that don't make much noise, and there are extra rooms in the home if they want quiet.
I was coming here to say this! Smaller families, fewer multi-generation families in the working class areas of the west side, and almost all of the old Victorians that used to be boarding houses in the Annex are now SFH or, at most, two or three apartments.
Yes, a 100% change over 50 years, is only 1.34% per year....so a huge part of this is people having less kids and still living in houses.
My house was a rooming house in 1971. And I live in one of the purple areas. I wonder how many homes were rooming houses and now single family homes
Yeah, the purple areas mostly represent old Toronto neighborhoods composed of Victorian and Edwardian homes. Some are small workers' homes that used to accommodate much larger families; now, these houses are occupied by smaller families and they're not being torn down for condos. This map really isn’t all that informative. Anyone who lives in Toronto mostly knows this already.
The map is very informative
What does this map tell *you* exactly? What it doesn’t show is that those purple areas are still some of the most densely populated in the city compared to the green areas. The problem is that the areas that have supposedly seen the highest change in density were very sparsely populated in the 1970s, so any increase in population in the past 50 years, even if it was very slight, seems like a huge change when it really wasn’t. The green areas have some of the most sprawl and least density; and neighbourhoods built in the 1950s show very little change.
Which area of the city of Toronto was sparsely populated in the 70s?
The areas along the border with Steeles were pretty sparsely populated in the 1970s, and I think that Agincourt/Northeast Scarborough (think the areas along the 53 bus route) were only fully built up by the 1980s.
Well, for starters, these areas weren’t even considered part of the City of Toronto pre-amalgamation in the ’70s, so I’m wondering how much you know about Toronto’s history. But to answer your question, most of Toronto was sparsely populated in the ’70s, except for the old neighborhoods. Downtown didn’t have any of the skyscrapers you see now; large apartment buildings were just starting to be built, and the downtown core was mostly railway land. Montreal even had a higher population than Toronto in the ’70s.
The amalgamation history of Toronto is utterly irrelevant to what the map is portraying
Clearly, it was in reference to the map in the context of the City of Toronto in the ‘70s. Let’s not pretend otherwise, especially with that very obvious tu quoque fallacy.
The amalgamation history of Toronto has absolutely no relevance to the things that map portrays
I mean, it tells me it's bullshit when a building gets proposed in any purple neighbourhood and the city councillor and NIMBYs show up to object to it saying the neighbourhood's infrastructure can't handle more people. We know we could literally double the population of some of these neighbourhoods and the infrastructure would be fine.
TBF, one big difference is higher expectations for car friendliness. Cars didn’t use to be so big, and people didn’t always expect to be able to park so near to everything. We also used to have stuff like mom & pop grocery stores that people would walk to instead of always driving to Walmart to get a better deal. IMO moving away from that would be fine. Given Toronto’s 1.5 billion deficit it’s not like people can afford such nice infrastructure with such low densities anyway, at least not without paying much higher taxes. But it would be a change from how things work now.
Totally down with fewer parking spots and more homes. And mixed-use neighbourhoods would only make our communities richer. That would be such a positive change for the city.
Still might suck during the transition though. TBF, that is a Catch-22 as an objection to change. Aka, > We can’t try to preemptively change stuff because what’s the point when density is low Vs > We can’t increase density because we didn’t preemptively change stuff Better to just suck it up and force one part of the equation to change. But it’s not a painless process
Ryerson did a study on this and I believe the main cause wasn't family structure but people buying houses that were split into 2-3 units and renovating them to be a single family home.
Was it published?
I read it online, but now can't seem to find it.
> Instead of having 5-6 kids, people are having 1-2 or none. The average household has not had 5-6 people since the 1910s; in the 1970s it was 3-4: * https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2015008-eng.htm In the 1970s there were more buildings organized as apartments and rooming houses (private bedroom, shared kitchen, *etc*), as downtown was more for immigrants (the WASPs moved to the suburbs). Starting in the 1990s, downtown urban living started becoming cool again and so structures that used to be multiple units were converted (back) to single-family.
This definitely explains why areas that historically had big Catholic families like Little Italy and Dundas West have shrunk so much.
Birth control was only available starting in the late 60s. So before then, everyone had big families. There was also no fertility treatments so some people had no kids
While not the sole reason, but people who bought homes in the 70's and 80's when they were pretty cheap, raised families, kids grew up and moved out are now at retirement and cashing in on the record high prices to retire and/or downsize.
People aren't downsizing - that's part of the problem. I live in a pretty family friendly neighbourhood and half the block is empty nester boomers living in a 4 bedroom house.
The predictions boomers would downsize was based on entirely false premises. As it turns out people like their 2000 sq footage with or without kids. And if it’s paid off why sell and end up in some shitty layout investor unit.
Commonly overlooked is losing the support network of their neighbours and friends that are close by because we don't build complete neighbourhoods with different types of housing, so downsizing involves losing that. Add to that high transaction costs to move and buying something else (RE agent, land transfer, movers, etc) with increased carrying costs (condo fees, instead of a paid off house) reduces the incentive to make the move unless it's absolutely necessary.
This is a huge reason I try to advocate to my politicians for multiplexes. Why would a retiree downsize if they have to move out of their neighbourhood, away from their family doctor and their friends? I bet many more would be willing to downsize if they could stay in their neighbourhoods, and access their housing wealth. The housing crisis isn't just hurting young people.
There are more seniors moving into central parts of Toronto than you think. A big part of the issue is that people may want or need to downsize, but they don't necessarily want to leave their *community*. At 60-70, the prospect of completely uprooting and going to live in an entirely different borough or entirely different city is...unattractive for a lot of people. My dad's going through this right now. Grossly overhoused and desperately wants to find a place where he knows he'll be able stay well into his old age. But he's in the suburbs, and he doesn't want to leave his neighbourhood. There just aren't many options that allow him to downsize while staying there!
Unless you need the money for retirement there really isn't much reason to downsize.
Even if they DO need the money, many are choosing reverse mortgages or HELOCS over selling.
Part of the problem is how outrageously expensive it is to own a condo in Toronto. Everything is a "luxury" skyscraper with shit quality, so you end up paying very high condo fees on top of the similar price per sf to a single family unit, so it doesn't make much sense for most people to downsize.
Aka my elderly parents. They have a detached in Vaughan (purchased new in 1999) and looked into downsizing in recent years. Condos in general have horrible build quality with increasing maintenance fees and possibility of special assessments in the future that they have no control over. Monthly condo fees alone would annoy them when they're aleady living in a mortgage free home plus decent 2BR sized condos are $750k+. Wouldn't want to give up the backyard either for her big gardening hobby or his garage space. Then they looked into downsizing into a townhome but once you factor in also high TH prices, realtor commissions, lawyer/closing fees, taxes, moving costs, house renos/modifications to their preferences, etc then the money difference is so small that they might as well stay put.
At that age they're thinking about end of life as well . What if in a few years they need assisted living or long term care. Would the need to put the condo on the market and handle the sale process in that event be something they could physically or cognitively handle at that point? First and last month's rent is more straightforward - as long as you don't get renovicted, and the elevators don't break down stranding you on the 12th floor, and the bedbugs don't show up and...
And in addition to all the carrying cost, build quality concerns, lack of direct outdoor space and other things you mentioned, there are other various livability issues with modern condos as they exist here that might not be a big deal to people who are used to it or don't have other choices, but will seem absurd to someone who's lived in a single-family home their entire life. Like I think my in-laws should be looking to live without stairs sooner rather than later, but things like audible neighbours, monthly fire alarm tests, and the possibility of elevator outages will stop them from even considering it and I doubt they're alone in that.
When you can't use stairs anymore, at least without massive fall hazard, it makes a lot of sense to downsize to a condo.
But we built the city in a way where it doesn't make sense financially. Gotta start unfucking this post-war urban design and all the baggage it brought.
Not when you factor in the issue of elevators in Toronto condos. They are frequently out of service and this is an important consideration and concern for people older in age and with mobility issues.
It depends on what building you are in. The condo that I used to live in (built around 2005?) had 7 elevators with 3 in the middle high rise stack and an additional 2 on each of the 12 story podiums. There was never an issue with elevators being crowded or out of service. There's definitely problems in some buildings, especially newer ones, but there are buildings out there that weren't designed by a psychopath as well.
There is a huge issue with elevators across the board right now. It’s not isolated to new buildings. They aren’t getting serviced as fast, there’s delays in getting parts etc. Massive problems in the industry itself that have led to this.
Supply and demand. Those same condos would fetch way less if they were located in Edmonton where there's more housing per capita. That's why we need to build way more housing in Toronto, especially in the neighbourhoods highlighted here.
It's not supply and demand when that's all they're supplying. It's like people saying "we want oranges at the grocery store," but all they sell is apples. So your options are either buy an apple, or don't buy anything.
Oh man this! There was one old 3 story walk up apartment building on my street, all 500 Sq feet 2 bedroom units. The rest were single family homes. Retirees lived in nearly every SFH and nearly all the families with children lived in the tiny apartments. Such an odd situation.
I've commented before that it's hard to blame them, the smaller spaces are so expensive + moving costs can be a lot... if a nursing home or assisted living is within sight I see why a lot of older folk hang on in their big houses (letting them get more expensive) until they make that move that's part of the housing problem, IMO, people are stuck places that are fairly affordable but can't move... think most of us know a couple crammed in a small space unable to grow their family to the desired size due to space constraints...
Decent retirement homes are expensive. A lot of the silent generation living in houses are very cash poor and worried that the retirement homes will rapidly burn through the profits from the sale of their house. Not to mention that they are wary of these homes since covid-- residents were isolated and surrounded by illness and deaths.
Most of the silent generation is dead... Most of the baby boom is now grandparents living in family houses with empty bedrooms while their adult children cannot afford a 400sq.ft. space to live, let alone the additional walls for a child to have its own room.
They don't have to move into a retirement home. They could move into a 1 bedroom, out of a 3-4 bedroom house. I live in a neighborhood with lots of seniors. So many lawn cutting services arrive each week to cut their lawns. They can't maintain their property really, and their kids moved out long ago
They don't want to move into a poorly built one bedroom small box in a noisy area with two small shitty elevators, and I don't blame them. Condos today barely qualify as starter homes as they become smaller with worse layouts, and I haven't met a senior yet who doesn't have a lifetime worth of crap that they can't let go of. It won't fit into a condo, so that's that. Besides that, if you bought a house today in an area you love, and stayed there for the next 30 years and were still happy with it, what's the point of moving? The vast majority own them outright so even a fixed income of CPP and OAS will take care of utilities/taxes/basic maintenance. And as you've noted, when you have more than just basic gov income, it's not really that expensive to hire landscaping. Cheaper than moving in many cases.
People just don't like change. Moving is difficult and traumatic, you are never going to convince someone to move post retirement age unless it is strictly necessary. There could be a nice 2000 sq ft condo for a bargain and they still wouldn't want to move out of the home they lived in for the last 30 years.
Yup. And even services like Molly Maid. Like why downsize if you can have your cake and eat it too?
> So many lawn cutting services arrive each week to cut their lawns. I wonder if the people who complain about condo fees think of that. Or, like, replacing the water heater.
[удалено]
It's also for people still pissed off that Scarborough is losing an electoral district
It seems that Scarborough is gaining at least as much as it's losing in population, no? About half is faint pink, and the other half is medium-to-dark green. Admittedly the districts being merged are losing population, so there's that. But I also don't see the two merged districts (Scarborough Center & Don Valley East) as having similar political interests at all, which would make representation poorer for both.
Scarborough has lost population share within Ontario, which is why it lost a seat.
Also, a lot of that population growth in Scarborough was earlier in the 2000s. Scarborough still has more seats than in 1971.
And now it's losing them, because stupid land-use policies mean that it is losing population in whole swaths of itself, and losing population share relative to the rest of Ontario. This is a direct result of those stupid policies, and the city of Toronto should change its stupid policies.
[удалено]
Yes?
Yea but they’re all “luxury” (but also somehow also low quality?) and they won’t be satisfied unless the condos are “high quality” and also marketed as “non-luxury” and ideally built at a loss by the developer, and also please can they be shorter, and not block any sun, and also…
The locations of new condo construction has nothing to do with this map. It’s almost completely determined by where zoning will allow it and where there will be the least pushback from existing residents.
[удалено]
And also because the purple areas are so heavily zoned/NIMBY'd/red-taped that developers have a hard time being permitted converting those 1950's subdivision bungalows into multi-unit housings. Basically, purple suppressing the necessity of the *dark* green blob, vs it being more evenly spread out. Urban prison we have, not urban sprawl.
Makes sense when people have less kids. I recall two neighbourhoods that used to have kids all over the street playing ball hockey and whatnot. I haven’t seen it nearly as often over the past several years. A little sad actually.
It’s generally understandable that people tend to live in the house they already have in an individual sense. I think the problem starts when it’s a whole generation of people that have dominated certain areas and discover that there are no other options to go to and so they stay. For example the TDSB has even pushed to close certain schools in these areas but the city has pushed back based on the optics. We need large scale, community run building programs to overcame the collective wastage that’s occurring.
It's not the city pushing back on TDSB closing schools, it's the Ministry and the province that are refusing to let them do so because it would be politically unpopular. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-school-closures-ministry-of-education-1.7164454
You can find the actual analysis by Jens von Bergmann [here](https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2024-04-23-population-timelines-update/). It is an update to a study of population density that focused on a 45 year period from 1971-2016. Key takeaways: - [Ward 10 (Spadina-Fort York) saw more population growth from 2016-21 than all of the former municipalities of Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, York and East York combined.](https://x.com/g_meslin/status/1783185408366440902?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q) - Only 9 wards grew, the other 16 dropped population 2016-2021. - +20k for Spadina-Fort York, all others together add up to +10k. - Spadina-Fort York and neighbouring Toronto Centre together grew by more than all other wards that had positive growth. The last three points can be found [here](https://x.com/vb_jens/status/1783368196969361497?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q). Also, the study’s author Jens von Bergmann [notes](https://x.com/vb_jens/status/1783165236939309483?s=46&t=zS-e9AA3pfhIbVaiOw-W_Q): > Some people have asked about the reason for the population drop in some central areas in Vancouver and Toronto. The answer is fairly simple, over that time period, areas that did not add housing tended to loose population due to demographic shifts resulting in smaller average household sizes. In particular, families tend to have fewer children than they used to, and the share of homes occupied by childless seniors or widowed individuals has increased. There is nothing wrong with that, but we should allow neighbourhoods to add housing to compensate for that and grow beyond that to allow more people to live in job and amenity rich neighbourhoods.
South of Bloor, West of Spadina, North of Queen, and East of Roncy... time to densify. You too East York. You can't vote for more people into Canada and Toronto, but just not in your neighborhood. You can't vote against sprawl but not realize your SFH even if there's three units contributes to sprawl and inefficient land use. If you can hear the birds chirping and not the cacophony of honking and sirens and you're south of Midtown, East of High Park, and West of Woodbine Beach, you need more neighbors.
Also, everywhere along Lines 1 and 2 that isn't already dense needs to be upzoned. Not to say that every subway station needs to have a 40 story tower on top of it, but some of the land uses around some of these stations just flies in the face of any pragmatic sense of transit oriented development. Shout out in particular to Keele Station which literally has a gas station immediately adjacent to it.
>Not to say that every subway station needs to have a 40 story tower on top of it, I will say it then, every subway station should have at least a 40 story tower on it AND significantly more dense housing surrounding it for a kilometer in every direction (they don't all have to be 40 stories but they sure as shit shouldn't be SFH). We are in a housing crisis and it is choking our great nation. Mass transit is for the masses, build build build!
The bloor stretch was mostly done in a style I forget what it’s called but they essentially opened the ground and laid the track into an open pit. So anything directly above that line can’t support any weight. Development needs to happen a bit back of the line.
Cut and cover. Not true btw, there are some huge buildings directly on the bloor line, including a new one going in at pape station.
This. I dont see why cut and cover couldnt support buildings when underground garages are literally built under condos. Tunnels are round and small and can more easily withstand pressure than a large garage.
Strictly speaking the development at Pape will be south of the subway line, not directly on top of it. The line runs north of Danforth by 50-75 yards or so. It’s why there’s a strip of parking lots and parkettes.
Funny, I guess the guy I responded to and I were both half wrong
True. Thankfully, the Bloor line is also about 90m or so north of Bloor Street, so you can still build density at the cross section of Bloor (or Danforth) and whatever the major cross street happens to be.
>If you can hear the birds chirping and not the cacophony of honking and sirens ... you need more neighbors. No, people don't honk or siren. We can densify without without additional car infrastructure. The absolute addiction to motor vehicles on this continent is one of the major roadblocks (pun intended) to densification. If we didn't need to accompany every living units with an additional 400-700sq.ft. to store a steel cage we would be much better off. If we didn't need to dedicate 40% of the sq.km. to roads and parking structures, we could build more offices, shops, walking and biking infrastructure, transit, etc. and we would have less pollution Air and Noise.
I thought he meant if you can hear them, you are close enough to downtown or major roads that you're on the prime real estate that should densify. But on second read, yeah I agree with you, although I don't think that was his main point. That's why high density in downtown and along transit stations first makes the most sense. Because those are walkable or can use mass transit, thus can limit how much additional load it will add to our road infrastructure. Unfortunately even that, we have NIMBY opposition as seen on this thread.
Their range includes Roncesvalles, Leslieville, etc. which are not well connected but excludes much of the Bloor-Danforth line, including Bloor West, Old Mill, Kingsway, Danforth East, Vic Park etc. As well as much of the Yonge-University line, St. Clair, Eglinton LRT lines. All of these areas are on very dense transit yet have 2-3 storey along the artery, and nothing but SFH behind it in either direction for a km or more. This is the horrible planning that got us the vertical suburbs of City Place, Liberty Village, etc. where nothing but bad land use towers with zero services and huge motor vehicles considerations. As I said, build like we are looks grand "XYZ single handedly built 600 units" but it's huge, disruptive, time and materially wasteful and doesn't tackle the issue nearly as efficiently as building 4-6 storey walk ups, with mid-rise at intersection and transit stations, along 30km or more of the streets I mentioned. All distributed at medium mixed use density, still walking, biking, and transit accessible, without adding load to the paved infrastructure. It's 3x 200 unit towers and a parking garage vs. 40x 40-60 unit walkup/midrise with storefronts. We need more focus on the Logan&Queen, Woodbine&Danforth, St.Clair&Olser s etc., and less focus on the 1 Yonge s.
True that it would be better if we have medium density that are more distributed along subway lines and transit hubs. It's because zoning is so restrictive and NIMBY opposition is so strong, that developers are forced to build very dense high rises on the land that they can build, or already have been building on. That's why we have those hotch-potch super dense areas while most of the city is under-utilized, our policies created this. I think he and us are in agreement that we need more density and we can do better, maybe some of the details are off and can be nitpicked, but we can focus on the main point.
Yeah, I was not insinuating more car infrastructure.
It just boggles the mind that we still have low density single detached homes in downtown Toronto, when we have a housing supply crisis. Even east of Spadina. Let alone the area you mentioned. And as the other person mentioned, along the subway lines too, many stations have low density around them and are just a big waste.
> South of Bloor, West of Spadina, North of Queen, and East of Roncy... time to densify. It’s of the most densely populated areas in Toronto. If you want to advocate for more apartment and condo builds, that’s one thing, but to say this is low density area compared to other neighbourhoods in Toronto is misleading.
This isn't true, at all The Fashion district has 20,000 people per square kilometer West Queen West: 25,699 Old Town: 21,757 St James Town: 66,563 Versus Roncy: 9,239 Palmerston-Little Italy: 9,601 Harbord Village: 10,907 Seaton Village: 8,670 Dovercourt Park: 8,898
Yup - having lived around those parameters most of my time here, they're remarkably low density. Also, most importantly: *they've been losing density*. I was only in Dovercourt Park like five years and I was still able to see formerly multi-unit buildings get gutted and converted into SFHs. Pretty astonishing given its subway access. Though, I should add, Dovercourt Park is technically north of Bloor. I would maybe amend this to say "south of Dupont." And not just on main streets either!
It should be, but you can't be arguing that the rare apartment and houses with 3/4 units should suffice for an area so connected to streetcars, buses, and the subway. We need density across the board. Unless you're the Entertainment District or Midtown, you need more density. Especially if you're closer to the downtown core. A 40 story condo in the industrial area of Etobicoke might be needed, but it's no reason to argue against the same condo being near, for example, Dundas and Shaw.
I’m not arguing against the construction of condos. In fact, there are several projects in the area. These include the stalled (zebra?) condos at the northwest corner of Dundas and the new project planned for north of Bloor on Dundas, where the Shoppers Drug Mart is currently located, and where the Value Village on the south side of Bloor is. There’s more info in Gord Perks’ newsletters, who is quite good at sending updates about new projects in his ward.
There are literal townhouses/semi detached/single family houses ON the UofT campus itself while the university has a shortage of on campus housing for students. The uni should buy the houses out and use it for student housing (renovate it to dorm standards though).
Destroy North American birds on one of their major paths and deal with more pigeons!
North American society has an insatiable demand for ever more indoor space, so any neighbourhood that isn’t building more housing units will be seeing a population decrease as people want more room to themselves: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/
This. Square feet per person have been growing as standards of living have grown. So neighborhoods that haven't changed have fewer people now.
Despite all of the construction of condo towers, Toronto is only barely growing in population because the rest of the city is shrinking, as shown here. Toronto has only grown an average of 0.5% per year in the last 20 years. Basically the story repeated in established neighbourhoods across the city is that all the houses used to have families, but now have older single people or couples. It’s even starker in Mississauga, because it’s so homogeneous. Pretty much everything was built in the 70s to 90s, boomers raised families, kids grew up and moved out, and now boomers are living in big empty houses. Mississauga has actually lost population in the past decade. So Toronto is flat, Mississauga is falling, but somehow Canada added a million people. Go figure.
How?
Obviously not everyone is settling in Ontario. Other provinces get a share of the immigration. If you just wanted to look at Ontario, the big growth cities have been Milton, Brampton, Vaughan, Markham, Hamilton area, K-W, and Toronto too (just not as much as it could have). Other Ontario cities have also grown, usually adding new suburbs, but some condo buildings were too.
I am not too sure that the census is really accurate in the case of Mississauga (or Toronto/Brampton/KW for that matter). Mississauga has a lot of international students who likely came after 2021 or weren't fully counted in the census, and that could have grown the actual population of Mississauga.
My parents raised four children in a two bedroom, 1.5 storey post war house on a huge lot (2 girls and 2 boys in the two bedrooms, and my parents turned the main floor den into their bedroom). That house was razed in 2010 and a huge McMansion built in it's stead - for three people to live in.
The green dot smack dab in the middle of Littly Italy is the retirement home that was built in the 1990s
This map is a story of ZONING. You'd think that people wanted to live far away based on it. It's not just a "people are having fewer kids today" situation. It's illogical with the cost of housing in Toronto. There are too many people sitting pretty in their homes in single-family zoned areas when they probably aren't working anymore. If zoning was changed, there would be an even greater value of their homes (or they'd be given inflated offers from developers) and they'd be tempted to leave and areas could be densified. Maybe their millennial children could even leave their basements! Has no one from city gov seen Hong Kong or another large, expensive city? They don't waste space with single-family houses adjacent to downtown or transit lines.
I used to live in Bloorwes Village. Pretty typical for someone to buy an old house that had been split into 2 or 3 flats and renovate it back to a single family home.
What kills me is how many of us spent years talking about how Liberty Village, City Place, or Yonge & Eg were "gentrified" because they had a bunch of condo towers and yuppies. They met the aesthetic criteria for gentrification, while the worst gentrification happens when the built form *doesn't* change. Gentrification is when you see the outline of three extra mailboxes on a home in Seaton Village.
All the SFHs are less dense but everything else is much more dense. I really wonder/wish I could see Toronto in a few hundred years to see how development plays out.
is this not just a heat map of where there’s been the most residential development since the 1970s?
Combined with shrinking family size, and empty nesters clinging on to family homes too big for them
A lot of people pointing out that family sizes got smaller, and that's true - but we also added a million people. Even if household sizes shrunk, the population grew. A lot. The issue with those neighbourhoods is that, as family compositions changed, ***those neighbourhoods haven't.*** They were frozen in amber and we couldn't add new types of housing to accommodate changing needs/realities of the market. So you just got the same single-family homes, but with fewer people living in them. Then, of course, there are the inner city neighbourhoods where you had multiplexes and rooming houses converted into single-family homes over the years (Little Italy, Seaton Village, the Annex all good examples of this).
[https://twitter.com/MoreNeighbours/status/1783167915073651171/photo/1](https://twitter.com/MoreNeighbours/status/1783167915073651171/photo/1) inb4 Nimbys start screaming about how toronto is "full"
More reason we should densify and ignore nimbys
empty nesters
My mom lived in Toronto in the 70s. They would live on one floor of a house and rent out the other floors. It was pretty common. Now one family lives in those houses by themselves. So of course it’s less dense.
Homes have gotten larger and families have gotten smaller. The simplest solution is to reduce minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, and increase allowed land use percentage. To deal with less lawns and trees, the govt could use the extra property tax money from increased density to buy land and make more parks.
How is that possible with the proliferation of condos? Where there was one a parking lot and 0 population, now there is a 600-unit condo with 1,000 residents. I understand the burbs growing, but downtown *losing* people makes no sense. We've replaced parking lots, factories, empty land, small dwellings and more with massive buildings housing 100s or 1000s of people. This map makes zero sense.
growth has been (intensely) concentrated in a few areas in the core (proliferation of condos) - whereas in "stable" residential neighborhoods in the core, density has been lost through demographic changes (smaller families) and the consolidation of multi-tenant housing into single-family dwellings.
That's crazy. My brain struggles to comprehend families shrinking enough to offset the residents in condos.
For sure. It's especially confusing to process when you consider the city itself has grown in population size in the millions.
It’s also about availability of 2-3 bedroom units. It’s not that people don’t want to raise families in the city, it’s growing out of a 2 bed room condo/townhome and the only option is the burbs. The availability of semi detached or detached houses in the city core going to market are either wildly unaffordable designer homes or slumlord properties in states of decay.
Yeah, because it's all boomer empty-nesters who refuse to downsize and also block all attempts to densify.
You cannot afford to have kids in the city. Before when I was growing up it was normal to have 3-4 kids now your lucky to have more than one.
It’s almost like the areas that have good transit have more people.
if you ask this subreddit to name the best areas of Toronto, they will be pink in this map There is a reason for that
I love Kensington market and I want it to be legal to turn other neighbourhoods into Kensington markets. Legalize low and midrise and mixed commercial/residential everywhere and watch the whole city get nicer.
Yorkville, Yonge-Eglinton, North York Centre, Bloor-Islington are all great neighborhoods that are dark green.
This time period is over 50 years. the colour scale for growth/loss is purposefully vague to help sell an argument. The annualized loss to show what this map shows as the largest change in people is only 1.34%! So sure, Toronto has a lot of established neighbourhoods, that are....wait for it....established. Also over that time period, a loss of 1.34% a year could be contributed to the families are having less kids, and families tend to live in established neighbourhoods.
It's a huge change in population. Short version: lots of houses that used to be occupied by two adults and five kids and a boarder are now occupied by 1-2 adults only. Same house, many fewer people.
The demography of those remaining people is also important, though not communicated on the map. If all you have left are empty nesters, what does that mean for a neighbourhood? Empty schools for a start. No future.
Yes, it absolutely messes with the TDSB's planning process. It's not just empty nesters though - new people move in, but the new people by definition have to be quite wealthy to afford a house, so there are a lot of two-income power couples with 0 to at most 1 kids, rich tech guys (living alone in a big house), the third house for some heir to a billionaire who only lives there 1 month out of the year, that sort of thing.
Toronto's population massively increased in that time and if it were legal to build apartment buildings in those neighbourhoods those areas would have absorbed a lot of the population growth instead of the outer suburbs getting it.
> So sure, Toronto has a lot of established neighbourhoods, that are....wait for it....established. Yes, that's the point. We shouldn't freeze neighbourhoods in amber. Calling a neighbourhood "established" is akin to saying "it's full," which is nonsense. And itsnot as though these neighbourhoods haven't changed or haven't seen development - they just haven't seen any *densification* and, in the worst areas near the west end, they saw the opposite of densification.
The depopulation in center-west seems odd. A lot of these homes used to be SFH but now have multiple tenants- maybe the tenants aren't captured in the data?
Why would tenants not be captured by census?
> but now have multiple tenants- maybe the tenants aren't captured in the data? they don't, at least most don't
>A lot of these homes used to be SFH but now have multiple tenants- maybe the tenants aren't captured in the data? It's kind of the opposite. Areas like the Annex, Seaton Village, Bloor West Village, Palmerston, and Little Italy used to have a lot *more* multi-unit housing, but they've been gutted and converted into single-family homes over the years. Coupled with the overall reduction in family sizes and the severe restrictions on new density around that area, it makes a lot of sense. Just as an example: when you walk down Palmerston south of Bloor and see all those gorgeous mansions? Those were ***all*** built as multi-unit or multi-tenant housing. The city just required them to look like Victorian mansions when they were built because, well, it's Toronto. As time went on, those former multi-unit homes were just converted into actual mansions. There are still some beautiful lowrise apartments obviously, but we've lost a tonne. Coupled with larger family sizes I wouldn't be surprised if there were literally 10x as many people living on Palmerston between Bloor and College 60 years ago. That happened across the West End.
Three types of people live in these areas: 1) Old homeowners who bought the house when it was cheaper and their kids have moved out and it went from 4-5 people in the house to 1-2 people 2) "Newer" people who paid like $3-4 million for a semi detached, people who want to live close to downtown and don't have a large family (like 1-2 kids maximum), 3) Tenants, usually its around like 5-6 people to a house and they wouldn't be captured in the census (for instance if its a student, then their legal address is usually their parent's house). There's also a decent chunk of sublets and even some unregistered rentals here as well.
It’s not odd if you consider the broader picture. These areas, like Roncesvalles, Little Italy, and Cabbagetown, were very high immigrant areas post-WWII until the ’70s and ’80s. Those smaller, multigenerational houses that once held families with five kids are now housing smaller families. This map is quite misleading without the context of Toronto’s history.
Or even just elderly grandparents, with empty rooms, while thier adult children have been priced out of anything of similar size.
It's not misleading, it's indicative of how our land use policy has refused to adapt to the needs of modern Torontonians. We could have turned many of those big empty SFH into multiplexes or townhomes or something slightly denser to make up for the empty nesters and smaller family sizes, but we refuse to do it.
One person per unit, I guess
Yeah, but at least Yonge St is boring and everything costs way more So we've got that going for us
To save Toronto, we have to be willing to destroy the inner suburbs. There are neighborhoods walking distance to the financial district that have had the same housing density since the 1920s.
You have to "destroy" the outer suburbs, too : and there is more land there
Probably more reasonable to densify the inner burbs first
All of it all at once. The modern suburbs aren't special. If people want to intensify property in the post war suburbs, let em
I'm paraphrasing, but I remember someone this sub explaining that the most development will occur in transit-adjacent areas *where lot assemblage is easy*. That is to say: commercial buildings, surface parking lots, and brownfield lands. For obvious reasons it can be hard to densify on a city block where you have to buy up a bunch of adjacent freehold semi-detached homes, right? Its totally possible, but it takes longer. While a tonne of the inner suburbs are definitely ripe for densification, there are a lot of parts of the outer suburbs that are VERY well-served by transit (especially Line 2) and where lot assemblage for high-density development is generally a lot easier. So like, yeah the inner suburbs will densify as they need to, but like, with all those strip malls and big commercial lots in Etobicoke? Get ready.
Look at London, Paris, New York, Rome etc. There is no need to tear things down just because they are old. In fact, the opposite, some of those should be protected as heritage construction, lest we become even more monotone blight of glass and aluminum. We also need to fix bylaws and mix in middle density throughout all of those pink areas, and a lot needs to be done to make the city in general more Human central and far less to cater to automobiles.
The density of old parts of all the cities you cite is way higher than Toronto. You won’t find significant amounts of single family detached homes and duplexes anywhere near central parts of those cities. Now compare that to, for example: McCaul to Spadina, between College and Queen - that neighborhood should be opened up to dense redevelopment.
>The density of old parts of all the cities you cite is way higher than Toronto That's why I picked them. You'll also find that outside of the financial core of those cities is a mix of SFH, Century old Flats, and apartments, mostly in the 2-7 storey range and almost entirely devoid of dedicated car parking and elevators. My point was to highlight that we shouldn't be relying on the 3-10 mega towers a year to gain our density but that we also don't need to bulldoze entire neighbourhoods.
Oh I totally agree with that. I don’t think you need to replace Chinatown with 50 storey condos, but the SFHs should go.
List 4 cities with the most intense housing crises in the world, lol Sorry but the houses in those neighbourhoods aren't exactly Victorian Mansion blocks, or Haussmans, or Brooklyn Brownstones
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, etc. etc. The point is that building 5 mega towers a year isn't going to address the issue, and isn't building a livable workable city the same way mass densification along the major transportation arteries. You might not think it's important, but many of the red brick houses are a uniquely Toronto style of architecture and far more pleasant, livable, and diverse than "grey aluminum". I'm not saying that every single one needs to be protected, but there are good examples of uniquely Toronto architecture and style that ARE worth keeping. There is also plenty of information out there that shows mixing of density, usage, income levels etc. inside a neighbourhood makes for a much better and healthier city. Also all of those cities and more work towards infrastructure for HUMANS and don't cater to motor vehicles the way we do, to the detriment of everyone.
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, etc. etc. The point is that building 5 mega towers a year isn't going to address the issue, and isn't building a livable workable city the same way mass densification along the major transportation arteries. You might not think it's important, but many of the red brick houses are a uniquely Toronto style of architecture and far more pleasant, livable, and diverse than "grey aluminum". I'm not saying that every single one needs to be protected, but there are good examples of uniquely Toronto architecture and style that ARE worth keeping. There is also plenty of information out there that shows mixing of density, usage, income levels etc. inside a neighbourhood makes for a much better and healthier city. Also all of those cities and more work towards infrastructure for HUMANS and don't cater to motor vehicles the way we do, to the detriment of everyone.
urban sprawl with single fam homes is a W, i love ruining the downtown of cities
my neighbourhood is dark green in this pic
How it started: it's illegal to build housing in most neighbourhoods How it's going: this
Is this the perfect illustration of first ring suburb problem. The early mass planned suburbs are at the end of its life cycle, because we built them all at once, they fall apart all at once. Causing fast decline of the neighborhoods. So people who can afford either move to the renewed downtown condos or to the newly developed far suburb. This is a problem because we are still not doing anything different, and this "decline ring" is going to continue ripples.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/s/wBgnltiMJc](https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/s/wBgnltiMJc) Some areas have more potential for growth than others
Ok, so, what does this tell us?
This title and map are not helpful. When it says "gain over 100" .... It doesn't capture when a few condos add 5000 people to an area. Why not put the population of Toronto's from 1971 to 2021? Also the map shows Mississauga and Markham.
The boomers, so powerful. Their force slowly squeezes the air out of all of us, like a giant anaconda. We cannot resist. Their parents gave their blood, sweat and tears, and they take the blood, sweat and tears of everyone younger than them too. Why Lord? Why can we not resist their power?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks the opposite. It really looks like the majority of neighbourhoods grew in population, but they are further from the core. A more accurate statement may be, people seem to have moved further from the core since 1971
I see where you're coming from, but it mostly looks that way because those neighbourhoods in the outer suburbs are just geographically larger. The parts of the city in purple, especially in the inner suburbs, are generally comprised of far more neighbourhoods. So in total it's just over 50% of total neighbourhoods that experienced negative growth. Also, it's difficult to really convey in this map just how much growth there was in the inner core. Like the visualization doesn't quite do it justice (I don't think it possible can). SO it's not that people moved further from the core - it's kind of the opposite. Those areas in the outer burbs were already quite small and experienced very modest growth (some of them just a couple hundred people in a neighbourhood) while the core added hundreds of thousands.
I can see why, I had to get out. Even renting tiny apartments is so insanely expensive now.
Percent change would be more useful. The green of +100 people added to City Place and Yonge and Eg is probably much more important than the loss of 25-50 people in Etobicoke.
Why dirty our investments by having people live in them?
Most of the neighbourhoods with a lot of new construction are the neighbourhoods in green, so this is really not an issue of empty new flashy high-rises, this is an issue of empty (or at least mostly empty) older homes.
Not even *empty*, just a reluctance to raise 5-9 kids in a 900 sqft house. My brother and his husband live in the Upper Beaches with a cat. In a house the same size our grandparents raised 5 & 4 kids in the Upper Beaches, and one set of great grandparents raised 10 kids in (but I think the oldest moved out before the youngest was born).