[LINK] "A Toronto neighbourhood without children"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at the Globe and Mail, Anna Mehler Paperny took a look at how "[t]he city and developers want breeders and their broods to start populating condo towers, but it's an uphill battle." The condo boom, it seems, downsides owing to the cost of units that mightn't have come to mind.

Carol Finlay's friends and family think she's crazy. A neglectful would-be mother. An urban masochist.

Her audacious proposal? To move downtown to raise a family.

“[They say,] ‘You can't raise a family. … That would be neglectful to children … it's not enough space to raise children, it's dangerous.' ”

Ms. Finlay, 29, and her husband Charlie are moving in August from North York to a loft near the corner of Queen and Dovercourt, which they hope to convert into a three-bedroom condo. “Ninety per cent of our friends are going in the opposite direction.

“[But] our life is in Toronto and it didn't make sense to us to spend so much of our time commuting,” Ms. Finlay says. “In North York we weren't part of the community there as much as we would like to be. … We would like to start a family and that becomes even more important to us.”

[. . .]

For the most part, the city is on board with the onset of a hyper-dense metropolis of vertical neighbourhoods. But the people buying those $600,000 condos are young singles and couples and, to a lesser extent, retirees. This migration upward coincides with an exodus of families from the downtown core. In the 2006 census, children under 15 made up only 8.4 per cent of Trinity-Spadina's population, compared with 16.3 per cent in the rest of Toronto.

The city is trying to change that. For months, Councillor Adam Vaughan has been working with developers on a social engineering project: to lure families into gleaming condominium boxes in the sky.

The to-do list is deceptively simple – families need space and services with an affordable price tag attached. Achieving that in one of the priciest real-estate markets in Canada is another story altogether.

It has been done elsewhere – notably Vancouver, which has seen its population of downtown children more than quintuple since 1986.

But developers shy away from the drastic measures and the minimum three-bedroom requirement Mr. Vaughan would like to see – they are skeptical as to whether this social-planning ploy will work.

[. . .]

The city's official plan to house more people in the downtown core calls for increasing density to take eco-conscious advantage of scarce urban space. But if Toronto's downtown neighbourhoods are going vertical, argues Mr. Vaughan, those 30-storey elevators should have kids inside.

“You can't sustain a city with a monoculture; you can't segregate singles from families and seniors from young people. What we need when we build these buildings is to build vertical neighbourhoods, and that means we need to sustain economic diversity and social diversity.”

For what it's worth, I quite like the Queen and Dovercourt area, but then, I'm not seeking to raise a family, either.

Question: Is this core-periphery contrast one of the emerging themes of Toronto's growing internal divisions and contrasts?