The Decibel - The shrinking neighbourhoods in Canada’s biggest cities

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

The populations of Vancouver and Toronto have doubled in the past 50 years, but in certain neighbourhoods of those cities, populations have declined by as much as 40 per cent.The Globe’s architecture critic Alex Bozikovic explains why neighbourhoods have lost so many residents, what that means for the areas, and how it might present a solution to the housing crises.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The populations of Canada's two biggest cities are growing. But inside those cities, certain neighborhoods are dwindling. So I live near Christy Pitts Park, which is just west of the center of downtown Toronto. And so it's a mixed neighborhood that has always been pretty working class. And by Canadian standards, it's pretty crowded with people. But if you look at a little bit more closely, there are signs that different things used to be happening than that are not happening anymore. Near where I live, there's a mid-sized street called Christie Street, and it's lined with storefronts. But almost all of these storefronts have been closed off, right?

The windows are, you know, have curtains, or they've been frosted because they've turned into people's apartments or I've turned into offices. And when you look back, as I did a little while ago, you find out that all of these places used to be shops or restaurants. There was a soda fountain. There was a candy store. And over time, all of those places have closed off. And the reason that we're seeing all of these things is that there are just fewer people around. There used to be a lot of people in the neighborhood who were coming into these shops and restaurants every day, and now there just aren't enough of them around anymore. The Globe's architecture critic, Alex Buzikovic, along with Globe data editor Yang Sun, recently analyzed data from Statistics Canada.

They found that in Vancouver and Toronto, specific neighborhoods have lost as much as 40% of their populations in the last 50 years. So today, Alex is on the show to tell us what's behind this drop, what happens to a city that loses so much density in certain pockets, and how it could present a solution to the two cities' housing crises. I'm Cheryl Sutherland in for Manica Ram and Wilms, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Alex, thanks for being here. Lovely to be here. So Alex, you and our colleague did this data analysis looking at Toronto and Vancouver. What exactly were you looking at? We were analyzing census data from the 1971 and 2021 census, so 50 years apart.

And the census slices these cities into little areas that they call dissemination areas, which are basically a block, sometimes two blocks, home to about 500 people. So that's kind of a more nuanced way of looking at the city than looking at a whole neighborhood or the entire thing. And when you get down to that level, you find some surprising things. So both Toronto and Vancouver have grown dramatically over that. time. Not a surprise to people to hear that, right? We know this, right? You know, both the city and then the entire region, you know, have grown out from the central city into being much bigger. Over that time, both Toronto and Vancouver have more than doubled population. In Toronto, it's almost tripled.

But when you get down to these little small areas, you find that many of them have actually lost people. In some cases, up to 40% of the population has gone away during that 50-year period. So along with these, you know, our map is color-coded and the blue squares show growth. growth. And there are some places, particularly in downtown Vancouver and downtown Toronto, that clearly have grown by a lot, right, have had a lot of people. And those are the places you would expect that have a bunch of new buildings, especially high rises. But around them, there's a lot of red, a lot of places where we've seen a decline. Interesting. Okay. So what you're describing here is basically the blue and red squares, there's like some areas that are quite

densely populated, but then around it, the population is declining. That's right. It's thinner and it's declining. In Vancouver, If you look at all of the areas of the Vancouver region that were built up, right, that had people living in them, you know, in the early 70s, 21% of those have declined over that 50-year period. And in Toronto, it's much more pronounced the pattern. Almost three-quarters of those areas across the Toronto region have lost people. Wow.

And those slices, those blocks, have lost more than 540,000 people, even as the region has more than tripled in size. Yeah, that's surprising for me to hear that. So we'll get into the Y's in a bit, but let's look at some examples from each city to illustrate what we're talking about. So, yeah, give me some examples from Vancouver and from Toronto. So in the piece, we read about the neighborhood of Carersdale on the west side of Vancouver, which in some ways would not seem to be an obvious candidate because it has seen some new buildings get built. Some apartment buildings have gotten built in and around that area over the last 30 years.

And yet, if you break it down more finely, some of the blocks within Carersdale have lost 30% even. and 40% of the population. There's one particular zone in this neighborhood that went from 1,010 residents in 1971 down to 630. Oh, wow. So it's a 38% decline. And in Toronto, where this pattern is both broader geographically and much more pronounced, there's a huge swat that covers essentially the entire west side of Old Toronto, all the way from the Parkdale neighborhood north essentially to Eglinton and west past High Park,

where there are almost uniformly very steep declines where particular areas have lost 30, 40% of their people over that 50-year period. And these are desirable neighborhoods too, right? So this might be very shocking for people to be hearing that. So we're talking about Toronto and Vancouver here, but would this also be true of other Canadian cities? To a degree, yes.

And I think it might surprise people to look at this. Even fast-growing cities like Edmonton and Calgary. also are having this problem to some degree. And it's not just happening in very old neighborhoods like the ones in central Toronto. It's also true in neighborhoods that were built as late as the 1950s or 1960s. And the demographics are a little bit different, but similar patterns repeat themselves that a lot of people used to live there. And at this moment, there are fewer.

And in a lot of cases, they're even declining from where they are today. Is this uniquely a Canadian or a North American thing? Because, you know, we hear a lot about how European cities are densely. populated. They have more people living in apartments. So yeah, is this a Canadian problem? It is also a European phenomenon to a certain degree. Interesting. Right. But the difference is this pattern of peaks and valleys, like this really dramatic change where you've got enormous growth happening in the city, which is not the case almost anywhere in Europe, but at the same time, in the same city, you also see significant shrinkage. You know, for historical reasons, a lot of European

cities have lost people, but they don't have none of them the kind of pattern that we do, where we're building new buildings that in some cases are very tall and will house, you know, a thousand people, well, a block away or two blocks away, you've got houses that are effectively emptying out. So when you walk down these streets, you talked about your neighborhood in Toronto, gave us a sense of what that looks like. But let's get a bit more on that. So what do we see?

Are there a lot of empty houses? Like, what is, what's going on on the ground? There aren't empty houses. And I talked to an academic called Maxwell Hart, who spoke to this directly. You know, when we think about a neighborhood or a city that's emptying out, that's what you think of, right? You think about vacant lots. You think about empty houses. About boarded up houses, that kind of thing, yeah.

Exactly, which is happening in a number of American cities, you know, in the Midwest and particularly in the Rust Belt. But that's not what we have. What we have is that the buildings in these, you know, prosperous cities are all still there. It's just that they have fewer people in them. So it's kind of an invisible phenomenon. You know, you can see the new buildings being built, but you can't see this process of attrition in the old buildings through which they are gradually, you know, losing more and more people. And there's something interesting that you did in your analysis that looked at classrooms and classroom sizes, right? So what did you find when you looked at classrooms?

So public school data is a really good way of looking at this phenomenon because it's public and it is, you know, clearly reported. And, you know, you can see what's happened over time. So the Toronto District School Board, which is the main public school board in Toronto and the largest in the country, has really been a victim of this process. They have, as of last year, about 301,000 classroom spaces, so physical spaces within their buildings to house students, and only about 234,000 students. So there are, in the buildings they have today, they have 69,000 empty seats. Again, this is something that is shocking to me, living in one neighborhood. and my kid goes to a TDSB school, and there's always movement of class sizes, this concern around overcrowding, classes that have 30 plus kids. And so to hear this is quite shocking.

It's very strange. And, you know, one of my kids goes to a TDSB school as well in high school, and his high school has portables. You know, it's crowded. And it is quite close to the school building that we talk about in the piece, the Bickford Center, which is effectively 90% empty. Wow. You know, so that school board is trying to do. deal with this uneven pattern of growth and this distribution of people and has been involved in this sort of long back and forth with, you know, the province's ministry of education to figure

out what do you do when you have some buildings that are overcrowded, you know, a handful of neighborhoods where people are scrambling to find spaces for the kids, but many other places where these buildings are, you know, large and are emptying out. Okay, so you mentioned Toronto's classrooms. What about in Vancouver? In Vancouver, there's a similar but more modest pattern than what's happening in Toronto. There are a number of schools in Vancouver, both at the elementary and high school level, that are showing up as underused. But there are also a few places where neighborhoods are desperate for new classrooms.

There's been a long sort of public advocacy campaign to get a new elementary school serving the Olympic Village neighborhood that was built up about a dozen years ago, which is only now resulting in a new school being built. And then meanwhile in the suburbs, where all of the growth is happening, happening and where most of the kids are, a ton of schools are being built. So, you know, Surrey outside of Vancouver has 27 new schools in planning or construction right now. Wow. That's so interesting. Okay. So there's new schools being built and then also schools that are not being used. That's right. We'll be right back. So Alex, let's talk about why we're seeing these changes in density in specific neighborhoods of Toronto and Vancouver.

What are the demographic changes that's led to this? There are a number of things that, you know, I think are we going to be familiar to a lot of readers, but when you put them together, they sort of multiply to create this effect that we're speaking about. One of them is that people are living longer. The Canadian life expectancy has been rising steadily over the last two generations. So there are a lot of people who are both living longer and are staying in their houses longer than they would have been, right? People in their 70s and 80s and 90s who are still there with one person or two people in a house that used to house three or four or five people. There are also families where they exist today are having fewer. children. There's a far larger number of Canadians, a far larger proportion, are remaining single or

are coupled with no children. And those who do have kids tend to have fewer. And there's also, I would say, the fact that we're taking it more space, right, in these places, right, which are increasingly expensive, Vancouver and Toronto, particularly through the central cities, there has been a move over the last 30 years in which these places have become really desirable again. And the people who live there are the people who can afford to live there now, right, who tend to be wealthier people. And so those people are taking up more space, right? Toronto particularly had an unusual phenomenon where there are a lot of houses in the city that had been divided up into apartments or had borders in them. Yeah, give me a sense of how it's changed because I think

that's an interesting history lesson here, right? Because the cities where you see these really expensive of homes, you know, going, I mean, in some areas, two million plus dollars for these older homes that had been renovated, but this wasn't always how it was. So, yeah, tell me what it was like before. That's right. I mean, if you go back further, you know, Toronto in the 1930s, more than half of households had borders living with them, the tenants living with them. You know, one of my grandparents, my grandfather grew up in Toronto very close to where I live now on Clinton Street. And, you know, his family, he had two siblings and they had a tenant living in their house. So there were six people living in what was a very modest house.

And I think, you know, there are many cases of that in Toronto where either families had people living with them. And then later houses, some of them served as rooming houses. And many of them were broken up into two apartment or three apartment buildings. Right. So what looked like a house in the city of Toronto has always tended to have more than one household in it. And now these people who are moving into these neighborhoods in many cases are buying those houses and that might have three apartments or might have three kitchens. And they're taking them out. Converting them into a single family home with one kitchen and one building for one family.

Exactly. So instead of three households with five or six or seven people, you end up with one household that might have three people or four, which doesn't sound dramatic. But when you talk about going from seven to four, from six to three, these are big declines, right? And multiplied by tens of thousands, they really add up. Let's talk about how government decisions have contributed to this. Are there policies we can point to in each city that have led to? to these peaks and valleys in population density? Yes.

So, you know, in broad strokes, Canada after the Second World War grew dramatically, right? Population grew dramatically. You know, we welcomed large numbers of immigrants, particularly to the big cities, you know, who transformed the country demographically. And what was happening at the same time was the growth of the suburbs, right? So Toronto and to a lesser degree of Vancouver, you know, grew outward. And that was not an accident. there was a sense among public sector planners.

There was a sense in the planning profession in the 1940s and 50s that crowding was bad, right? That the crowding that one saw in cities, particularly back in the 19th century, you know, created all sorts of negative effects. You know, with respect to public health, with respect to quality of life, you know, and you can go back into the history of Toronto and find, you know, the city's director of public health in the 1910s and 20s, you know, writing reports about these crowding conditions. in the slums of Toronto. And those places are much more crowded than their later equivalence would be. But that idea was sort of baked into how we do planning. That the right way to have a neighborhood

was to have a neighborhood that wasn't too crowded where each household, ideally, had a house of its own. And in Toronto, particularly, there was something baked into the politics from very early on, an idea that a city of houses was going to create good citizens. That having a nuclear family live in a house was the right way to create social cohesion

and to sort of reinforce social behavior and moral behavior. Because if you didn't have that, you had strange things happening like single women living alone. Right? So there's a kind of social conservatism that was baked into this that was reinforced by ideas about, largely about public health and related concepts. into the planning profession.

So crowding was bad. Cities discouraged crowding. They didn't want neighborhoods to be crowded. And the suburbs, which were seen generally as an ideal form of development, you know, were built around those ideas of having adequate, you know, not just public amenities, but having a lot of space and physical space and light and air for everybody. But that, of course, change where the view of cities and density was not seen as a bad thing. Tell me about that. That's right. critiques of this developed reasonably quickly initially that, you know, it was harder to get around

than people thought it was going to be, right? And that, you know, that the suburbs for a variety of reasons didn't provide all of the quality of life that people were looking for. And sort of the cultural sense that cities were overcrowded and that they were dirty and undesirable. All of that started to shift, you know, initially a little bit in the 1980s and then more decisively at the end of the 90s. And then you have across North America, but especially. in Canada, this movement of people with means choosing to be in the city and choosing to be in

the central city. Right. Okay. So these cities did start building big condo towers. How did they decide where to put them? Where they would face the least friction. Right. So this reemergent policy idea, you know, around the turn of the millennium, this emphasis, renewed

emphasis on the idea that living in cities made sense, both for residents and for government, you know, resulted in a desire to intensify the city. And that's the jargon that they used to build new housing inside the existing city. And where they went, where these new residents went, were effectively into places that had no people. Where the arrival of these new residents and the buildings they live in wasn't going to disturb anyone. I wasn't going to get anyone angry to call their local counselor and complain about it. I was going to say, is it because, you know, they put them places where, yes, other people in the neighborhoods, potentially we get upset, right, if there was a high density building coming into their neighborhood. Exactly. People don't like change. And people had, you know, experienced, you know, a 30-year period of, you know, being told that their neighborhood wasn't really going to change, right, in a physical sense.

And so that's how you get downtown Vancouver, you know, oversimplifying. But, you know, essentially the city of Vancouver leaned into the intensification that it is famous for. And you get the downtown peninsula that's full of all of these carefully planned. and very dense communities, and the rest of the city of Vancouver gets nothing, essentially. Interesting. And what happened in Toronto was analogous. Essentially, the former industrial lands around the edges of the downtown core of Toronto, King West, King East, and Liberty Village, as it's known today, are three of the most prominent. Those took a ton of the growth.

And the politics there were pretty straightforward, just that those places didn't really have any residents, and there weren't a lot of people who were going to be upset by the arrival of thousands of new neighbors and big new buildings. Why does it matter if there are differences in population density in these cities? Well, I think the first thing is that those places with low population density, right, those places that are relatively empty provide something of a potential answer to our housing crisis. Some of those buildings, those houses could house more people and certainly those blocks and those neighborhoods could take more people. We have been talking a lot in this country over the last decade about the need to build new housing, particularly in cities, and where we're going to put it and how we're going to accommodate it and make it work.

And I think these neighborhoods often have excess capacity in their infrastructure. Right. So we talk about government these days has been talking about housing enabling infrastructure. Yeah, tell me what this means, excess capacity in their infrastructure. So it means a lot of things, right? Infrastructure in this context is a very sort of wide-ranging term. And in part it means really nuts and bolts things like water and sewer capacity. And there's also what governments would call soft infrastructure.

So that means schools. Okay. It means parks, you know, recreation centers, libraries, all of these facilities that are, you know, maybe not life or death in the same way that water and sewers are, but are necessary. And so the argument in this piece that I heard from a variety of experts is that when you look at all of these different kinds of infrastructure, both water and sewer transportation as well, and then particularly all of the soft infrastructure like schools. These places have a lot of stuff that used to be supporting more people than they do today, so that in many cases you could

accommodate a lot of new people in these places without having to build everything from scratch. So the sense here is that you would save a lot of money then? I think it's reasonably clear that if we were more determined to actually actually, use what we have, the governments at large would be saving a lot of money. I think that's quite clear. The city of Ottawa commissioned a report a few years ago from a private consultancy that found that building new housing in the suburbs of Ottawa generates considerable costs on new infrastructure and that the taxes that new residents pay don't pay enough to pay for that new infrastructure,

whereas building inside the central city, it's the opposite. that taxes from new residents actually more than pay for the costs of whatever new stuff that needs to get built. So the big question then, Alex, is how does that work, right? Are we talking about taking down single-family homes and building apartment buildings? Sounds radical, doesn't it? It does sound radical. It sounds like it would upset a lot of people.

I think it would upset a lot of people. And, I mean, individuals tend to come back to the same kinds of concerns. A lot of them have to do with cars. a lot of them don't have to do with car traffic and with parking. It's a big one. And then there are aesthetic concerns, the sense that big buildings just don't fit and that they're going to cast shadows and that the people who live in those buildings will be able to see the backyards of houses nearby,

which are all concerns that I would argue are wildly overstated. And when you go to the meetings that cities host to discuss a new development or a new neighborhood plan, there's often ordinary citizens concerned about infrastructure. Can we support all of these new residents? Are the pipes going to work if we do that? And what's the answer to that? Can they?

I mean, the answer is yes. Okay. Right? I mean, when it comes to hard infrastructure, you know, cities do not allow new development to happen until they are satisfied that the toilet is going to flush and that the tap is going to turn on. And I think there's another angle to that,

which is that when we build infrastructure to house new people, we're not necessarily building from scratch, or rather we're repairing what we already have, expanding what we already have. And as the engineering professor Kerry Black from, the University of Calgary told me, in many cases, we need to repair the old infrastructure anyway. She likened it to the metaphor of a house.

You know, our old city, you know, the older part of a city is a house. So you own a house and you have to look after it. But what our governments have been doing by building new suburban growth is to build a new house. And then you've got to build that house. build that house and then you have to take care of that house, but the old one is still there and you still have to fix the pipes, you still have to fix the roof. So what you've done is added

more bills to pay and more things to take care of. And just because the new house doesn't need as much maintenance, that doesn't mean that the old one is going away. You haven't made those costs disappear. So, you know, I think it would be interesting to have a better sense of what we can do with the things that we already have. And, you know, to what degree, you know, adding new people can help pay for fixing the old house up. Yeah. Okay. So you're getting to, I guess my final question here, which is, you know, what do experts see as the plus size for increasing the density of our cities?

Well, I mean, the first one is fiscal. You know, there's reasonably good evidence that we could use what we have and that governments could save money in doing that. But there are also a number of social and environmental benefits that our governments are, at least on paper, committed to. Right? We, the planning profession as a whole, believes that density is good, that urbanism is good. For the quite straightforward reasons that when people are living closer together, that transportation is easier because people don't need to get as far. That people are more likely to use mass transit, which is much more efficient, cost less money, takes up less space, is far better for the environment than they are to drive their cars everywhere. And I think that spins over into a whole set of other public services. having robust public services, having nice libraries, having schools that are in good shape and are running well, having parks that are well cared for, all of these are supported by having people close together who are invested emotionally in these places and whose taxes help to support them and to make them better.

And, you know, being in the city can have its downside, but being around other people ultimately is a good thing. And I think remembering that and physically sharing space with our neighbors would be better for us in all sorts of ways. Alex, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Cheryl. That was Alex Bazikovic, the Globe's Architecture Critic. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Minica Raymond Wilms is the host of the decibel.

I produce The Decibel with Madeline White and Rachel Levy McLaughlin. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.