Some of you might remember the Toronto of 1982. I don’t. I was born that year, nearly 400 kilometers northeast of the city. So that Toronto is an abstraction to me. As time passes, that’s the case for more and more people.
Let’s take a second to reflect on Toronto in 1982. Toronto was a city of nearly 2.2 million people, anchoring a region of just under 3 million people. The average house sold for under $100,000 and the car was king. The past is a foreign country.
1982 was also the year that Canadian band Rush released its album Signals. One of the lead singles from the album was Subdivisions, written by Toronto born Geddy Lee.1
Geddy Lee was born in Willowdale. At the time it was on the urban fringe (it’s well North of Bloor). North York hadn’t yet been swallowed up by the Toronto megacity, and only about 1/3rd of the current housing stock had been built. Much the housing was in new subdivisions built since the 1960s - the type of places that influenced Geddy Lee’s writing.
If you were born in 1953, like Geddy Lee, you’d remember an even smaller Toronto. The subdivisions he wrote about in 1982 were fairly new, after all. When he was born less than 14% of Willowdale’s current housing stock existed. As he grew up, so did Willowdale.
Toronto in 1953 was an even more foreign place than the Toronto of 1982. The City had just under 1.2 million residents in 1951, and the region was under 1.3 million. Today those numbers are roughly 2.8 million and 6.2 million, respectively. This isn’t the Toronto of Geddy Lee’s childhood anymore.
The expectation (or at least aspiration) for someone born in Willowdale in 1953 would have likely been that they’d eventually buy a house in a new subdivision either in the community, or elsewhere in the growing city (or region). The suburbs within the current boundaries of the City of Toronto were still growing. Indeed, even someone a bit younger, but old enough to remember ripping the cellophane off of a brand new copy of Signals, might have grown up in a relatively new subdivision somewhere like Willowdale. Their expectations also might have been that they would move into a new subdivision one day, and that they would primarily get around the city by car.
Now, I’m afraid, I’m going to make some of you feel old. Geddy Lee is 69 years old. Someone who discovered Subdivisions as a 10 year old is around 50 now. In ten years, Geddy Lee will be nearly 80, and his once young fan will be nearly 60. As they age and pass on, so will those memories of a smaller Toronto.
Toronto is now a big city, in the process of becoming a global metropolis. We’re not building subdivisions here anymore. If anything, we need to replace them with denser forms of housing to accommodate explosive population growth in the region. This might seem undesirable or alien to someone who has lived experience of Toronto as a mid-sized city. But to anyone born here in the last thirty years or to anyone who has moved here this Millennium, it might as well have always been this way. They expect Toronto to be a global metropolis, and to act like one.
That might not be satisfying to a lot of people. It’s not hard to see why someone who has lived here for 50 years would be upset that they can’t easily drive around anymore, or that the community they knew is changing. But it’s reality. We have to adapt. We need to build a city for the next century, not the last.
I don’t mean to pick on Geddy Lee. I have no idea what his preferences are about anything other than music and beer (he has collaborated with Toronto Henderson Brewing to produce Rush branded beers).