Kerrisdale\u2019s stretch of the Arbutus corridor can be bustling with cyclists and pedestrians. But go deeper into the Vancouver neighbourhood, and some blocks are increasingly empty of residents.Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n
This is not an anomaly. Over the past half-century, both the Vancouver and Toronto regions have doubled in population. <\/p>\n
But a Globe and Mail analysis of census data shows that within these growing metropolises, there are shrinking cities: established areas where populations have fallen as much as 40 per cent. <\/p>\n
This trend of local population declines has been largely overlooked, even as Canadian governments work to create more homes and build the infrastructure \u2013 pipes, roads, community facilities \u2013 to serve the people who will occupy them. <\/p>\n
In last year\u2019s federal budget, the government promised $50-billion toward such projects. <\/p>\n
In March, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged<\/a> $4.4-billion to \u201chousing-related infrastructure\u201d in Ontario, and in June, the government pledged<\/a> $1.6-billion over 10 years for such projects in British Columbia. <\/p>\n But experts suggest some of this spending could be put to better use, or avoided entirely. <\/p>\n That is because governments rarely ask a fundamental question: Where do we have unused capacity? Many urban neighbourhoods have water systems, roads, parks and schools that were built for larger populations than today\u2019s. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Kerrisdale does not have the residential high-rises that dot the skylines of Burnaby or downtown Vancouver.Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n One thing Kerrisdale does have in common with downtown is a clock designed by Ray Saunders, creator of the more famous Gastown Steam Clock.Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n As new houses have been built across the Lower Mainland and the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, as apartment towers have swelled the populations of formerly desolate industrial districts, each city has maintained an archipelago of neighbourhoods where neighbours have become increasingly scarce. <\/p>\n The Globe compared figures from the 1971 and 2021 censuses for both Toronto and Vancouver, examining the population of \u201cdissemination areas\u201d \u2013 each one an area of a few blocks, typically home to about 500 people. <\/p>\n In the Vancouver region, 21 per cent of those areas declined in population over those 50 years, losing 76,424 people in total. Many other areas failed to keep up with the quick growth of the region. <\/p>\n In the Toronto region, the pattern is much more stark: Almost three-quarters of those established areas had declined by 2021, shedding a total of 540,789 people. <\/p>\n This pattern is hard to discern on the streetscape; these prosperous cities generally do not have crumbling, empty buildings or vacant lots. But the declines are subtly reflected in empty public-school classrooms, a lack of foot traffic and the closing of neighbourhood retailers. <\/p>\n The history of growth and shrinkage is shaped by a combination of demographic changes and specific urban planning policies. But nothing is set in stone: Experts say these places could yet absorb more residents, often at a lower cost than building entirely new communities. <\/p>\n Shifting demographics <\/p>\n Several demographic trends contribute to the pattern of the shrinking city. Canadians today are living longer, having fewer children and occupying more square footage than previous generations. <\/p>\n Roland Haebler is a case in point. A general contractor, he was raised on the west side of Vancouver. He and his wife raised their two sons in a 3,400-square-foot house in Kerrisdale; they remain there as empty nesters, though their son\u2019s dog Hershy is often around the house. \u201cWe live in the same space as when we had two boys who walked to school,\u201d said Mr. Haebler, 65. Their pandemic project was to convert their coach house into a music studio. \u201cAnd now we have a spare bedroom, and I\u2019ve moved my study from the basement into one of the other bedrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n Prof. Maxwell Hartt, a geographer at Queen\u2019s University who studies population decline, says that this story is quite typical. In the shrinking zones of Toronto and Vancouver, \u201cthere aren\u2019t a lot of vacant homes,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is fewer people in the same amount of places.\u201d<\/p>\n Canadians are having fewer children. Young parents often choose to move from cities to suburbs. And seniors \u2013 whose lifespan has increased from an average of about 75 to 82 in the past four decades \u2013 are largely remaining in place, by choice or by necessity.<\/p>\n The COVID-19 pandemic prompted thousands of people to migrate out of large cities, particularly Toronto and its adjacent communities. However, that pattern was outweighed until 2025 by high levels of international migration; both the Toronto and Vancouver metro areas have continued to grow in each year of the past decade except for last year. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are, I\u2019m sure, many retired people who would be happy to move down,\u201d Dr. Hartt said, \u201cbut there isn\u2019t a condo or an apartment nearby to move into in their community.\u201d<\/p>\n Roland Haebler and his wife are empty nesters in Kerrisdale. The dog belongs to one of their sons. In Vancouver, it’s more common now for couples that share a household to have no children at home.<\/p>\n Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Mr. Haebler was surprised to learn that most blocks in his neighbourhood have lost people. Some of his neighbours have divided up their lots to make room for new apartments, often for their children. \u201cEverybody\u2019s got a laneway suite now, and everybody\u2019s got a basement suite,\u201d he remarked. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s multiple generations living in homes where there was only one before.\u201d <\/p>\n Such small-scale additions to the neighbourhood, which planners describe as \u201cgentle density,\u201d don\u2019t trouble Mr. Haebler. But these building projects are outnumbered by changes in the other direction. Empty nesters are more numerous; families are often smaller; and buildings are being converted from rooming houses or apartments into single-family homes.<\/p>\n To reverse the current trend in Kerrisdale would require big, visible change, with mid-rise or even tall buildings permitted across a wider area. <\/p>\n \u201cIn Burnaby, there are high-rises going up everywhere,\u201d Mr. Haebler mused. If such large buildings were permitted in Kerrisdale, \u201cI don\u2019t think I would like that very much.\u201d <\/p>\n Mr. Haebler has no interest in selling his house to a developer, and would not support larger buildings on his block.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n On Kerrisdale’s leafy streets, some densification is happening, but it is hard to spot. Many empty nesters have subdivided their properties for rental housing.Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Such attitudes are common. And while new buildings generate political friction, nobody really notices when existing buildings shed some of their occupants.<\/p>\n The latter trend is common enough in Vancouver, but far more pronounced in Toronto. A large zone of the old City of Toronto, running along Bathurst Street westward to High Park and north to Eglinton Avenue, has seen declines of up to 40 per cent.<\/p>\n Through the 19th century, houses here were home to larger families, and it was common for homeowners to take in tenants. The crowding increased as immigrants arrived in large numbers following the Second World War: Among them were Italians, Portuguese, Poles and Ukrainians, who each settled the west side of the city and then in many cases became homeowners, often raising large families. <\/p>\n As these latter groups became wealthier and more established, they largely moved to the new suburbs of Metro Toronto and beyond. The side streets near the core continued to hold two- and three-storey houses, but those houses gradually became emptier.<\/p>\n The two solitudes of Toronto in 1959: Downtown, the city was growing fast with new immigration and a baby boom, and in North York, the suburbs of Don Mills were taking shape.<\/p>\n John Boyd\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n To the sprawl and back <\/p>\n On one side of the road, farm fields. On the other side, a concrete apartment tower rising 15 storeys from the new neighbourhood of North York. <\/p>\n This was the northern border of Metropolitan Toronto in the late 1960s, when the rapid growth of the city ran into strict boundaries. <\/p>\n The Metropolitan Toronto Planning Board enforced a vision of \u201curban contiguity,\u201d as the historian Richard White puts it<\/a>. Within a defined area, \u201cdevelopment would be welcomed, but outside that designated urban area, development would be tightly controlled.\u201d<\/p>\n This pattern continued, imperfectly, from 1954 until the early 1970s, when the economic and political pressure for suburbanization won out. The regions around Toronto grew explosively through the 1980s and 90s, largely in the form of houses, while the City of Toronto stagnated.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n The 1970s, when Toronto erected the CN Tower, was a turning point in the city’s attitude to sprawl. From that point on, suburban growth boomed.John McNeill\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n The last quarter-century has seen another reversal, pushing back against sprawl. In the 1990s, the Toronto region saw increasing gridlock as cities experienced fiscal pressure; at the same time, environmentalists gained popular support to protect green space, especially on the Oak Ridges Moraine north of Toronto. In response, a Liberal government in 2006 introduced the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which sought to reverse sprawl by focusing new housing within urbanized areas. Toronto and its neighbouring municipalities were forced to accept more density. <\/p>\n Likewise, Metro Vancouver\u2019s Urban Containment Boundary has directed almost all new growth inward since 1979, and the Regional Growth Strategy<\/a>, implemented in 1996, reflected a similar attitude. <\/p>\n This \u201cintensification\u201d policy was driven in part by the understanding that the older city neighbourhoods had capacity to hold more people, said Victor Doyle, a planner who spent two decades with Ontario\u2019s Ministry of Municipal Affairs. <\/p>\n \u201cIn house neighbourhoods, the population had declined dramatically from seven people in a house to two or three,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the housing stock itself could accommodate lots of new people.\u201d <\/p>\n And with the addition of new buildings, he added, \u201cthese zones could accommodate a lot more.\u201d They had \u201csoft infrastructure\u201d such as parks and schools, and they were close to downtown jobs, particularly in Toronto. <\/p>\n But in each case, there was a catch. New residents moved into existing cities \u2013 but regional and provincial planning generally didn\u2019t dictate where they should go within those cities. <\/p>\n So, as in many other North American cities, a grand bargain was struck: New housing was pushed into the places where few people lived, principally industrial districts near downtown, while house neighbourhoods remained unchanged. In Toronto, the King-Spadina and Liberty Village districts rapidly transformed from industrial uses to high-density neighbourhoods with tens of thousands of residents. <\/p>\n \u201cWe protected certain neighbourhoods, so a lot of the geography of the city was insulated from change,\u201d said Josh White, the City of Vancouver\u2019s chief planner. \u201cThose weren\u2019t just geographic realities; those were geographic realities combined with political choices that we made.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Burnaby has been more accepting of tall residential buildings than other parts of Greater Vancouver. Here, crews demolished some three-storey walkups two years ago, to make room for high-rises.Darryl Dyck\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n This has generated an uneven pattern of growth sometimes described as \u201ctall and sprawl.\u201d In Vancouver, that has meant high-rise residential buildings within the city\u2019s downtown peninsula, and clusters in the suburban downtowns of Surrey and Burnaby. It has also meant mid-rise buildings focused on particular major streets, but not on the streets next to them. <\/p>\n As an example, Mr. White cited the Cambie Corridor Plan that added new housing when the Canada Line transit route was completed in 2009. <\/p>\n Development \u201cis heavily concentrated physically on Cambie Street, to the exclusion of a lot of density even blocks away,\u201d Mr. White explained. \u201cThat\u2019s been the typical pattern of growth in Vancouver for the last couple generations. And that\u2019s one of the patterns we\u2019re trying to shift now.\u201d <\/p>\n The city\u2019s new Official Development Plan, which took effect in March, opened up the potential for new middle-density housing across a much larger swath of the city, organized into 17 new \u201cvillages.\u201d The goal was to permit townhouses and small apartment buildings in areas that have seen little construction for decades, and to even out the city\u2019s peaks and valleys in population.<\/p>\n However, Vancouver City Council decisively rejected the villages idea in July. Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung described the public response as \u201ca landslide of opposition.\u201d<\/p>\n Reversing the patterns of the past 50 years will be difficult, and there are serious political headwinds. Questions around new housing \u2013 how much should be added, where and in what form \u2013 have dominated Vancouver politics for a generation. Housing has not dominated Toronto\u2019s politics to the same degree, but change remains unpopular. <\/p>\n Still, intensification could pay fiscal and social benefits. <\/p>\n The environs of Christie subway station and Bickford Park are among the shrinking districts of Toronto, The Globe\u2019s analysis found.<\/p>\n Laura Proctor\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Empty schools, empty pipes <\/p>\n In central Toronto, Darlene Varaleau remembers when the schoolyard at Bickford Park High School was full of action. <\/p>\n \u201cThis place used to be busy,\u201d recalled Ms. Varaleau, gesturing at the high school and community centre across the street from her house near Bloor and Christie Streets. \u201cAll the children used to go to after-school programs and have swimming lessons here. And then the kids grew up, and most of them left.\u201d<\/p>\n The high school sat in the public park of the same name. Now called Bickford Centre, the building opened in 1965 to serve a growing population of immigrants and local baby boomers alongside a city-run public facility called Bob Abate Community Recreation Centre. <\/p>\n It rises five storeys high and includes a gym, swimming pool and auditorium. But the school that once served 1,000 students is largely quiet. In the last academic year, according to a Toronto District School Board spokesperson, Bickford Centre housed four small specialty high schools with a total of 77 students, while 386 adult students attended short-term programs. <\/p>\n At any given time, this facility is mostly empty. Ms. Varaleau, 74, is advocating for new community programs to make use of the building. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Darlene Varaleau lives near the mostly empty Bickford Centre, which she would like to see repurposed for new community programs.Laura Proctor\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n The school board offers one visible example of underused infrastructure in our big cities. For two decades, TDSB and Ontario\u2019s Ministry of Education have argued over funding of its facilities. <\/p>\n This tension is connected to the city\u2019s pattern of growth and shrinkage. In a few places, TDSB schools are oversubscribed. But the board has 301,366 classroom spaces and only 234,514 students, leaving nearly 69,000 empty seats. These are largely located in areas whose population has been declining for years.<\/p>\n Ms. Varaleau\u2019s block, steps from the Christie subway station, had about 750 people in 1971. As of 2021, it had roughly 500, and that number is shrinking. <\/p>\n \u201cThere was a migration out of this area,\u201d Ms. Varaleau explained. \u201cYou know, these were big families. There were a lot of people in these houses. And now, this is a desirable place to live, so you\u2019ve got two people where there were five or more.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Indeed, the average household size across Canada has shrunk<\/a> significantly over the past two generations, from 3.5 in 1971 to 2.4 in 2021. In Toronto, and particularly in older districts such as Ms. Varaleau\u2019s, the change is still more pronounced. <\/p>\n Children in Toronto today are heavily concentrated in a few places \u2013 largely the zones where many new homes have been built in condominium apartments. When young couples in those areas have children, many of them will stay in place or else move to the suburbs in search of more space. Houses in the central city, which remain more expensive, can be financially out of reach. <\/p>\n A similar phenomenon is occurring in Vancouver. The downtown Olympic Village neighbourhood, which has many young families, has seen calls for a new school for a decade. A new elementary school is now slated to open<\/a> in 2029. At the same time, the Vancouver School Board\u2019s buildings in many other downtown areas are below capacity<\/a>. Meanwhile, suburban boards are booming. Last year, the Surrey Board of Education approved a $5.7-billion, five-year capital plan including 27 new schools. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n The school system in Surrey, B.C., has been growing in recent years, but not so in other neighbourhoods.Darryl Dyck\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n In both cities, particularly in Toronto, schools are maintaining empty space while new school buildings are being constructed from scratch.<\/p>\n New suburban development generally requires all-new infrastructure. And the cost of building it, in places where homes are spread out, is high. <\/p>\n A 2021 study<\/a> by Hemson Consulting for the City of Ottawa found that when low-density suburban houses are built, they create a deficit: Their property taxes do not cover the cost of the public infrastructure such as water mains, each home leaving the city worse off by $465 a year. Conversely, infill growth generated a surplus of $606 per home \u2013 property taxes cover all the costs of infrastructure, and then some. <\/p>\n That holds true even in places where water infrastructure is aging and under strain, said Kerry Black, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Calgary. <\/p>\n Calgary has coped with two water-main failures \u2013 on the same pipe, the 50-year-old Bearspaw South Feeder Main \u2013 in the past two years. But Dr. Black said such failures are about aging infrastructure, not heavy use. \u201cIn many cases we\u2019re not using these systems to their full capacity,\u201d she said. \u201cBut they are at their end of life and will need major repairs anyway.\u201d <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Two years ago, Calgary began scrambling to fix the Bearspaw South Feeder Main when its rupture cut off many in the city from drinking water.Jeff McIntosh\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n Expanding cities out into new territory does not reduce that cost, she says; it simply adds new infrastructure that is costly and that will also need to be maintained and repaired. <\/p>\n \u201cImagine it in the context of a house,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve got an old house, and now I\u2019m going to buy a new one because it seems like it needs less maintenance.\u201d But government, in this metaphor, keeps the old place and takes care of both. <\/p>\n The better solution, she suggested, is \u201cto fix the existing house, to get the value for our money that we put into it at the outset.\u201d Repairs or replacements to existing water infrastructure, she added, can also add more capacity in any places where it is needed.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Well-maintained water infrastructure is critical to any neighbourhood, new or old, but fixing the latter can be considerably cheaper.Keito Newman\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n Constructing all sorts of infrastructure \u201cis far less expensive\u201d in urban areas than it is in newly built neighbourhoods, said Shoshanna Saxe, associate professor of civil and mineral engineering at the University of Toronto. <\/p>\n Dr. Saxe argued that intensification could focus on neighbourhoods built after 1950. Many of these have similar patterns of population decline to those in older neighbourhoods. <\/p>\n And generally, Dr. Saxe said, these postwar suburbs have \u201coverbuilt\u201d networks of roads and water infrastructure. \u201cIt\u2019s not just that there used to be more people there,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s that we have capacity within our networks to add more people because of things like fire requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n Water supply systems are designed to deliver pressure to meet peak demand \u2013 which is determined by requirements for fire trucks pumping water to fight a fire, typically ten times the pressure required for normal demand. \u201cIn almost all suburban neighbourhoods you have more water capacity than you need to serve the people there,\u201d Dr. Saxe explains. \u201cYou could add lots of people before you needed more water pipes.\u201d <\/p>\n Their roads, meanwhile, \u201care hugely overbuilt\u201d relative to the populations they support, Dr. Saxe said. These road networks can accommodate more people if certain streets were consolidated and if more road space was shifted from driving to mass transit, such as bus lanes and cycling. <\/p>\n In short, use what you have. <\/p>\n No more sprawl?<\/p>\n To back up the idea that more compact cities are more cost-effective, Canadians would need to take stock of existing infrastructure. How do we do that? <\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t,\u201d Dr. Saxe said. \u201cIf there are comprehensive studies, I\u2019m not aware of them.\u201d <\/p>\n Generally, Canadian governments build infrastructure in response to population growth; they do not count their existing assets.<\/p>\n But there is one exception, an existing model in Canada for directing growth to where the capacity is: transit-oriented development. Ontario\u2019s 2024 provincial planning statement directs new housing to transit stations. British Columbia has an analogous transit-oriented development policy, introduced in 2023. <\/p>\n Transit-oriented development is a well-established policy across the country \u2013 although it has not been widely implemented outside the Vancouver region. Now, there are signs that this tool could start to open the door to change in existing house neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Toronto’s Harbord Village lies just south of the main east-west subway line. Advocates of transit-oriented development see potential for growth in such neighbourhoods.Laura Proctor\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Jason Thorne, the City of Toronto\u2019s chief planner, pointed to recent planning changes that favour small \u201cmultiplex\u201d apartments, and newly updated zoning that would open up broader zones around transit stations. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are starting to see more housing permissions in neighbourhoods than has ever been the case\u201d since the beginnings of land-use planning 80 years ago, he said. This will make the decisions \u201cabout where we put infrastructure much more complex and complicated,\u201d he said, because growth patterns may be less focused and less predictable. <\/p>\n Complicated \u2013 but possible. Could we simply redirect much of the new housing, and new people, across existing neighbourhoods? Dr. Saxe suggested yes, with a caveat. <\/p>\n \u201cThe infrastructure could take it,\u201d she said, \u201cbut the buildings will look different.\u201d <\/p>\n Because today\u2019s families are smaller than those of past generations, houses will need to be replaced by apartments. \u201cThere will be different types of units, different types of living, which will require construction.\u201d<\/p>\n What might this look like? For specific examples, we can look back to how Canadian central cities grew in the 1950s and 60s \u2013 with clusters of mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings. <\/p>\n The City of Vancouver allowed the intensification of the West End; there, more than 220 high-rise apartment towers were added between 1962 and 1975, adding about 10,000 people. Toronto saw a similar but more dispersed pattern: Several central neighbourhoods, including the Annex, saw substantial apartment construction between 1954 and 1972. <\/p>\n Individual houses were replaced, often one or two at a time, by buildings containing many more homes. (Across the Toronto region, more than 1,000 mid-rise and high-rise apartment towers were built in that postwar period, and they now house a total of a million people.) In both the Toronto and Vancouver cases, the street networks and public spaces remained largely intact as the housing stock changed.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Kerrisdale and other shrinking neighbourhoods of Vancouver would look much different if the city allowed more density, as it did in the West End.Jennifer Gauthier\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n Repeating this model on a larger scale could mean designating particular urban areas for redevelopment, as Vancouver tried to do with its rejected Villages initiative. <\/p>\n Or it could mean a more widespread adoption of density \u2013 altering regulations for big cities, or their most central neighbourhoods, rather than making new rules block-by-block. Instead of focusing around transit stations, a central-city policy would emphasize the general presence of amenities and transit. <\/p>\n This would represent a rethink in planning and in municipal politics. The generational compromise of \u201ctall-and-sprawl,\u201d block-by-block planning would be replaced by a different pattern, one that would allow growth across urban centres. <\/p>\n Within those chosen zones, large new buildings and houses would stand alongside one another. Allowing private builders, and non-profit housing developers, to construct apartments across a much wider territory would shake up the markets for development land and for housing. <\/p>\n Politically, this would be very difficult \u2013 as evidenced by Mr. Haebler\u2019s reaction to seeing apartments in his neighbourhood, and the public outcry that led Vancouver politicians to pause the city\u2019s plan. <\/p>\n Still, Dr. Saxe suggested that some form of more focused metropolitan growth would generate serious benefits through building on the cities we already have. \u201cWe can take advantage,\u201d she said, \u201cof a massive, expensive, underused infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n Chris Helgren\/Reuters<\/p>\n The housing crunch: More from The Globe and MailThe Decibel podcast<\/p>\n It\u2019s been just over a year since the Carney government launched Build Canada Homes<\/a> to bring relief to the housing crisis. Back then, reporter Nojoud Al Malees spoke with The Decibel<\/a> about the new agency\u2019s goals and potential impact. Subscribe for more episodes.<\/a><\/p>\n Commentary<\/p>\n Alex Bozikovic: Welcome to the age of the land grab. How can we balance great power with great responsibility?<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/resizer\/v2\/MJ3NKLLC2JFRVHE6ZXXPPMCGHI.JPG?auth=526b99ee27b029a98505c4cf3395fb97c06362a0d480f0a84479a6a613788740&width=600&height=400&quality=80&smart=true\")
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