BEST COMMUNITIES IN CANADA
Where can you go to find good jobs, affordable housing and great weather? An exclusive new Maclean’s ranking of the nation’s best spots to live finds many of the top locations are in and around the GTA.
FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, Henry Dortmans spent his weekdays on the highway. As a management consultant in telecommunications living in Oakville, Ont., he braved the Greater Toronto Area’s notorious gridlock, driving daily to visit sites and clients around the region. After a while, he started dreaming of a life that involved spending a lot less time on the Queen Elizabeth Way.
Dortmans, now 67, started noticing signs around his neighbourhood reading “For Sale,” and then “Sold.” He called the real estate agent listed on the signs and asked if the houses were selling for good prices. She said yes. He said he was thinking about selling his, too, and moving somewhere a little quieter, with less traffic. She asked where. He said he didn’t know, and the real estate agent suggested the community where she lived—Grimsby, Ont., a town of 29,000 on Lake Ontario that’s a 50-km drive southwest of Oakville.
Four years later, as Dortmans contemplates the view of the Niagara Escarpment from his backyard, he’s glad he made that call. With the money he pocketed by downsizing, he was able to cut back on his meetings and work hours. His drive to Toronto is longer now, but he only has to do it about three times a month instead of every day.
About a year after he moved, Dortmans says that his doctor noticed the change of lifestyle was having a positive effect on his health. “The doctor looked at me. She said, ‘Your blood pressure’s down to below normal. It was on the high side before. What did you do?’ I said, ‘I live here,’” Dortmans says. “The neighbourhood, everything’s quieter. And stress levels are way down.”
Dortmans thinks life is better in the Hamilton-Niagara region. That’s not just an opinion—it’s backed up by hard numbers. There are nine Hamilton-Niagara municipalities— more than in any other region—in the top 50 of Maclean’s inaugural Best Communities in Canada ranking of 415 towns and cities. Grimsby took this year’s No. 2 spot. The honour of best community in Canada went to Burlington, Ont.—a suburb Statistics Canada puts in the Hamilton-Niagara economic region, although Burlington is also often classified as part of the GTA.
It seems that Dortmans isn’t the only one who’s noticed the appeal of the Hamilton-Niagara region’s great weather, low crime and strong sense of culture and community, all within driving distance of Toronto’s amenities. These factors helped the region’s towns and cities climb to the top of our ranking, and they’ve also encouraged populations to soar and housing prices to skyrocket over the past five years. Now, the region faces a new challenge—keeping the characteristics that make it so attractive as it grows and changes.
Many of the intangible things that Dortmans loves about Grimsby, like his view of the escarpment, can’t be quantified and measured. A lot of tangible items can be, however. Using data provided by Environics Analytics as well as publicly available figures from a variety of sources, Best Communities weights each category based on how important we think it would be to the average person; we then rank each municipality accordingly. The strength of the local economy and affordability are the heaviest-weighted categories, followed by access to health care, weather, commute, crime, taxes, population growth, culture and access to amenities.
The Hamilton-Niagara region, compared to Toronto, has low unemployment, strong full-time job creation and affordable housing prices. Combining those factors with great weather, solid access to health care and strong population growth shot its towns and cities to the top of the ranking.
The City of Toronto excelled in some areas but did poorly in others. Toronto is the top municipality in the country for access to health care and amenities, but it clocked in just a few spots from the bottom in affordability. In other words, if you love city life and have the money, Toronto’s great, but for a lot of people Hamilton-Niagara offers more for less.
Trading a long drive into the city for a better quality of life in the suburbs—or beyond—has a
long history. Oakville, the very city Dortmans left because it was too gridlocked and hectic, was once a charming small town just like Grimsby is today, according to David Gordon, a professor of urban and regional planning at Queen’s University. The never-ending expansion of what we consider the Toronto area is the direct result of government policies in the ’50s that subsidized infrastructure in the suburbs and encouraged people to move to low-density housing far from city centres, Gordon says.
“All of this was national policy, promoting a way of living that was considered absolutely ideal in the ’50s,” he says. “There’s no doubt that living in a suburban detached house and commuting in an automobile on a congested freeway is a very popular lifestyle choice in Canada, particularly if you can get somebody else to pay all the common expenses caused by that particular way of living.”
Gordon sees some signs of the trend reversing. Companies are increasingly choosing to put their offices in downtown cores where younger workers prefer to live. But without government policies to change the existing incentives, the trend of towns like Grimsby attracting more new residents until they become towns like Oakville is likely to continue, he says.
“It’s generally considered to be a good thing when jobs and housing are close together,” Gordon says. “We have to find better options than widespread, low-density suburban development.”
Certainly, many people commute to the Toronto area from the Hamilton-Niagara region. (Burlington stands out with 43 per cent of workers commuting to Toronto. In Grimsby and Hamilton, it’s closer to 15 per cent.) But the region has a thriving economy of its own. Alan Arcand, associate director of metropolitan economics at the Conference Board of Canada, says Hamilton has managed to do what a lot of former manufacturing hubs struggle to do—modernize its economy and diversify away from reliance on a single industry. He says the U.S. lifting of steel tariffs gave Hamilton a boost, but the region doesn’t struggle with booms and busts as it used to. “More and more of the economy is moving towards services,” Arcand says. “The fact Hamilton is close to one of the most dynamic economic areas in the country, you’re seeing some investment take place.”
A downside to this growth—and a potential drag on its desirability—is that as more people trade the GTA for Hamilton-Niagara, housing prices in the region rise dramatically. Data from the Canadian Real Estate Association shows residential property prices grew at similar rates in Toronto, Hamilton-Burlington and Niagara until the spring of 2017, when the Ontario government introduced a suite of policy measures known as the Fair Housing Plan to cool what it saw as an overheated market. When the federal government introduced measures that made it harder to qualify for a mortgage soon afterward, prices in the more affordable Niagara and Hamilton-Burlington regions recovered much more quickly than those in Toronto. Rising housing prices are great for people who own homes but are bad news for renters and young people trying to enter the market. Burlington mayor Marianne Meed Ward says she’s concerned about how to help people who make too much money to qualify for housing assistance but don’t have enough income or assets to actually afford to buy. “Housing affordability is a very significant concern for us here in Burlington,” Meed Ward says. “Unless you have the ‘bank of mom and dad’ or you got into the market and flipped a few times and realized some gains, it’s really hard.” With housing prices rising and populations growing, Dortmans may eventually have to move even farther away for the peace and quiet he’s seeking. For now, though, life in Niagara is good. He enjoys being close to the region’s wineries, getting involved in the community by joining the Rotary Club and planting a massive garden with his wife Donna. When people from out of town come over, he makes sure to show them a good time—but not too good. “Friends and visitors, when they visit, say, ‘Hey, we want to move here,’” Dortmans says. “We say, ‘It’s too crowded. You can stay where you are.’”
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