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

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

by outrun86 • 3 years ago

67 116 3 years ago

thestar.com

resolutebat• 3 years ago

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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Can we really be sure that economists weren't involved though ?

robswc6• 3 years ago

Idk, I find economists pretty scary with their big words.

motohagiography2• 3 years 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.

wolverine8767• 3 years 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.

jncfhnb2• 3 years ago

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

meowtimemania• 3 years ago

it'd be nice to have that kind of construction in a lot of US cities

ptero2• 3 years 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.

huytersd3• 3 years ago

I would use the term “swimming in immigration”.

wolverine8767• 3 years ago

Indeed. Also, I wonder how it's affordable to immigrants but not college graduates (from U. Toronto, no less).

Qwertious• 3 years ago

Presumably drowning in immigration though.

Do you have numbers that presumption is based on?

voisin3• 3 years ago

You can Google the specifics but Canada has the highest per capita immigration of the G20 according to our newspapers (I’ve never checked the underlying data), and the vast majority go to Toronto and Vancouver as our biggest and most multicultural cities. I don’t think OP’s presumption is misplaced.

3vidence2• 3 years ago

I have to go source my numbers but I think toronto is up to 50% 1st generation immigrants. That's a very high percentage for a small city.

Sorry on mobile best source right now is Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Toronto

s0rce• 3 years ago

Apparently the scale of visible construction doesn't correlate well with actual new units

https://twitter.com/evboyce/status/1678573678181728261

jncfhnb2• 3 years ago

I don’t know much here either way but I can’t help but wonder if they’re not missing some nuance on the meaning of new permits. I would like to see it as new units constructed.

adaml_623• 3 years 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-v2• 3 years 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.

criddell4• 3 years 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.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/mdUQf

robswc6• 3 years 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.

wolverine8767• 3 years 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.

sanswork10• 3 years 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

robswc6• 3 years ago

What do you like better about your quality of life?

Mainly, how the actions of others (good or bad) don't have as much of an effect on me. Believe it or not, one of the main things was people smoking weed. People would smoke it endlessly. I attempted pretty much every solution before moving. It smelled awful and got into my sinuses and would make me get an instant sore throat. Similar to cigarette smoke. I guess I'm allergic but basically if it got in my respiratory system, my sinuses would be effected and make it next to impossible to breath through my nose. This often would then lead to sinus infections and always a sore throat every night. I literally felt like I had a cold every other day.

I moved apartments but the same damn thing happened. Now, that could be bad luck or it could just be a new normal, I don't care to find out though.

Also now, with an actual area to do "DIY" stuff, I can run power tools and play guitar with amp without annoying anyone, lol.

Lol. Spoken like a suburbanite! :D Depending on where exactly you live, everything in Manhattan would be within 30-40 minutes.

My bad, by "stuff" I meant city stuff like shows, entertainment, fancy restaurant, etc. For day to day, I'm only a 5-10 minute drive. I've actually been saving a ton of time in tons of ways you don't really consider. 1-2 hours of groceries a week is better (at least according to my wife) than 20-30 minutes every few days.

Also, many cities see an increase in residents (but a decrease in office workers). People like to work from homes in the city.

That's good. Seems we all are getting what we want, thanks to WFH.

criddell4• 3 years ago

Everybody is different, but what I like has changed a lot over the past 35 years and I don’t expect that to stop. The city was the right place for me for part of my life, but right now it really isn’t. When I get old and need more access to healthcare, it might be again.

tmpX7dMeXU3• 3 years ago

Yes, different people have different desires when it comes to their living situation. Your comment does however come across as dismissive of living outside of a city. “Parks” for instance…from my experience, a city would not be where I’d first look for this.

wnolens3• 3 years ago

Where did you go to? Asking for a friend.

30-40 mins away from downtown isn't better to me (in fact, so much worse. But to each their own..). Maybe Uxbridge or something?

sanswork10• 3 years ago

I know a lot of people working in Markham have moved to Brooklin. Uxbridge is ok since it's easy to get to Stouffville for rail during peak times but I'd want to be closer to 404 if going north for out off hours transport. Like Keswick/Newmarket.

nunez• 3 years ago

Not in Toronto (I live in Houston), but we actually did the opposite.

Living 30 or 40m away from the city was great in theory, but sucked given that we did that trip every weekend (or sometimes during the weekdays). Also, the suburb we lived in was not walkable at all. The sprawl was insane and sidewalks were a rarity.

xwdv6• 3 years 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_Viscosity22• 3 years ago

This system worked great while the rates were declining. But now... less so.

voisin3• 3 years ago

In the US on 30 year fixed rates I understand you can refinance down without penalty. Can someone confirm?

granshaw• 3 years ago

The US is one of the few countries in the world that HAS a fixed mortgage longer than 5 years... we're the exception not the norm

xwdv6• 3 years ago

I think Japan has a 100 year.

ManuelKiessling2• 3 years ago

Germany: fixed mortgages are the norm (actually never even heard of another type), common runtimes are 10, 15, and 20 years, and no matter what the runtime is, as the borrower you can simply exit the contract without even giving a reason after 10 years; and that’s not something in the contract, it’s a federal law.

You obviously have to pay back the remaining debt, but this makes it super smooth to either pay off all debt in one go or refinance.

voisin3• 3 years ago

It doesn’t even seem to make sense from an economic standpoint, leaving the population essentially to gamble and having approx 20% of mortgages coming due each year, threatening the banking sector.

tmpX7dMeXU3• 3 years ago

I also live in a country without full-term fixed mortgages, however we also don’t have a secondary market for mortgages. AFAIK these two things are at the very least not entirely orthogonal, and to be blunt I don’t think anyone is looking to the US as a source of inspiration for that aspect of your mortgage system.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Surely this isn’t that big of a deal for most people? After 5 years you could just refinance the loan and reset it to 30 years again with lower payments.

fatih-erikli3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Way too expensive

fatih-erikli3• 3 years 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.

acc_297• 3 years 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

bluefirebrand4• 3 years ago

There are other cities that have what Toronto offers, or even more opportunities even, for cheaper.

Toronto isn't that great.

sanswork10• 3 years ago

No where in Canada has what Toronto offers. Toronto is pretty great, still probably makes sense to live elsewhere though for a lot of people.

criddell4• 3 years 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-v2• 3 years 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.

nemo44x4• 3 years 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.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

Make the Canadian populace less timid and less risk averse.

8jef• 3 years ago

Maybe those traits you give the Canadian populace are there for some reasons you have yet to learn about.

Anyway, no population in this world have ever changed any of their traits because some random douche said they should, quite the contrary.

wnolens3• 3 years ago

That would help the startup scene (at least in the form of less risky VC), but real estate I'm not sure. Canadians are mortgaged up to their eyeballs. That 5y due date is coming up for a many folks with 2-3% mortgages, and will add a $1000-1500/mo drain to their budgets. Canada is not a place where you can easily capture a 12k/y raise.

ethanbond• 3 years ago

Land value tax. Makes speculation infeasible and low-density development uneconomical and eliminates a lot of the incentives that drive restrictive zoning.

Also allows the public to capture the financial upside of public infrastructure projects (e.g. building a billion dollar subway today produces a huge amount of wealth for the landowners who happen to be near that project, in the form of increased rent — that can and should be captured by the public who paid for it).

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Let it burn I guess. If people move out and the city suffers, property values and rents will come back down.

graypegg3• 3 years 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.

wnolens3• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

graypegg3• 3 years ago

Ahhh yep! I had to deal with that while looking for another job a few months ago. I had it in mind that remote work meant I could work anywhere. Not here! You really are locked into Québec once Revenu Québec is handling your taxes, got dropped for being a Qc resident multiple times.

I’ve thought about Europe as well, I’ll need to reevaluate in a few years to see if that’s still a positive move for me. The French expats I work with they have their own complaints and reasons for crossing the Atlantic.

Gunnerhead2• 3 years ago

The first half convinced me I wrote this myself while sleep walking or something. In fact, I lived one block South of Bloor/Church on Charles St… Wow! However I moved to the US for the much higher salaries.

graypegg3• 3 years ago

Hah! Sorry I just saw this now, that's so funny, charles st E., small world! I actually loved that area, it's a shame I couldn't afford it anymore. I miss the late-night runs to Rabba on the other corner.

tamimio• 3 years 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.

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

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