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UrbanToronto is celebrating 20 YEARS throughout October with stories and images looking back over the last two decades. Today we begin with a look back at UrbanToronto itself and its evolution over the the period, the first of many in-depth articles to come this month.
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There are several theories as to the origins of the word Toronto, one of them being ‘toronton’, an Indigenous word meaning ‘Meeting Place’, an apt description given the early settlers and traders who set up their camps on the shore of Lake Ontario alongside established canoe and portage routes.
Like almost everything else in our world these days, meeting places have moved online and an argument could be made that in one area of engagement, the development meeting place in Toronto today is UrbanToronto, now celebrating 20 years as the acknowledged go-to source for data-scraped and crowd-sourced information, dialogue, discussion, and an lively idea incubator for real estate, transit, and community issues.
To fully appreciate the change that has occurred the last two decades in Toronto, it is helpful to look back. In 2003 the population of the GTA was 4,861,000, today it is 6,372,000. That’s more than 1.5 million additional people who all needed a place to live, room to play, and the ability to move about the area. Twenty years ago, 'Southcore' was a vast array of parking lots, and in fact it's safe to say in 2003 none of us had even heard the term ‘Southcore’, as one example of the change that has since taken place. Back then, from a development standpoint, local citizens’ hair was on fire over the Pantages Tower downtown on Victoria Street, slated to be an outrageous 45 floors and 139 metres upon its completion the following year, leading no doubt to the feared “Manhattanization of Toronto”, most certainly leading to its urban decay and demise.
UrbanToronto was only in its infancy when Edward Skira decided to take a stroll one day on the empty railway lands near what was to become the CityPlace development. Skira is a self-described ‘construction geek’ who remembers staring into the big construction pit of what was to become the Sheraton Centre Hotel opposite City Hall when he was only 10 years old.
“I lived downtown and would take walks to watch workers pour concrete on construction sites,” recalls Skira. “I would stand for hours …one more bucket …just one more bucket …it was almost like a zen-like experience for me.”
A lone figure standing on those desolate railway lands in the early 2000s, Skira noticed a sign for a coming condominium and searched for its the website, and up popped something called UrbanToronto and its Forum discussion board. As UrbanToronto has since revealed over 20 years, there are a lot of Edward Skira’s in Toronto; sidewalk superintendents who hadn’t had an opportunity to find their ‘meeting place’. For Skira, it was a eureka moment.
“I had a background in the music industry, understood marketing and publishing and had a digital camera, so I posted regularly on the Forum and became quite well known on the site,” says Skira. “There was a little bit of development going on in 2003 and One King West was near me and that was going to be an eye-popping 51 floors. So, I took a tour while it was under construction, walked up 30 flights of stairs and posted my photos. With my wife, we bought UrbanToronto soon after thinking it could be fun as a hobby.”
Skira and his wife Nada Laskovski, today vice president and co-publisher, together realized UrbanToronto had greater potential to be a site for much more information, attractive to not only those interested in buildings and development, but transit and other civic issues as well. They also thought the major players in the real estate industry would realize its value, credibility, and reach, and pay for the exposure the site provided, therefore turning UrbanToronto into a revenue-generating business opportunity.
But before money could be made and major players attracted, changes needed to be made – especially on the technology side. “It was kind of a mess with bad software; early information was being lost because of it,” says Skira. “We changed the software so building threads would live on forever. I thought it would be good to have a historical record of projects so we reorganized everything. It was a good little community back then and it was fun seeing all the new applications for development start to come in. We definitely were in the right city at the right time to build up a site like UrbanToronto.”
The ‘naughts proved to be a decade of steady consistency in Toronto real estate development, in contrast to the volatility of the previous two decades. The 1980s brought us big hair, even bigger shoulder pads, and big projects — culminating in Scotia Plaza — while the 1990s saw a crippling recession and constriction in the development industry, its legacy being ‘The Stump’ from the on-hold Bay Adelaide Centre, which seemed to serve as a worthy tombstone to that's decade real estate development.
That all changed in the 2000s and UrbanToronto was there to chronicle and document the frenzied pace of development and emerging civic issues, turning the site from a discussion board into a business.
“We decided to sell banner ads so we sent a message to all Forum members saying we were now offering them, and within an hour of sending the message we had three clients and were running the banners soon after,” recalls Skira. “A light bulb went off and we realized revenue was possible, and I turned my attention to Urban Toronto. It was only a discussion forum at that stage so we started to build up the site with editorial by adding a news page and home page by pulling content from the Forum and using it as a front page story, which made it easy to read about projects without having to search through the Forum. Renderings of buildings were getting lost in the Forum so we created a database file for every project, with a rendering to make it easy to see.”
Today the four elements of UrbanToronto are its front page news, database of projects and industry players, its map page, and of course the Forum.
Ah yes, the Forum.
If UrbanToronto has become Toronto’s digital town square, the Forum has become its village well – where everyone can partake. “UrbanToronto grew organically, but there is no question people found us via the Forum,” says Skira.
The growth UrbanToronto has enjoyed under Skira and Laskovski has been nothing short of staggering. It averages 300,000 visitors to the site per month and averages two million page views per month. The Forum averages approximately 400 new posts per day. Not surprisingly, the Buildings section of the Forum is the busiest and also not surprisingly, here height is king. The Top Ten page views by project over its history are in order; The One, Aura, St Regis (formerly the Trump), CIBC Square, One Bloor East, L-Tower, Pinnacle One Yonge, Ice Condominiums, The Well, and now sitting at Number 10 but climbing the ranks, is Forma (formerly known as Mirvish+Gehry).
The person in charge of herding all the cats, i.e. Moderating the Forum, is Managing Editor Craig White. Skira met White at one of their regular ‘Night of the Nerds’ in the mid-2000s – a collection of approximately ten people (all interestingly enough at the time, men) who gathered in a downtown pub to discuss real estate development, architecture, transit, and other civic issues. White also found UrbanToronto by accident. Working for a map company at the time, White was searching for information on the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, then starting construction, and up popped "so much more!"
While the Building page of the Forum is the busiest, White says transit stimulates the most heated discussions. “Transportation seems to get the most in-depth and animated conversation and opinions,” he observes. “People have very strong opinions about transit, cycling, walking, driving. Quite simply, people are passionate about their favourite ways to get around.”
There is certainly no shortage of opinions on the Forum section, and one of White’s responsibilities — shared with other Moderators — is to pull people out of off-topic rabbit holes or rants, and ensure a modicum of decorum exists on the site… otherwise a temporary or perhaps even permanent ‘vacation’ will be imposed on a participant. To that end, White has some useful tips for users of the Forum.
“The Forum is the sharing and dissemination of information on countless items of interest in a very complex city, and its purpose is to give people a chance to both learn about their city and express their thoughts,” says White. “People want to engage, and it’s a stepping stone to further engagement. However, you need to engage civilly if you want to enjoy the privilege of remaining there! Approach it in a generous way, and most importantly, be lighthearted and don’t expect everyone to always agree with you.”
Skira and Laskovski have had a unique vantage point to witness the growth of the city and see the influence of UrbanToronto grow, especially regarding residential marketing. In the old days, developers and marketing agencies very much controlled the messaging and brand of their projects with calculated campaigns of flowery marketing jargon which could last two years in advance of a shovel in the ground. Today, a rendering could leak onto the Forum site and the project is talked about immediately.
“The internet took that control away from developers and marketing agencies because they could no longer control the narrative, as the UrbanToronto Forum discussion gave that narrative to the people,” says Skira. “The Forum was a source of good because it forced better architecture as developers wanted good reviews. A third of our page visitors are in the business and UrbanToronto is an important tool for them by reading reviews.”
Data has always been the lifeblood of UrbanToronto, supplying the key competitive advantage in elevating it to its position as Southern Ontario’s leading real estate and development data provider. UrbanToronto’s development database currently tracks more than 3,000+ projects and the 6,000+ companies involved in building them.
Recent service offering additions include UTPro, UrbanToronto's sophisticated GTA development database including project applications and mapping tools, providing subscribers with tracking ability from project inception to completion. It also recently launched UTPro Instant Reports, which pulls stats based on a specific address, MLS Zone, or Toronto Ward; the daily subscription-based New Development Insider Newsletter; and Premium Listings, a publicly accessible list of more than 300 companies from the UrbanToronto database.
Given the pace of change experienced over these past two decades, it is of course impossible to predict the next twenty years in Toronto – how we will live, work, and play, what issues will emerge, and how our city will look. With hybrid work apparently here to stay, perhaps major commercial developments such as Commerce Court 3 or The Hub will live on in limbo as proposals only, or perhaps the next generation will realize the value of in-person collaboration and demand returns for new office space?
One thing is for certain though, Toronto will continue to be a magnet to which people are drawn to live and work, where ideas and innovation will flourish and livability remains front and centre. Equally certain is that UrbanToronto will be here to chronicle and document the coming changes with data-driven information.
“Urban Toronto is very much “YIMBY”, not NIMBY, as in “Yes, in my backyard” as we like development and building more vibrant communities,” says Skira. “We will always continue to provide a platform and meeting place for dialogue and discussion, experts and exchange and always giving voice to citizens who care passionately about their city.”
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Thank you to the companies joining UrbanToronto to celebrate our 20 years in business.
