'Dicey territory': Greater investment, mixed-use remake needed to reverse downtown decline

Examining downtown Toronto's decline Torontonians way in on the post-pandemic decline of downtown Toronto's core, and what the next mayor of Toronto will need to do to help.

In Part 3 of its Downtown Decay series, CTV News Toronto examines the path forward for the city’s slumping core—and what can be done to reverse the troubling trend.

It is lunch hour in Toronto’s core, and the Front Street patio tables are set. It’s midweek, it’s May, and the skies are clear—but the office crowd is scarce, and the chairs sit empty.

It’s a tell-tale sign that fewer people are downtown these days, with plenty of reasons to avoid the area.

“Transportation has been a hot mess,” said Jay Daye, who lives downtown. “It has been a struggle to get around.”

“I have never seen this much construction at a single time,” said Akash Thomas, who moved here from India three years ago.

Improving the commute into the core, and the ease with which people can move around within it, is key to revitalizing a slumping city centre, said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.

“It’s just like a litany of transportation challenges in that area, to the point where politicians are in some cases saying ‘Don’t come into downtown,’ which is the opposite of what we need right now,” he said.

“We’re talking about a downtown core that is struggling, and needs huge numbers of people to come in and out, and be able to do that easily.”

With activity levels at just 47 per cent of what they were in the core pre-pandemic, the data suggests a downtown decline spurred by a lockdown-led drop in the nine-to-five office crowd. But with hybrid and remote work here to stay in at least some capacity, some experts suggest reorganizing the role of Toronto’s core in the city’s economy.

“If you’re not able to attract people to work, attract people for amenities,” said William Strange, who teaches urban economics at the University of Toronto. “The stronger are the amenities, the happier people are going to be to go into their office anyway.”

“What I see is a huge opportunity for downtown Toronto to remake itself,” Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, told CTV News Toronto.

The key, she said, would be to reinvent the area as a mixed-use community, a model other urban centres have demonstrated to be successful.

“What I just hope, though, as we’re attracting sectors back, is that they are not nine-to-five sectors, because that’s what killed some of these downtowns.”

The revitalization of the core will be a critical challenge for the city’s next mayor, Siemiatycki said, who warned service cuts could worsen an already-spiralling problem.

But investment won’t be possible without a rethink of the city’s fiscal framework, according to Matt Elliott, publisher of City Hall Watcher.

“If you look at the city’s budget hole and you say, ‘We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing,’ and you’re not going to have a real plan to fill that budget hole, that gets into some really dicey territory,” Elliott said. “Because that’s when you start looking at really deep cuts.”

It’s not ideology, he said—it’s math.

“I don’t think we’ve realized that we’ve fallen down this ladder in terms of our prosperity,” Giles Gherson, incoming Toronto Region Board of Trade president, told CTV News Toronto.

Gherson warned that without a new financial deal for the city, which heavily supports services that should be the responsibility of Ottawa and the province, Toronto’s downtown would fall further behind.

“We’re poor,” he said. “We’re a poorer place than we used to be.”

The core, he argued, is in need of a correction, if the city is to salvage its productivity, maintain job growth, and remain competitive globally.

“We haven’t been paying attention,” he said. “We’ve been sleeping, and it’s falling off. So that’s what we need to fix—and that’s a big deal.”