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Originally Posted by hipster duck
Yeah, that's how I see it too.
Despite Toronto's cost, I'd still live here over any other city in Ontario. It's not just the usual things like friends, family and a job. Those are the main reasons keeping me here, but if those things were out of province, and I had to live in Ontario as part of the rules of some funny contest, I'd still choose Toronto because I value the things that Toronto offers more than I value things like a large house and a yard.
The only other big draw in the suburbs is ethnic and family ties. But immigrants who move half way across the world are often willing to give up some of that, especially among the younger cohorts.
Beyond the usual personal considerations, Toronto is big enough that it has a dozen or more examples of everything I like. If I lived in a mid-sized town, it might have one walkable neighbourhood, one good Chinese restaurant, one bar where the bartender knows how to make a good cocktail, etc. After a while, I'd like some variety. In some ways, my love of big cities is precisely the joy of getting out of your house and exploring new things.
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The thing is, a lot of "Torontonians" don't have this experience. I would argue that most of the GTA doesn't have this experience. A good chunk of the GTA and even a lot of the 416 is very suburban. So for many of these people a move to cities like London is hardly a huge change. There's no huge difference between the food court options at Square One in Mississauga and Masonville Mall in London. From that perspective I agree with those who say these cities can draw people from the GTA.
However, whenever you hear politicians talk or even forumers here, the idea isn't to draw some immigrant Chinese family away from Markham. It's to try and get some WASP Yuppie Millennial professional couple to give up their Leslieville semi and take up in London's Old North. That ain't happening. They legitimately value their yuppie Toronto lifestyle with transit, cheap ethnic food and the quick walk to the yoga studio and dog groomer. Far easier to actually convince that immigrant family to move.
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Originally Posted by someone123
I don't know what to make of these discussions sometimes. One error I see is when people look at lower "tier" Ontario cities and assume that level of vibrancy is just what you get at 500,000 or 800,000 inhabitants. But that's clearly not true; there are some very vibrant Hamilton-sized European cities. Ontario is a bit like the US as far as having heavily populated industrial towns that are kind of dull.
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What I find odd is the amount of people who take about mid-sized cities in Canada as some kind of idyllic small town. London is becoming a fucking sprawling mess with bad traffic at peak. Halifax isn't that much better. Heck, I remember a transit consultation a decade ago where an attendee was whining that Ottawa was not Toronto and didn't need a multi-billion dollar transit system. A huge part of the problem with our conversations about cities in Canada is that Canadians think anything smaller that TMV isn't really that big. All while the mid-sized cities are turn out to be among the worst for sprawl. Look at what Ottawa is becoming, while having about the same population as Mississauga. Predictably, there's people who now leave home at 6am to beat the traffic. But sure, Ottawa is not like Toronto....
Ontario's mid sized towns are not always a notable improvement on Toronto. If you and your spouse have jobs where you don't have to commute regularly or have short commutes, the GTA is actually pretty damn fantastic. Meanwhile, that mid sized Ontario city means worse job opportunities, less contact with extended family, usually more driving and often less of all the little things (like hole in the wall eateries) that make Toronto great....
Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I don't know much about London but I still follow Halifax stuff, and I find sometimes the way people talk about options or limitations there is out of whack with the reality on the ground. To put things in perspective a food discussion there might be "what are your top 5 hot pot spots" or "where are some places I can get xiao long bao". The options thin out more noticeably at the higher end, in places where you might spend hundreds of dollars on a meal. Most Torontonians are not regular patrons of those places, but the top 5% of earners in Toronto still make up a decent-sized market while in Halifax they do not.
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The viability threshold is not always based on income/wealth. Sometimes it's just the mix of people. For a lot of ethnic restaurants, for example, viability (especially at launch) is having enough consumers of the same ethnicity (or sufficiently adjacent) to support your cuisine. A great example for me is Indo-Chinese (often called Hakka) food, one of my personal favourites. Toronto has one or several Hakka restaurants in virtually every suburb. And they do well. Ottawa has a million people. Not one Hakka restaurant. What would surprise most people is that the main customers for these restaurants are South Asians. Not East Asians. And Toronto has some of the best Hakka restaurants in North America.
Even outside of dining, there's a lot of options across activities that bigger cities enable based on simply having the base of support necessary, which would not exist in smaller centres.It will not be possible to enable most of these options in smaller centres. What we should be aiming for though is making these smaller centres more connected to big centres so that accessing these activities is possible from the smaller centres. It should be possible to live in London and Kingston and in a reasonable amount of time and for reasonable cost get to Toronto and spend and evening or for a full day out attending to whatever you couldn't get/do at home.
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