Toronto: No City for Young Kids
TL;DR: During my lifetime, Toronto’s always been an expensive city to raise a family. But new data from Statistics Canada shows that this has reached crisis levels.
At the beginning of each year, Statistics Canada releases their population estimates for subprovincial areas. It’s a treasure trove of data on where Canadians lived, where they moved to and from, and where they were born or died at a metro (CMA/CA) or census division (for Southern Ontario, census divisions are county) level.
One metric I find particularly insightful is what percentage of people in Canada, by age, live in a particular census division. If you took all the 7 year olds that live in Canada, what percentage of them would live in Kingston or London (or more accurately, Frontenac or Middlesex)?
Since both Kingston and London are college towns, you’d expect they’d have a disproportionately high proportion of 20-somethings…
And our suspicions are confirmed: 1.4% of all 6-year-olds in Canada live in Middlesex as compared to 1.7% of all 24-year olds. We see a similar bulge in Frontenac’s population, along with a high proportion of Seniors. This could be due to a number of factors, including seniors moving to the Kingston area or due to working-age people moving away from the city.
Next, consider four counties near Toronto.
I find the York and Halton graphs particularly interesting. About 10–15 years ago these were particularly popular locations for young Toronto families looking for housing they could afford. This shows up in the data, as both cities have disproportionately high populations of young teens and people in their mid-40s, which is exactly what you’d expect to see in communities that experienced an influx of young families a decade ago.
Let’s add the city of Toronto to the mix:
Yikes! If you’re a newborn living in Canada, there’s about an 8 percent chance that you live in the city of Toronto. This drops down to 6.4% for elementary school-aged children, then rockets past 10% for people in their 20s, as the city attracts students and young workers from all over the globe. It then drops substantially for people in their 30s, due in part to young families looking for an affordable place to live. There is also another drop in the proportion of people in their late 50s living in the city of Toronto; retiring workers cashing out on real-estate, perhaps?
That low proportion of elementary school-age kids is alarming, but Toronto’s long been an expensive place to raise a family. So you might wonder if it’s always been like this.
The earliest the data goes back is 2001, so let’s compare then to now:
Between the ages of 23 and 58, the data for the two years lines up remarkably well. There is a higher proportion of people between the ages of 18 and 22 living in Toronto now than in 2001, perhaps due to the rise in the number of international undergraduate students. The proportion of people in Canada between the ages of 58–81 and under the age of 14 living in Toronto has fallen sharply over the last two decades. I would not be surprised if this was due to retirees “cashing out” of expensive housing and young families looking for more affordable housing options respectively. It’s worth investigating further.
