The lack of affordable housing in the GTA can leave many feeling hopeless. New data from Statistics Canada confirms that very misery. Good to know we weren’t all just imagining it.
As it turns out, residents in Canada’s major cities – Vancouver and Toronto – are the least satisfied with their housing. The 2018 Canadian Housing Survey showed that while most people across Canada were satisfied with their home dwellings, Torontonians were the unhappiest – showing the lowest levels of satisfaction.
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Just check out what the financial squeeze and lack of affordable housing is doing to Toronto’s most vulnerable populations, including many who are employed on a full-time basis. In fact, many of Toronto’s recent immigrants are also stuck in a cycle of unsuitable housing.
Statistics Canada revealed that of all Canadian households, those in Toronto were most likely to live in unsuitable dwellings (Quebec households were the least likely). At the same time, and perhaps not coincidentally, Toronto has some of Canada’s richest neighbourhoods – and those are proliferating.
While Toronto is always attributed as having vibrant neighbourhoods and as being at the top of most “Best Cities” lists, the fact is that Toronto rated as the lowest in “neighbourhood satisfaction” with a rate of 82 per cent. The low rate is in comparison to all other major Canadian cities (10 in total) that were included in the data.
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Neighbourhood satisfaction is examined alongside items such as neighbourhood disorder, safety and services, and socio-demographic and household characteristics, but the suggestion is that lack of satisfaction coincides with human density.
"Households living in rural areas were more satisfied with their neighbourhood at 91.4 per cent than households living in small, medium and large urban population centres of Canada," the study reads.
About three quarters of households rated their satisfaction with feeling as part of their community at six or more on a scale of zero to ten.
"Interestingly, while a sense of belonging to the community is related to neighbourhood satisfaction, volunteering and participating in community groups were less related to neighbourhood satisfaction," the study noted.
The Canadian Housing Survey releases another round of results in 2020. Given the rising height of Toronto’s Unignorable Tower, chances are the trend towards housing dissatisfaction is only going to rise.
