8 ms·

Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto – economists say city will suffer

67 points by outrun86 3y ago

resolutebat 3y ago
https://archive.li/2023.10.07-221402/https://www.thestar.com/business/thousands-of-young-people-are-fleeing-toronto-economists-say-the-city-will-suffer-because-of/article_1bd938b4-246d-5b24-b0ac-20960d216f30.html https://archive.li/2023.10.07-221402/https://www.thestar.com... Original title, which does not imply that young people are fleeing from economists: "Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto — economists say the city will suffer because of it"
- dang 3y ago
  Ok, we've changed to that (minus a 'the') above. Thanks! Submitted title was "Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto, economists: city will suffer"
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Can we really be sure that economists weren't involved though ?
- robswc 3y ago
  Idk, I find economists pretty scary with their big words.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  Given they were policy problems, fleeing economists was pretty accurate. I left the city and am looking at leaving the province over the chaos of what are all government caused problems with no path to getting out of the way for people to solve them. Not a lot of Austrians or Chicago School economists working in policy these days.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Which policy problems and what was the result? It sounds like lots of people and wealth and investment is moving in, driving up prices.
    - motohagiography 3y ago
      The change is unmanaged. The question is whether they are starting businesses that provide some semblance of the quality of life and opportunity people from here had planned to make for themselves or not, and whether the government has just sold the locals out for foreign political donations. We don't solve inequality by importing more of it.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Toronto is interesting. The scale of construction is immense. Visibly unlike anything you see in the states. Presumably drowning in immigration though.
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  it'd be nice to have that kind of construction in a lot of US cities
  - ptero 3y ago
    Lerge US cities are already big enough. Doubling the housing density in many of them will not make living there any better. My 2c.
- huytersd 3y ago
  I would use the term “swimming in immigration”.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Indeed. Also, I wonder how it's affordable to immigrants but not college graduates (from U. Toronto, no less).
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      Because they’re willing to stuff many people in a single residence. Like 3 or 4 to a bedroom. I worked at a place with many migrants and one group had like 10 guys staying in the apartment and they more or less hot bunked the beds as they worked across different shifts.
    - sanswork 3y ago
      Canadian college graduates are going to feel less happy living with a bunch of other people to share the rent with than immigrants who frequently are ok with multigenerational households. I left Toronto for an even more expensive area(Bondi) and i see this here too with backpackers willing to live 6 people to a 3 bed apartment while locals feel priced out at the 1 bed or studio level.
adaml_623 3y ago
I think Doctorow was correct with Walkaway. I think young people will start building communities away from the big cities. And their lives will be so much better
- crooked-v 3y ago
  This is more like cities driving people out than it is people intentionally deciding to leave. Most of the affordability crisis here comes down to bad local zoning causing an extreme lack of housing.
  - criddell 3y ago
    I’m not sure I agree with you. Toronto is already pretty dense and there’s a crazy amount of construction. I have a hard time believing the problem is zoning.
    - sanswork 3y ago
      The core South of bloor is dense but outside of that with exception to a few spots along Yonge and the 401 Toronto is almost entirely single family housing.
      - jiayo 3y ago
        Exactly. There's lots of intense density (50+ storey residential buildings) in a small geographic area, but for the other 75% of the land area of Toronto, it has been illegal to build even a 4-plex; zoning allows single family housing only. If you look at neighborhoods in Montreal where there are blocks upon blocks of 4-6 storey low-rise, that type of construction simply doesn't exist in Toronto. Some good search terms for this topic are "the yellowbelt"[1] and "the missing middle"[2]. [1]: http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt [2]: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/
    - JambalayaJim 3y ago
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
https://archive.ph/mdUQf https://archive.ph/mdUQf
robswc 3y ago
Escaping the city is one of the best things I ever did. So much cheaper and the quality of life got so much better, for so many reasons. If I ever want to go do stuff, its only 30-40 minutes away too. WFH has been liberating for so many people.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What do you like better about your quality of life? Also, personally, how do you feel about the level of activity? I guess people who prefer city life are those who like the faster pace, dynamics of more and more variety of people, art, food, services, parks, festivals, etc. etc. Not that one preference is better than the other. > If I ever want to go do stuff, its only 30-40 minutes away too. Lol. Spoken like a suburbanite! :D Depending on where exactly you live, everything in Manhattan would be within 30-40 minutes. > WFH has been liberating for so many people. Also, many cities see an increase in residents (but a decrease in office workers). People like to work from homes in the city. But I don't mean to be disagreeing. Glad you found what you liked, and many have followed your path.
  - sanswork 3y ago
    Toronto is such that you can go from the financial district to farmland in less than 40 minutes. It's a bit annoying living outside the core when you are young since cabs are expensive and regional pubic transit unavailable late but outside of that everything else is pretty close to just as accessible you just have to plan more in advance where when i lived downtown I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event
    - robswc 3y ago
      >I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event Yea, I'd say this is probably the worst part about living outside of a city. Just not as many events to go to easily. At the end of the day though, the 30-40 minute drive isn't too bad when its something you really want to go to and plan for.
xwdv 3y ago
It’s insane that Canada doesn’t have true 30 year fixed mortgages. Every 5 years the rates will update and if the payment is too high for you there’s nothing you can do about it. How can you live?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  This system worked great while the rates were declining. But now... less so.
  - voisin 3y ago
    In the US on 30 year fixed rates I understand you can refinance down without penalty. Can someone confirm?
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Correct. You're essentially paying to originate a new mortgage (with the same originator as your previous or anyone else). Proceeds pay off previous mortgage, and no one can really tell you no. I'm not sure if any US mortgage can have prepayment penalties and be compliant? (for resale of the mortgage debt) Worst I've seen is "If you pay fully before X date, we'll charge you the closing fees we comp'd you originally."
      - nemo44x 3y ago
        No mortgages don’t have early payoff penalties. The bank doesn’t really care. They’ve probably sold your mortgage off to be packaged in a bond anyways. They’re mainly in the business of selling loans. There’s a big margin on that. They’re more than happy to payoff your old one and write a new one and collect those fees.
        ethbr1 3y ago
        Is there anything that prevents it though? If not, I assume someone would have written a 3/1 ARM with predatory early repayment provisions, so I'm guessing there's probably a conformant mortgage guideline (e.g. from *Mac) that prevents clauses like that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fatih-erikli 3y ago
Question is where do they go and will they find a better place than Toronto. I haven't been there, however it looks like a reasonable place to live. There is everything a young person would want. Everyone is fleeing everywhere then they don't find what they were looking for then they flee back. As a person living in the border of middle east, Toronto is a place that people would like to migrate.
- jfghi 3y ago
  Way too expensive
  - fatih-erikli 3y ago
    I think it's much more expensive to be a migrant. You do know how to live cheaper in your native country. It's difficult for a foreigner to learn those later.
    - Lalabadie 3y ago
      Natives know how to live cheaper in this country: move away from Toronto.
    - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
      Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
      - fatih-erikli 3y ago
        - Spending money for language course - You do not know the places for cheap prices - Being a target for tourist scams many other hidden costs I forgot to say
- acc_297 3y ago
  Just for context I live in Montreal about 6 hours east and have most of the same job prospects but just to quote the very first source I found: “ You would need around 8,129.0C$ in Toronto to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 6,400.0C$ in Montreal “ And I really do feel that as a recent graduate I pay for a 1 bedroom apt what some friends in Toronto pay to share a 5 bedroom house it’s a big investment for a young person just to live there
criddell 3y ago
What’s the solution? When a story about suburbs appears, the ideas promoted by the Strong Towns group are mentioned. Is there a similar set of ideas for fixing cities?
- crooked-v 3y ago
  A simple starting point is changing local zoning that implicitly or explicitly requires single-family homes in most places. Even just allowing rowhouses would make for significantly higher density in some places.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    There’s a place for that but one of the reasons many places are desirable is precisely because there isn’t so much density and that everyone owns their properties. It stops becoming nice when you change that too much. And there’s infrastructure. Places that weren’t designed for the density don’t have the water/sewer, electrical, etc capacity. Traffic too - now there’s more traffic making a place not as nice. So that needs to be sorted out too.
    - Firmwarrior 3y ago
      The answer is to sort all those problems out and let the space evolve, rather than turn whatever crop of assholes who coincidentally happened to buy houses there 30 years ago into a permanent landed gentry
      - nemo44x 3y ago
        Who pays for those problems to be resolved? It’s literally what property taxes fund. Why would property owners pay to solve a problem they don’t have to make their town a worse place to live?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  Make the Canadian populace less timid and less risk averse.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
graypegg 3y ago
I was living in downtown Toronto (one street south of Bloor St, corner with Church St) for 4 years, in that time my rent went from 1800, to 1900, to my landlord threatening to move her son into the unit just to evict me unless I accepted 2500, for the same unit. A small 1bdrm without a balcony, in a building from the 70s. I was making a pretty normal tech worker salary, and struggling on 2500/m. (90k CAD in early 2020) Looking around there were only similar or more expensive options. Many of them were "ready to move in". (Aka, vacant) The pandemic barely put a dent in those prices. I moved to Montréal, currently have a 2bdrm so I can have a home office, on the ground floor of a triplex with a little sunken balcony, in the gay village, for 1500/m. I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are. If you think of rent and cost of living as the "subscription" to a city, there's no way you're getting that sort of value out of it.
- wnolens 3y ago
  > I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are. For a lot of Canadians/Torontonians (everyone I know), family and friend bonds keep them there. Canada is not an easy country to hop around. The next metropolitan city over is an expensive flight, and heaven forbid one of those sides includes Pearson Airport.. Canadians are culturally less flighty than Americans in my experience. And the options to move to are quite limited (again, in comparison to the USA) Source: I've lived 2/3 my life in Canada, 1/3 in the US.
- betaby 3y ago
  While you are right, said 2bdrm were costing 1100-1200 per month in 2019 in Montreal. So prices are catching up in Montreal as well. Surely it's not THAT bad yet, but also keep in mind that typical after tax income in QC is probably 30% lower than in ON.
- mtriassi 3y ago
  As a fellow Montreal-er I agree with you in principle. Our city is beautifully diverse, and it's decently lively. Many of my peers agree that living in Toronto is infeasible, economically, and culturally. That said, I've found that living in Montreal is far from ideal. A big issue is that Montreal's salaries are, as other commenter have said, upwards of 30% lower here. With rising rent and real estate costs, people are living outside their means. More than that, though, companies outside of Montreal are loathe to hire Montrealers remotely as well. It's not just because of the decline of remote friendly workplaces, but also the language laws in Quebec. Any legal department worth their weight will look at Quebec's requirements for companies to serve Quebec employees in French, and promptly conclude hiring there isn't worth it. It really seems like no matter where you end up in Canada the cards are stacked against you. Vancouver is just as expensive as Toronto, and Montreal has all the aforementioned issues. At this point I'm considering running off to Europe, but I know that has its own host of issues as well. I might just be falling victim to analysis paralysis, but I definitely feel stuck.
tamimio 3y ago
Good! And hope to be followed by the housing market crash, it’s abysmal at this point! I don’t think there’s any advantage of living downtown Toronto than say a small city, all connections can be made online, same with business meetings and such, food is bad, overly crowded it took me a whole hour to pass through downtown during covid lockdown, plus all the safety concerns that some of my friends who live there mentioned that started to happen after the pandemic.

67 points by outrun86 3y ago

https://archive.li/2023.10.07-221402/https://www.thestar.com/business/thousands-of-young-people-are-fleeing-toronto-economists-say-the-city-will-suffer-because-of/article_1bd938b4-246d-5b24-b0ac-20960d216f30.html https://archive.li/2023.10.07-221402/https://www.thestar.com... Original title, which does not imply that young people are fleeing from economists: "Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto — economists say the city will suffer because of it"

dang 3y ago
Ok, we've changed to that (minus a 'the') above. Thanks! Submitted title was "Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto, economists: city will suffer"
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Can we really be sure that economists weren't involved though ?
robswc 3y ago
Idk, I find economists pretty scary with their big words.
motohagiography 3y ago
Given they were policy problems, fleeing economists was pretty accurate. I left the city and am looking at leaving the province over the chaos of what are all government caused problems with no path to getting out of the way for people to solve them. Not a lot of Austrians or Chicago School economists working in policy these days.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Which policy problems and what was the result? It sounds like lots of people and wealth and investment is moving in, driving up prices.
  - motohagiography 3y ago
    The change is unmanaged. The question is whether they are starting businesses that provide some semblance of the quality of life and opportunity people from here had planned to make for themselves or not, and whether the government has just sold the locals out for foreign political donations. We don't solve inequality by importing more of it.

jncfhnb 3y ago

Toronto is interesting. The scale of construction is immense. Visibly unlike anything you see in the states. Presumably drowning in immigration though.

meowtimemania 3y ago
it'd be nice to have that kind of construction in a lot of US cities
- ptero 3y ago
  Lerge US cities are already big enough. Doubling the housing density in many of them will not make living there any better. My 2c.
huytersd 3y ago
I would use the term “swimming in immigration”.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Indeed. Also, I wonder how it's affordable to immigrants but not college graduates (from U. Toronto, no less).
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    Because they’re willing to stuff many people in a single residence. Like 3 or 4 to a bedroom. I worked at a place with many migrants and one group had like 10 guys staying in the apartment and they more or less hot bunked the beds as they worked across different shifts.
  - sanswork 3y ago
    Canadian college graduates are going to feel less happy living with a bunch of other people to share the rent with than immigrants who frequently are ok with multigenerational households. I left Toronto for an even more expensive area(Bondi) and i see this here too with backpackers willing to live 6 people to a 3 bed apartment while locals feel priced out at the 1 bed or studio level.

adaml_623 3y ago

I think Doctorow was correct with Walkaway. I think young people will start building communities away from the big cities. And their lives will be so much better

crooked-v 3y ago
This is more like cities driving people out than it is people intentionally deciding to leave. Most of the affordability crisis here comes down to bad local zoning causing an extreme lack of housing.
- criddell 3y ago
  I’m not sure I agree with you. Toronto is already pretty dense and there’s a crazy amount of construction. I have a hard time believing the problem is zoning.
  - sanswork 3y ago
    The core South of bloor is dense but outside of that with exception to a few spots along Yonge and the 401 Toronto is almost entirely single family housing.
    - jiayo 3y ago
      Exactly. There's lots of intense density (50+ storey residential buildings) in a small geographic area, but for the other 75% of the land area of Toronto, it has been illegal to build even a 4-plex; zoning allows single family housing only. If you look at neighborhoods in Montreal where there are blocks upon blocks of 4-6 storey low-rise, that type of construction simply doesn't exist in Toronto. Some good search terms for this topic are "the yellowbelt"[1] and "the missing middle"[2]. [1]: http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt http://www.mapto.ca/maps/2017/3/4/the-yellow-belt [2]: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/
  - JambalayaJim 3y ago

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

https://archive.ph/mdUQf https://archive.ph/mdUQf

robswc 3y ago

Escaping the city is one of the best things I ever did. So much cheaper and the quality of life got so much better, for so many reasons. If I ever want to go do stuff, its only 30-40 minutes away too. WFH has been liberating for so many people.

wolverine876 3y ago
What do you like better about your quality of life? Also, personally, how do you feel about the level of activity? I guess people who prefer city life are those who like the faster pace, dynamics of more and more variety of people, art, food, services, parks, festivals, etc. etc. Not that one preference is better than the other. > If I ever want to go do stuff, its only 30-40 minutes away too. Lol. Spoken like a suburbanite! :D Depending on where exactly you live, everything in Manhattan would be within 30-40 minutes. > WFH has been liberating for so many people. Also, many cities see an increase in residents (but a decrease in office workers). People like to work from homes in the city. But I don't mean to be disagreeing. Glad you found what you liked, and many have followed your path.
- sanswork 3y ago
  Toronto is such that you can go from the financial district to farmland in less than 40 minutes. It's a bit annoying living outside the core when you are young since cabs are expensive and regional pubic transit unavailable late but outside of that everything else is pretty close to just as accessible you just have to plan more in advance where when i lived downtown I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event
  - robswc 3y ago
    >I could just be bored one afternoon and go find a cool event Yea, I'd say this is probably the worst part about living outside of a city. Just not as many events to go to easily. At the end of the day though, the 30-40 minute drive isn't too bad when its something you really want to go to and plan for.

xwdv 3y ago

It’s insane that Canada doesn’t have true 30 year fixed mortgages. Every 5 years the rates will update and if the payment is too high for you there’s nothing you can do about it. How can you live?

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
This system worked great while the rates were declining. But now... less so.
- voisin 3y ago
  In the US on 30 year fixed rates I understand you can refinance down without penalty. Can someone confirm?
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Correct. You're essentially paying to originate a new mortgage (with the same originator as your previous or anyone else). Proceeds pay off previous mortgage, and no one can really tell you no. I'm not sure if any US mortgage can have prepayment penalties and be compliant? (for resale of the mortgage debt) Worst I've seen is "If you pay fully before X date, we'll charge you the closing fees we comp'd you originally."
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      No mortgages don’t have early payoff penalties. The bank doesn’t really care. They’ve probably sold your mortgage off to be packaged in a bond anyways. They’re mainly in the business of selling loans. There’s a big margin on that. They’re more than happy to payoff your old one and write a new one and collect those fees.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Is there anything that prevents it though? If not, I assume someone would have written a 3/1 ARM with predatory early repayment provisions, so I'm guessing there's probably a conformant mortgage guideline (e.g. from *Mac) that prevents clauses like that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fatih-erikli 3y ago

Question is where do they go and will they find a better place than Toronto. I haven't been there, however it looks like a reasonable place to live. There is everything a young person would want. Everyone is fleeing everywhere then they don't find what they were looking for then they flee back. As a person living in the border of middle east, Toronto is a place that people would like to migrate.

jfghi 3y ago
Way too expensive
- fatih-erikli 3y ago
  I think it's much more expensive to be a migrant. You do know how to live cheaper in your native country. It's difficult for a foreigner to learn those later.
  - Lalabadie 3y ago
    Natives know how to live cheaper in this country: move away from Toronto.
  - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
    Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
    - fatih-erikli 3y ago
      - Spending money for language course - You do not know the places for cheap prices - Being a target for tourist scams many other hidden costs I forgot to say
acc_297 3y ago
Just for context I live in Montreal about 6 hours east and have most of the same job prospects but just to quote the very first source I found: “ You would need around 8,129.0C$ in Toronto to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 6,400.0C$ in Montreal “ And I really do feel that as a recent graduate I pay for a 1 bedroom apt what some friends in Toronto pay to share a 5 bedroom house it’s a big investment for a young person just to live there

criddell 3y ago

What’s the solution? When a story about suburbs appears, the ideas promoted by the Strong Towns group are mentioned. Is there a similar set of ideas for fixing cities?

crooked-v 3y ago
A simple starting point is changing local zoning that implicitly or explicitly requires single-family homes in most places. Even just allowing rowhouses would make for significantly higher density in some places.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  There’s a place for that but one of the reasons many places are desirable is precisely because there isn’t so much density and that everyone owns their properties. It stops becoming nice when you change that too much. And there’s infrastructure. Places that weren’t designed for the density don’t have the water/sewer, electrical, etc capacity. Traffic too - now there’s more traffic making a place not as nice. So that needs to be sorted out too.
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    The answer is to sort all those problems out and let the space evolve, rather than turn whatever crop of assholes who coincidentally happened to buy houses there 30 years ago into a permanent landed gentry
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      Who pays for those problems to be resolved? It’s literally what property taxes fund. Why would property owners pay to solve a problem they don’t have to make their town a worse place to live?
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Make the Canadian populace less timid and less risk averse.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

graypegg 3y ago

I was living in downtown Toronto (one street south of Bloor St, corner with Church St) for 4 years, in that time my rent went from 1800, to 1900, to my landlord threatening to move her son into the unit just to evict me unless I accepted 2500, for the same unit. A small 1bdrm without a balcony, in a building from the 70s. I was making a pretty normal tech worker salary, and struggling on 2500/m. (90k CAD in early 2020) Looking around there were only similar or more expensive options. Many of them were "ready to move in". (Aka, vacant) The pandemic barely put a dent in those prices. I moved to Montréal, currently have a 2bdrm so I can have a home office, on the ground floor of a triplex with a little sunken balcony, in the gay village, for 1500/m. I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are. If you think of rent and cost of living as the "subscription" to a city, there's no way you're getting that sort of value out of it.

wnolens 3y ago
> I don't even know why I'd live in Toronto, it's just become a bad deal now. Doesn't matter who you are. For a lot of Canadians/Torontonians (everyone I know), family and friend bonds keep them there. Canada is not an easy country to hop around. The next metropolitan city over is an expensive flight, and heaven forbid one of those sides includes Pearson Airport.. Canadians are culturally less flighty than Americans in my experience. And the options to move to are quite limited (again, in comparison to the USA) Source: I've lived 2/3 my life in Canada, 1/3 in the US.
betaby 3y ago
While you are right, said 2bdrm were costing 1100-1200 per month in 2019 in Montreal. So prices are catching up in Montreal as well. Surely it's not THAT bad yet, but also keep in mind that typical after tax income in QC is probably 30% lower than in ON.
mtriassi 3y ago
As a fellow Montreal-er I agree with you in principle. Our city is beautifully diverse, and it's decently lively. Many of my peers agree that living in Toronto is infeasible, economically, and culturally. That said, I've found that living in Montreal is far from ideal. A big issue is that Montreal's salaries are, as other commenter have said, upwards of 30% lower here. With rising rent and real estate costs, people are living outside their means. More than that, though, companies outside of Montreal are loathe to hire Montrealers remotely as well. It's not just because of the decline of remote friendly workplaces, but also the language laws in Quebec. Any legal department worth their weight will look at Quebec's requirements for companies to serve Quebec employees in French, and promptly conclude hiring there isn't worth it. It really seems like no matter where you end up in Canada the cards are stacked against you. Vancouver is just as expensive as Toronto, and Montreal has all the aforementioned issues. At this point I'm considering running off to Europe, but I know that has its own host of issues as well. I might just be falling victim to analysis paralysis, but I definitely feel stuck.

tamimio 3y ago

Good! And hope to be followed by the housing market crash, it’s abysmal at this point! I don’t think there’s any advantage of living downtown Toronto than say a small city, all connections can be made online, same with business meetings and such, food is bad, overly crowded it took me a whole hour to pass through downtown during covid lockdown, plus all the safety concerns that some of my friends who live there mentioned that started to happen after the pandemic.