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rfmcdonaldOpen File's John Michael McGrath has highlighted an interesting fact about Toronto's changing population.
McGrath notes that much of the recent population growth was concentrated in districts on the Toronto waterfront, south of King Street, where the condo boom has been at its most uninhibited. Future population growth in downtown Toronto will require more sensitive development than the surfeit of empty buildable land on the waterfront allowed in previous years. Too, he also points out that growth in the urban core helps sustain the ongoing growth in disparities between the downtown and the suburbs, shades of the "Three Torontos" that people like Hulchanski have been talking about.
While we've noted some of the trends in Toronto that were revealed in the 2011 census before, here's one that seems to have slipped past people's notice, mostly because it applies to something that doesn't exist anymore. The area of the old City of Toronto, before 1997's amalgamation, has finally seen its population increase above its previous high—in 1971.
Like many North American cities, the '70s weren't kind to the downtown core of what was then Metro Toronto. A combination of economic and demographic factors (jobs leaving for lower-tax suburbs; baby boomers starting new families in bigger suburban houses; shrinking family sizes) caused a large drop in the population of Old Toronto. From Canadian census numbers compiled by City of Toronto staff, this is what happened:
In the decade of 1971–1981, Old Toronto lost 16 per cent of its population—more than 100,000 people. It then recovered those numbers, only slowly, until the last five years of 2006-2011.
So what happened?
"We've comprehensively rebuilt the downtown core," says Zack Taylor, doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto's Cities Centre. "We've poured billions of dollars in private capital tinto reconstructing the older part of the city, to essentially have the population end up the same."
In the core area of the old city, roughly from Bathurst to the Don Valley and from Rosedale south the the waterfront, numbers that Taylor collected from census data show what happened. Essentially, the number of dwelling units almost doubled while the population since 1981 has increased more slowly, leading to a substantial decline in average household size[.]
McGrath notes that much of the recent population growth was concentrated in districts on the Toronto waterfront, south of King Street, where the condo boom has been at its most uninhibited. Future population growth in downtown Toronto will require more sensitive development than the surfeit of empty buildable land on the waterfront allowed in previous years. Too, he also points out that growth in the urban core helps sustain the ongoing growth in disparities between the downtown and the suburbs, shades of the "Three Torontos" that people like Hulchanski have been talking about.
There are problems with Toronto having surpassed its 1971 high that are immediately felt by most residents. The city wasn't built to handle the 1971 population with 2011's car ownership, so congestion is one obvious result. David Hulchanski at the University of Toronto points out that as economic activity explodes in the city core, it pushes poverty out to the suburbs where services are more sparse, or absent.
It's giving Toronto a feel less like many American cities, and closer to the London/Paris model says Taylor, where a wealthy core is surrounded by a ring of suburban poverty associated with immigrants and visible minorities.
But the numbers show Toronto avoided the arguably worse fate of a city like Detroit, where whites and wealth fled the city entirely, leaving urban blacks with an empty shell. "[Toronto's] is a problem that many American cities would love to have," says Taylor.
