Is Toronto more similar to Los Angeles than to Northeastern and Midwestern US cities?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by TorontoDrew

comparing Toronto to L.A is just absurd.

Oh it's been done.

[urbandreamer]

Originally Posted by Docere

That makes sense as they were largely built up around the same time. In Calgary, there isn't much of an inner city at all, you go from downtown to "Mississauga" pretty quickly.

Agreed. Soon after returning from my cross country trip, I found myself on Central Parkway and Bloor and thought damn, am I in Calgary again ha. The part that reminds me of London is the agricultural/heavy rail line dividing downtown, the old strips of commercial buildings destroyed by endless
parking spaces, the river, the 1980s office towers with dead street level activity, even the demographics ie beautiful WASPY girls in the malls. Obviously London has a bigger stock of Victorian homes, but again on Wonderland Road etc you get Calgary vibes. Driving north to Arva and beyond, I keep thinking shouldn't Airdrie be coming up soon.

[Docere]

Agree that the "satellite cores" typology doesn't describe Toronto at all.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Loco101

I found that Calgary feels quite a bit like Mississauga.

Most of Ottawa reminds me of Mississauga. Especially outside the downtown core. It's just never-ending suburban subdivisions. But that's just how most Canadian suburbs are built these days.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by TorontoDrew

What the Hell? Lol comparing Toronto to L.A is just absurd. L.A has a lack luster downtown core tjat pretty much is a dead zone weeknights and weekends. It's surrounded by satellite cores that offer a more urban experience but most people need cars to get to them. No Canadian city resembles L.A in any aspect.

Agreed. I don't think anybody who has been to both cities would make this comparison. Toronto is denser, more downtown focused and substantially less car dependent than LA. And because of LA's distributed urban centres, going anywhere to do anything takes 2 hrs. Toronto might be heading that direction, but it's not there yet. Heck, LA is so terrible on sprawl, the rich move around by helicopter routinely. You don't really see that in Toronto.

[yaletown_fella]

Originally Posted by TorontoDrew

What the Hell? Lol comparing Toronto to L.A is just absurd. L.A has a lack luster downtown core tjat pretty much is a dead zone weeknights and weekends. It's surrounded by satellite cores that offer a more urban experience but most people need cars to get to them. No Canadian city resembles L.A in any aspect.

L.A, Vancouver, and Toronto are all multi nodular but LA has more medium density nodes while Toronto and Vancouver has multiple high rise nodes that tend to spring up around transit hubs.

The three metros are also known for ethno-burbs (which I'd call far from lack luster and dead) but Van/Tor are known for more extensive transit systems.

[yaletown_fella]

Originally Posted by Docere

Agree that the "satellite cores" typology doesn't describe Toronto at all.

It depends on what you consider a core. The majority of Canadian high rise nodes built in built in the past 15 years are centred around shopping malls and business parks. Think of the recent skyline clusters around Consumers Road and Sheppard, Fairview mall, MCC, Brentwood etc. This phenomenon almost non-existant in the US. Even places like Long Island city have more established urban fabric before they started getting a lot of recent high rise activity.

[Zeej]

I was in Milwaukee in October and it struck me that there were areas that very much like Toronto.

It's as if Toronto had been frozen in time in 1967. It was kind of fascinating.

[MolsonExport]

I think Toronto's doppelganger is Jacksonville.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by savevp

Is Ontario more similar to Belize City or the Sultanate of Oman?

This is asinine. But yes, Toronto is far more similar to London than LA, New York, or Gaylick Gulch Mississippi.

Definitely more similar to the Sultanate of Oman, with Gaylick Gulch Mississippi coming in second place. This is so obvious it does not need repeating.

[thewave46]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

What's with SSP's unending obsession with matching our cities to an American equivalent? Funny how it never seems to work in reverse - there's never a "is Des Moines the Toronto of Iowa?" thread.

The usual gist of it is that there is never really a singular equivalent because each city in Canada tends to fulfill more roles within the country. Toronto is Canada's New York + Los Angeles + Chicago; just like Vancouver is our Los Angeles + San Francisco + Seattle, etc.

Just as far as urban development goes, Toronto historically most closely mirrors the second-wave inland cities like Pittsburgh, and the other nearby Great Lakes cities like Detroit and Cleveland - but took a very different direction post-war (something more in line with LA, sure, but also more distinctly Canadian).

Pretty much this.

I've compared the evolution of the skylines of Toronto and Los Angeles. Aside from that? Any similarity is a product of a similar developmental time frame and perhaps some coincidental overlap in other facets.

[ScreamingViking]

These threads are silly.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

I think Toronto's doppelganger is Jacksonville.

Jacksonville's skyline is really incredible.

[Docere]

I think this is the first use of the Toronto is Los Angeles of the north analogy (written by pro-sprawl hack Wendell Cox):

http://demographia.com/rac-toronto.pdf

[niwell]

If one wants to reach they can make some interesting parallels between the historic growth of LA and Toronto - namely that they were unique in having a much higher proportion of owner-occupied housing prior to the 1930s compared to peer cities. In Toronto's case this usually meant the owner lived in the house but also rented out the upper floor(s) to lodgers, at least in more working class areas (large swaths of the West/East-end). LA was also always more spread out vs Toronto's vernacular of very tightly packed homes along transit routes that only extended once the break-even point was reached - no loss-leader streetcar lines here.

But really as one would experience things on the ground there isn't a whole lot of similarity. Post-war growth is broadly similar in that Toronto diverged from the typical Eastern pattern of things. Still, growth here from the 50s to 80s featured a lot more integrated highrise apartment communities and mixed-income spaces.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by TorontoDrew

L.A has a lack luster downtown core tjat pretty much is a dead zone weeknights and weekends.

Outdated stereotype.


https://www.gq.com/story/downtown-lo...rants-food-art

[giallo]

Downtown LA is a treasure trove of amazing architecture, and I still think it has the most potential of any downtown in North America, but it's a pretty shitty place to be in after work hours. Even during its revival pre-COVID, it was super sketchy. I stayed at 5th and Hill (right across from Pershing Square) in 2016 for close to a week, and I was really let down by how bad it was. I'd head to Ralph's at 8pm to get some groceries, and most of the people on the street were super out of it, and every storefront (the was still open) had armed guards/security out front. No one was hanging out or walking around. It was dead except for all of the people coming up from San Pedro St (Skid Row).

One night coming back from a dive bar in east downtown, my friend dropped me of at Pershing Square just in time to see a guy get sucker-punched, and then jumped, and all of his shit taken.

It's not a pleasant downtown to be in after work hours.

Still, it's totally worth a visit during the day. It's a very photogenic downtown.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by giallo

Downtown LA is a treasure trove of amazing architecture, and I still think it has the most potential of any downtown in North America, but it's a pretty shitty place to be in after work hours. Even during its revival pre-COVID, it was super sketchy. I stayed at 5th and Hill (right across from Pershing Square) in 2016 for close to a week, and I was really let down by how bad it was. I'd head to Ralph's at 8pm to get some groceries, and most of the people on the street were super out of it, and every storefront (the was still open) had armed guards/security out front. No one was hanging out or walking around. It was dead except for all of the people coming up from San Pedro St (Skid Row).

One night coming back from a dive bar in east downtown, my friend dropped me of at Pershing Square just in time to see a guy get sucker-punched, and then jumped, and all of his shit taken.

It's not a pleasant downtown to be in after work hours.

Still, it's totally worth a visit during the day. It's a very photogenic downtown.

I haven't been to too many developing world megacities, but I think a lot of them in Latin America and Africa are kind of organized like LA, where the downtown is vibrant and architecturally very interesting, but also very gritty, pretty small in physical size, and it's clear that people with money do all their stuff in a different part of town.

[MonkeyRonin]

These are all true, but it's also noteworthy that DTLA's residential population has more than doubled in the past 15 years - from 35,000 in 2008 to 85,000 in 2019; its transit system (centred on downtown) has grown to be the second most-used in the US (though the city is still obviously not set up around transit the way that the older cities are), and newer, higher-end businesses have opened in recent years.

It looks like a fairly vibrant area on a weekend night at least - not a dead 9-5 downtown:

• Video Link

[niwell]

Visually at least the historic parts of DTLA and the Fashion District (not Bunker Hill) remind me far more of the Johannesburg CBD than elsewhere in North America. Lots of historic buildings interspersed with modernism, vibrant streetscapes, random markets, vaguely rundown.

Random example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/i6cqinXLLx71qSPB9?g_st=ic