New York City has numerous Chinatowns, and more than one Little Italy, but residents might be surprised to know that its largest legal international segment is actually Canadian. Nearly a quarter million Canadians live and work within the city; by and large, they are professionals, youngish and urban-minded.
Canadian observers attribute this brain drain to the U.S. to a quest for higher wages, cultural excitement and the feeling of being in the center of the world. Any New Yorker with a Canadian friend can tell you, however, that another pay-off for these migrants is the density and variety of the built environment found in New York.
Commonly, these expats are dissatisfied with those qualities in Toronto, Canada’s premier city and a logical magnet for its upwardly mobile. For years, Toronto developers, shaping one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the West, have fostered sprawl, cookie-cutterness and sheer man-made ugliness, according to some observers.
An everyday complaint is encapsulated in this recent observation in Toronto’s National Post by a native returning home after exposure to civilities abroad: “The gleaming new towers appeared banal … it was depressing to attempt to find reasons to stay married to my urban partner of 33 years.”
Still, for all the native’s deprecations of their city’s ungainliness, something transformative is happening in Toronto. Sprawl is getting checked. Downtown, in particular, is building upward — and in a big way. While New Yorkers tend to think that theirs is the Skyscraper City, recently Toronto homebuilders have surpassed Gotham in their ratio of multi-unit to single-unit construction.
The numbers for 2006 (from the U.S. Census and a Canadian Conference Board study) tell the story. In metro New York, an area with 18.1 million people, some 29,000 out of 60,000 housing permits were issued for condos. For metro Toronto, a region with a third of the residents, the condo numbers are nearly the same, and the proportion is higher — 25,000 out of 40,000. Buoyed by immigration, Toronto is growing at twice New York’s speed.
Further patterns have been identified by Emporis, a German research firm that monitors worldwide construction. In New York, 430 high rises are going up, approved or proposed. Meanwhile, in smaller Toronto, the pace is more intensive: 330 are in the works. In the roughly two-mile by four-mile rectangle that comprises the downtown core, over 50 skyscrapers are climbing up; many are above 50 floors, replicating the feel and scale of midtown Manhattan.
Significantly, New York developers are getting in on the action in Toronto. Several are partnering with local developers to create hotel-condo combinations.
No surprise that Donald Trump is one of those New Yorkers, with a part-hotel, part-condo tower going up on Bay Street, Toronto’s answer to Wall Street.
He also has stiff competition. Super-tall hotel/condo projects by Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Shangri-La are going up nearby. As a result, Trump had to lop off 13 floors from his original design — although the height is the same, and more units were added. Prices at the Trump tower are going for between $650 and $850 a square foot; the penthouse was recently bought by the city’s youngest billionaire for about $20 million.
Another New Yorker is helping to create a newly dense neighborhood outside of Toronto’s core.
Jason Pomeranc’s firm, Thompson Hotels, is partnering with Freed Development on a 15-floor hotel-condo project. Prices range between $190,000 for a studio to $1.5 million for a penthouse, or about $400 and $600 per square foot.
To be sure, developers from all over the world are active in Toronto. They are drawn by an economy where housing starts have ballooned by over 19 percent and median home prices are up nearly 15 percent, all in the past year. Bazis International, a firm from Kazakhstan, is adding to the momentum with plans to build the city’s tallest residential tower: 80 floors in the midtown area.
On former rail yards between the lakefront and the CN Tower, Concord Pacific, a Hong Kong company, is midway through erecting a cluster of condos with about 8,000 units in 20 towers, each ranging from 20 to 40 floors.
Douglas Coupland, the Canadian author of the novel “Generation X,” is designing a small park between these buildings. Funds for that park, and for numerous public sculptures, come from impact fees levied by the city on developers.
The sum effect, however welcome for its grace notes, is small. Unlike New York’s core, Toronto’s midtown and downtown have to get by without busy public squares, plentiful green space or lengthy bicycle paths.
As in New York, many of the high-rise structures are being placed along subway and streetcar routes. Even more development may be sparked by the provincial government’s commitment to spend $17.5 billion on improvements and expansion of the city’s rapid transit.
While it is planned as one of the largest infrastructure projects on the continent, some major developers still anticipate considerable gridlock. They are disappointed because unlike New York, where express subway lines propel commuters to hubs of neighborhoods, Toronto’s lack of similarly fast subway routes makes for commutes as much as three times longer than comparable distances in Manhattan.
What’s afoot, then, is a major intensification; today’s inner city will differ markedly three years from now. Looming above all this is an open question: Will the new Toronto be attractive enough to retain those ambitiously seeking a truly liveable place?