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Why was Vaughan so late to develop?

K

King of Kensington

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The suburbanization of Markham began earlier than in Vaughan. That's most evident in Thornhill where the Markham side was mostly built up in the 60s/70s and the Vaughan side in the 80s/90s. The Markham side seems to have developed right along with the Bayview/Leslie corridor. And going further east Agincourt and Malvern was the last part of the 416 to fill up and the adjacent areas of Markham presumably right around the same time.

In contrast while the Bathurst Corridor of North York, Downsview and Rexdale were pretty much built up by 1970 or so, there was a time lag of at least a decade before neighboring Vaughan really took off.

Why did Vaughan hold out as a rural community longer?
 
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It wasn't Wonderland. It was the Big Pipe, which reached Vaughan in the late 70s.
 
Again: the Big Pipe. For whatever political reason, it reached into Vaughan a little later than in the rest of York Region (thus Vaughan remained King-like for a few years: a whole lot of underserviced rural land punctuated by the village-like Thornhill/Woodbridge/Maple nodes). Then it all got connected to the GTA water and sewage network, and the boom began--what had been static in population around 15 thou doubled by 1981, and continued to gallop along at record place almost to the present day...
 
The main reason it developed so late is the farmers in Vaughan didn't sell their land to developers until the late '90s--1997 I believe. I used to know the family that owned all the land that is now Thornhill Woods--they were the last remaining family of the German Baptist Brethern that were the original settlers--their meeting house is still on Dufferin. Thornhill Woods used to be several beautiful historic c.1820s farmhouses/operating farms and of course the maple sugar bush. One of the conditions of the sale, iirc, was that the land be marketed towards conservative religious peoples/uses. I sometimes go up and walk around looking for ghosts from the past.... I think if I ever had to live in the suburbs I'd live here even though the architecture is appalling. Bathurst really is my main drag for a variety of reasons going back to this era.

I know many of their relatives owned land further north closer to Major Mac and had been selling through the '70s/80s/90s.

Markham otoh, was controlled by Mennonite farmers who sold most of their properties in the 1960s-70s and moved west to cheaper land in Waterloo, Perth and Huron Counties. There's even a sect called the "Markham Mennonites" near Elmira. Reesor Road is named after another prominent Mennonite family--all original Empire Loyalist settlers.

It was the Ontario Gov'ts late '80s 407 land grab that proved to be the last straw for these Vaughan farming families--the big city brought "Worldly" "English" people to their closed community.
 
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I'd dispute a late 90s date, because Vaughan was already growing explosively up to that time--the population had been static at around 15K through the 60s and into the early-to-mid 70s; but then it got hooked up to the GTA's trunk sewer system and BAM! it was up to 30K by the 1981 census, thanks to the earliest boomburbs around Woodbridge and Thornhill. And by the 1991 census, it had jumped 275% to 111K. Growth slackened somewhat from that explosive rate in the 90s (132K in 1996); but thereafter (and *this* may be where the holdout evangelical farmers selling out kicks in) Vaughan barreled along at a 10K-a-year rate just about to the present. But the essential "suburban megagrowth" aspect was already in place before then.

Think of it as akin to the GTA boomburb-of-the-moment, Milton--a beefed-up local sewer system led to Milton's urban-core population doubling through the 70s and early 80s; but then they maxed out on serviceable land and Milton stagnated at around 32K for a good 15-20 years thereafter. Then, *they* got hooked up to the GTA trunk sewer system, and Milton tripled over the course of a decade.

If you want a hint of how it was before the trunk sewer ventured north of Metro, a shot of Bathurst & Steeles in the 60s/70s will more than do.

bathurst-green-belt-7.jpg
 
adma said:
I'd dispute a late 90s date, because Vaughan was already growing explosively up to that time--the population had been static at around 15K through the 60s and into the early-to-mid 70s; but then it got hooked up to the GTA's trunk sewer system and BAM! it was up to 30K by the 1981 census, thanks to the earliest boomburbs around Woodbridge and Thornhill. And by the 1991 census, it had jumped 275% to 111K. Growth slackened somewhat from that explosive rate in the 90s (132K in 1996); but thereafter (and *this* may be where the holdout evangelical farmers selling out kicks in) Vaughan barreled along at a 10K-a-year rate just about to the present. But the essential "suburban megagrowth" aspect was already in place before then.
Click to expand...

This is correct.

The subdivision at Martin Grove north of Hwy 7 was from the 80's.

The subdivisions at Langstaff and Weston started in the 80's too.
 
The Bathurst-Steeles photo is rather telling. How would Bayview or Leslie contrast? I doubt the contrast would have been as sharp and if it was, it wouldn't have lasted very long.
 
Aren't there photos on this site of Sheppard Ave. in the 60's which are almost all farm land?

Toronto and the GTA overall is a city that has grown a lot in the last 50 years.
 
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