Gloomy report doesn't dampen Pollyanna's spirits
JOHN BARBER
October 3, 2007
Once again, the Toronto Community Foundation's annual Vital Signs report presents a tough challenge to the Pollyannas of the mainstream media.
The most persuasive evidence of urban decline it presents is the simplest: the city's inability to attract new people and investment, especially when its performance in those two basic measures is compared with that of the booming 905 suburbs. The suburbs outside Toronto are growing, it says, while the city proper has stalled.
But dauntless Pollyanna doesn't buy it. She notes that the 2001 census undercounted the population of Greater Toronto by 5 per cent, and that the 2006 undercount is likely to be similar - with most of the uncounted likely to be found in older parts of the city.
Leaving aside the uncounted cohort of so-called illegal immigrants, city staff say that official "undercoverage" adjustments could add 200,000 souls to the city's stated population of 2,503,281. Pollyanna approves.
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But she doesn't bother much with the arithmetic. Mostly, she just looks around. And being well travelled, she can't help noticing that there are more high-rise buildings under construction in Toronto today than anywhere she's ever been in her carefree life.
She doesn't exaggerate - much. There are currently 143 high-rises under construction in New York City, according to Emporis.com, compared with 104 in Toronto, a city with less than one-third of NYC's population. Including new towers both proposed and approved raises the count to 435 in Toronto, versus 330 in NYC. Chicago is distinctly second tier, with 63 high-rises under construction and a total of 173 in the pipeline.
Pollyanna wonders: If this is what it feels like to be stalled, how could we ever survive growth? But mostly, she attributes the apparent discrepancy between 416 and 905 to the fact that the city as a whole is growing, like any organic thing, from the inside out. One doesn't expect the pith of a tree to add rings, but urban ingenuity has produced a work-around: Toronto is growing up as well as out.
Pollyanna is more apt to celebrate suburban growth than to regret it, especially when it's accompanied by some measure of urban growth. Many U.S. central cities continue to outright lose population while their suburbs grow, a textbook diagnosis of sprawl. Even among the well-publicized few that are now regaining population, however, none appear to enjoy a greater share of overall regional growth than Toronto.
Developers built 24,354 new housing units in Greater Toronto last year, with a healthy 12,726 of them appearing in the already built-up city. New York and its region acquired 32,609 units in the same year, with 8,790 of them in Manhattan. Among comparable cities, only Chicago is capturing a share of regional housing starts equal to Toronto's.
Pollyanna is also struck by the facts that more Torontonians than ever own homes, and that those lucky many have experienced spectacular gains as a result, with house prices rising 77 per cent over the past decade.
An affordability crisis, then? Not really: The plentiful new construction that propelled home ownership also helped to hold down rents, which increased by 30 per cent over the same period that housing prices increased by 77 per cent. Vacancy rates remain near historic highs.
Transit use is twice the national average while crime rates are much lower, smog days are dropping, waste diversion is climbing, the streets are cleaner, and the number of head offices in Toronto is growing smartly. The financial sector is booming and lavish cultural monuments are erupting from the sidewalks. Toronto's stall, in short, is uncommonly energetic.
True, Pollyanna never sees the whole picture. But that doesn't stop her from liking what she does see.
jbarber@globeandmail.com