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Reverse commuters reflect shift in land use
As firms flee crowded downtown to the suburbs, a new class of worker is fleeing the city every morning
AMY BROWN-BOWERS
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
December 11, 2007 at 6:24 AM EST
TORONTO — Most weekday mornings, Brian McWilliams leaves his downtown Toronto condo, hops in his car and gets out of town - slowly.
Mr. McWilliams and thousands of other commuters are part of a trend in which, judging by the traffic, there appear to be nearly as many people leaving Toronto every morning to go to work as there are heading toward the city's office towers.
These "reverse commuters" - those going against the traditional tide of traffic by living in urban centres and commuting to the suburbs for work - also reflect complex demographic, transportation and property developments of recent years.
Last week, two reports shed light on this trend.
Census data released by Statistics Canada showed that new immigrants are flocking to Canada's major urban areas but, unlike Mr. McWilliams, they're choosing to live in the suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. They're not only finding cheaper housing but a large pool of potential employers, who have been moving offices and factories to more available land in the suburbs.
And the flight to the suburbs is expected to continue, suggests a report last week from Cushman & Wakefield LePage. In its 2008 outlook, the real estate firm expects the national office vacancy rate to drop to 5.6 per cent next year. But in major cities, such as Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, the vacancy rate in downtown areas will be much tighter, prompting tenants to consider moving to the suburbs where new office space is coming on stream.
In Toronto, which Cushman says represents more than 40 per cent of the total Canadian office market, the downtown office vacancy rate is expected to fall to 3.8 per cent this time next year from 6.2 per cent a year ago.
"We are now at the point where demand will have to slow in the central market, simply due to the lack of available space," Paul Morse, Cushman's senior managing director and national practice director of office leasing, warns in a release. "Those expanding or entering the market are now considering space in mid-town or further into the 905 [suburban] regions to meet their space needs."
This shift can be seen every morning in Toronto, where the likes of Mr. McWilliams are forming long lines of traffic on major outbound arteries - a change from just a few years ago when the heavy traffic was primarily inbound.
Not only are reverse commuters growing in numbers because their jobs are relocating out of the city, but residential space in the downtown core is growing exponentially faster than office space, according to figures from Toronto's planning department.
Currently, there are seven commercial office projects in the works in Toronto, representing nearly five million square feet. In comparison, there are 149 residential housing projects with a total of 39,398 units in the pipeline. Even if each of those units were only 600 square feet, that would amount to a whopping 23.6 million square feet.
Urban planners have been trying to adjust to these trends, especially as it applies to transportation.
"There was a strategy in the late 1970s and early eighties and it was focusing on decentralization," says Rod McPhail, director of transportation planning for Toronto.
At that time, planners decided that the city needed to grow from about 1.5 million people to about three million. The problem was that the transportation infrastructure, designed to bring people into the city from the suburbs, couldn't accommodate that kind of growth.
"We had to come up with a development strategy," Mr. McPhail says.
The solution was to make use of the empty commuter trains, subway cars and roads heading out of the downtown core in the morning and back into the city at night. To do that, planners encouraged the creation of pockets of jobs at the edges of the city and at the far ends of the transportation system to draw people outward each morning.
The strategy was wildly successful. In Mississauga, for instance, just west of Toronto, there are 406,000 jobs but a labour force of only about 364,000, according to figures supplied by the city.
The sprawling metropolis has been wooing companies with its lower taxes, space availability and attractive rental rates for years - it is currently the Canadian headquarters for 59 Fortune 500 companies and 51 Global Fortune 500 companies, and building permits were issued for more than 1.5 million square feet of office space in the past year and a half.
"The concept that most people are travelling to work in Toronto, well that used to be the case," says Robert Sasaki, Mississauga's manager of transportation planning. On a typical weekday between 6 and 9 a.m., 122,000 commuters travel to jobs in Mississauga, about 40,000 of whom are from Toronto, he says.
But the strategy's success has created a new set of challenges, Mr. McPhail says.
At first, reverse commuters happily sailed past incoming traffic on the roads and enjoyed empty trains, but now their commute has become just as clogged as the traditional commute in many cases. As well, there isn't sufficient public transit infrastructure to get city folk to their increasingly dispersed suburban offices and factories, leaving them with no option but to drive.
"The transit to do that type of [reverse] trip just doesn't exist. ... That's why we're seeing such a huge increase in car traffic because almost every new job in the 905 area that's filled by a City of Toronto resident is a car trip," Mr. McPhail says.
Mr. McWilliams, for one, drives every morning from a condo complex a home run's distance from the Rogers Centre to Mississauga, where he works in the health care division of General Electric Canada Inc.'s headquarters.
"All my friends are downtown. I'm just not ready for a suburban life. There's not much going on for people our age," he says.
"The extra time I spend commuting each week is worth the tradeoff."
Reverse commuters reflect shift in land use
As firms flee crowded downtown to the suburbs, a new class of worker is fleeing the city every morning
AMY BROWN-BOWERS
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
December 11, 2007 at 6:24 AM EST
TORONTO — Most weekday mornings, Brian McWilliams leaves his downtown Toronto condo, hops in his car and gets out of town - slowly.
Mr. McWilliams and thousands of other commuters are part of a trend in which, judging by the traffic, there appear to be nearly as many people leaving Toronto every morning to go to work as there are heading toward the city's office towers.
These "reverse commuters" - those going against the traditional tide of traffic by living in urban centres and commuting to the suburbs for work - also reflect complex demographic, transportation and property developments of recent years.
Last week, two reports shed light on this trend.
Census data released by Statistics Canada showed that new immigrants are flocking to Canada's major urban areas but, unlike Mr. McWilliams, they're choosing to live in the suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. They're not only finding cheaper housing but a large pool of potential employers, who have been moving offices and factories to more available land in the suburbs.
And the flight to the suburbs is expected to continue, suggests a report last week from Cushman & Wakefield LePage. In its 2008 outlook, the real estate firm expects the national office vacancy rate to drop to 5.6 per cent next year. But in major cities, such as Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, the vacancy rate in downtown areas will be much tighter, prompting tenants to consider moving to the suburbs where new office space is coming on stream.
In Toronto, which Cushman says represents more than 40 per cent of the total Canadian office market, the downtown office vacancy rate is expected to fall to 3.8 per cent this time next year from 6.2 per cent a year ago.
"We are now at the point where demand will have to slow in the central market, simply due to the lack of available space," Paul Morse, Cushman's senior managing director and national practice director of office leasing, warns in a release. "Those expanding or entering the market are now considering space in mid-town or further into the 905 [suburban] regions to meet their space needs."
This shift can be seen every morning in Toronto, where the likes of Mr. McWilliams are forming long lines of traffic on major outbound arteries - a change from just a few years ago when the heavy traffic was primarily inbound.
Not only are reverse commuters growing in numbers because their jobs are relocating out of the city, but residential space in the downtown core is growing exponentially faster than office space, according to figures from Toronto's planning department.
Currently, there are seven commercial office projects in the works in Toronto, representing nearly five million square feet. In comparison, there are 149 residential housing projects with a total of 39,398 units in the pipeline. Even if each of those units were only 600 square feet, that would amount to a whopping 23.6 million square feet.
Urban planners have been trying to adjust to these trends, especially as it applies to transportation.
"There was a strategy in the late 1970s and early eighties and it was focusing on decentralization," says Rod McPhail, director of transportation planning for Toronto.
At that time, planners decided that the city needed to grow from about 1.5 million people to about three million. The problem was that the transportation infrastructure, designed to bring people into the city from the suburbs, couldn't accommodate that kind of growth.
"We had to come up with a development strategy," Mr. McPhail says.
The solution was to make use of the empty commuter trains, subway cars and roads heading out of the downtown core in the morning and back into the city at night. To do that, planners encouraged the creation of pockets of jobs at the edges of the city and at the far ends of the transportation system to draw people outward each morning.
The strategy was wildly successful. In Mississauga, for instance, just west of Toronto, there are 406,000 jobs but a labour force of only about 364,000, according to figures supplied by the city.
The sprawling metropolis has been wooing companies with its lower taxes, space availability and attractive rental rates for years - it is currently the Canadian headquarters for 59 Fortune 500 companies and 51 Global Fortune 500 companies, and building permits were issued for more than 1.5 million square feet of office space in the past year and a half.
"The concept that most people are travelling to work in Toronto, well that used to be the case," says Robert Sasaki, Mississauga's manager of transportation planning. On a typical weekday between 6 and 9 a.m., 122,000 commuters travel to jobs in Mississauga, about 40,000 of whom are from Toronto, he says.
But the strategy's success has created a new set of challenges, Mr. McPhail says.
At first, reverse commuters happily sailed past incoming traffic on the roads and enjoyed empty trains, but now their commute has become just as clogged as the traditional commute in many cases. As well, there isn't sufficient public transit infrastructure to get city folk to their increasingly dispersed suburban offices and factories, leaving them with no option but to drive.
"The transit to do that type of [reverse] trip just doesn't exist. ... That's why we're seeing such a huge increase in car traffic because almost every new job in the 905 area that's filled by a City of Toronto resident is a car trip," Mr. McPhail says.
Mr. McWilliams, for one, drives every morning from a condo complex a home run's distance from the Rogers Centre to Mississauga, where he works in the health care division of General Electric Canada Inc.'s headquarters.
"All my friends are downtown. I'm just not ready for a suburban life. There's not much going on for people our age," he says.
"The extra time I spend commuting each week is worth the tradeoff."
