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UrbanToronto is celebrating 20 YEARS throughout October with stories and images looking back over the last two decades. Today's article is one of several looking at change in Toronto over the the period.
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The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has been growing quickly over the twenty years since UrbanToronto began, and keeping up with the infrastructure requirements needed to maintain or even improve the quality of life here has proven to be complicated and difficult. The traffic that commuters around the GTA put up with every day is possibly the most obvious aspect of the issue, so congestion garners many headlines… but how citizens actually experience and feel Toronto’s massive population growth may be on a more personal and local level.
“Of course, the growth can be seen in transit and traffic, but people can be even more impacted by how their neighbourhoods are changing,” says Edward Skira, president and co-publisher of UrbanToronto. “Their local corner store is being replaced by a 50-storey building, or they are reading about proposals which will change the face of things nearby. Of course, sitting in Highway 401 traffic is frustrating, but how their local demographics or their shopping street is changing can be much more impactful.”
One can best see this growth through the numbers, and the numbers are impressive. The GTA is approaching seven million in population in 2023, a rise from five million twenty years ago and growing by more than 100,000 per year. Its 5,903 square kilometres are made up of 25 urban, suburban and rural municipalities with a population density now above 1,000 people per square kilometre. The City of Toronto’s population is 2.9 million with forecasted growth to 3.5 million by 2030.
The growth can also be seen in the terminologies we now use to describe 'Toronto'. It used to be just the City of Toronto, which expanded into Metropolitan Toronto, followed by the Greater Toronto Area. Then came the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), followed by the Golden Horseshoe which stretches into Niagara. Now there is the Greater Golden Horseshoe, a behemoth encompassing Peterborough, Barrie and reaching to Kitchener-Waterloo.
One of the most impressive results of this growth has been how Toronto’s ethnic diversity has changed to make it one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse major world centres. In the City of Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods more than 200 languages are spoken, with 45% speaking a mother tongue other than either English or French. It used to be that Toronto was known to have one of the world’s largest Italian populations, but Italian is now the seventh most common spoken language, behind Mandarin or Cantonese, Tamil, Spanish, and Tagalog, reflective of the major demographic change Toronto has undergone since 2003.
According to the most recent statistics from 2021, 54.6% of Toronto’s population belong to a visible minority group, which is higher than most global cities, including New York City. Illustrative of our changing city, that figure was just 13.6% in 1981. Where to house this phenomenal growth and accommodate the changing demographics is a major challenge facing developers and builders in Toronto, especially considering the economics of building residential towers.
“Providing units and places to live is the most significant way developers are addressing our growth, but you must remember the economics of that business,” says Skira. “Developers are concerned about profit margins and while 3-bedroom units are a nice idea, they are a hard sell as the economics of building large 1,500 ft² units are difficult. Developers seek to provide what people want but large units are not practical. They are expensive to build and people can’t afford them. People live in places which they can afford.”
Construction and development often mean delays on the roadways. At the end of 2022, Toronto had 147 major road restrictions in place, and that’s not including the intersection of Queen and Bay, now closed for a minimum of five years to allow for construction of the Ontario Line. As we sit frustrated in traffic, it’s important to remember that growth is much better than stagnancy, creating a vibrant urban environment and providing jobs and opportunity. One only has to look at the American Rustbelt of the 1970s and the urban decay experienced by such cities as Buffalo, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland to see the dangers of stagnancy.
“Growth is much healthier than stagnancy,” says Skira. “Growth provides economic stimulus and means new people, vibrancy, and economic opportunity.”
Growth also means delays with transit as Toronto plays catch-up after decades of looking the other way. The construction of the Eglinton Crosstown has been the subject of multiple delays over the last several years, and as anyone who has endured the ‘shuttle bus experience’ knows only too well, track and signal repairs forcing the closure of sections of either Line 1 or Line 2 of the TTC are a weekend regularity. A mid-2023 study released by Toronto Region Board of Trade showed only 58% of TTC trips were on-time during 2022, making it the least reliable transit system in the GTA.
There is no reason on the horizon to expect this massive population growth not to continue. Toronto remains an attractive destination for international investment, business start-ups, and immigration. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks it among the world’s most liveable cities, Number 9 on a list of 173. With more than 350 construction cranes at work, the GTHA has the most of any metropolitan area in North America, and more active cranes than New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington combined.
Growth also means the city's infrastructure is vulnerable, and increases to its capacity to not only move people around to their daily destinations, but also to deal with such things as sewage and the electrical demand to accommodate the expected growth. The redevelopment of areas such as the Golden Mile in Scarborough, which will see the construction of 77 residential towers slated to house 50,000 people in the next ten years, may become the norm and not the exception.
Changes in government regulations may assist in handling this growth beyond just taller residential towers. Cities like Montreal and New York have single family homes with apartments in them. On a zoning map of Toronto, 70% is coloured in yellow, dubbed the ‘Yellowbelt’ by planner Gil Meslin. These neighbourhoods, urban and suburban, until recently were restricted to single family housing.
“Toronto proper needs to look at the Yellowbelt to spread out the growth away from subway lines,” says Skira. “It used to be you couldn’t do anything with a single-family home in vast areas of the city, but with the recent change we can now have up to four single units on a lot, like a New York or Montreal. This could dramatically assist in spreading out the growth.”
Few things in our world are predictable but continued population growth in Toronto and the GTA is an almost certainty. Toronto remains a magnet for investment, business, people, and opportunity, and Government of Ontario projections for the next 20-plus years show the GTA growing to a population of 10 million in 2046, or 50% of the province’s total population, and the City of Toronto reaching 4.04 million population by the same year.
The challenge before this healthy, prosperous, and dynamic metropolis and its surrounding region is to learn from the past in order to accommodate and continue to thrive in the future.
UrbanToronto will return tomorrow with another story celebrating 20 YEARS. A second look back at transit over the period, this time on regional plans, will appear next week. In the meantime, check back often to our front page and Forum to keep an eye on all the current and emerging trends, and you can always leave your comments in the space below.
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate our 20 years in business.
