Why Toronto will survive COVID ‘exodus’

“New York is on life support. New York is dead. New York City is dead forever.” This is a mash-up of recent media headlines describing the state of America’s most populous city. But it could just as well be a mash-up of headlines describing the state of big cities all over the world that are hollowed out and eerily quiet on account of, what else: COVID-19.

Indeed, one of the more popular media stories to emerge since the onset of the pandemic is the grim future of wealthy urban centres — often featuring interviews with young attractive couples who have ditched shoebox condos in a crowded sky for big houses under an empty one.

According to Reuters, COVID-19 has triggered “Madrid’s millennial exodus” to the Spanish countryside.

Last summer, says the Japan Times, for the first time in eight years, the number of people leaving Tokyo exceeded those arriving. In October, Parisians fled their city ahead of a national lockdown creating hundreds of miles of gridlock on its streets.

And of course, nearly every Toronto publication — this one included — has covered the trend of our own people relocating to small towns and suburbs around Ontario, where a cool million gets you a whole lot more than a condo with a sliding bedroom door.

We get it. At a time of mass infection, most people don’t want to be around other people. And if they can afford it, many of them will move out of town and stay out of town (especially when out of town is a lot cheaper).

But where does that leave those of us who want to remain in cities even amid the pandemic or, in many cases, who have no choice but to remain in cities? And when the pandemic is over, is it really true that Toronto and urban centres like it will be vacant, soulless wastelands?

I recently put this question to former Toronto mayoral candidate and urban planner Jennifer Keesmaat. And I’m pleased to report — as a Torontonian who wants to remain a Torontonian — that the answer is probably not.

“It’s true that the things we love about urban living are on hold,” says Keesmaat. However, this doesn’t mean those things are on hold forever or that they have gone extinct. “We’re not living in a pandemic in perpetuity,” she says. “We’re living in a pandemic right now.”

Has that pandemic drastically changed cities and exacerbated the inequities within them? Sadly, yes. The problems that made Toronto a tough place to live pre-COVID-19 — a lack of affordable housing for families for example — are amplified in a real estate market that’s become more expensive and competitive in the pandemic, not less so. (Sure, it’s easier now to rent a bachelor condo at a decent price, but this doesn’t help a family of three or more looking to put down roots.)

But the notion that a city is “dying” or “dead,” or that cities in general will be permanently rendered unattractive and unsafe on account of COVID-19, is probably false.

First of all, the pandemic may have temporarily eliminated the ability of people to gather safely, but it hasn’t eliminated the desire to gather itself. “At the heart of urban living is that we are inherently social creatures,” says Keesmaat. It’s unlikely that COVID-19 nor any crisis will upend human nature.

Keesmaat points to various crises throughout history for evidence of this unlikelihood.

“In the aftermath of 9/11 everyone said travel will never be the same,” she says. “There were conversations: Will you ever get on a plane again? How will they make planes safe again? And the irony is, within a decade, people were travelling more than they ever travelled before.”

In fact, the crisis we’re currently living through is a testament to the wrong-headedness of those predictions following Sept. 11. It was thanks to the popularity of air travel that COVID-19 was able to spread so quickly around the globe.

And then there’s New York City, always allegedly at death’s door. “I was born in 1970,” says Keesmaat, “and I remember, vividly, stories of New York City as this dangerous crimeinfested place where people were living below ground in tunnels.

New York City went through a financial crisis in the ’70s and only started to come out of that in the ’80s and, in the ’90s, started to really boom. New York City has been completely written off and came back stronger than before.”

Cities around the world — Toronto included — have been written off and came back stronger than before.

“The Spanish flu was meant to be the end of cities,” says Keesmaat. “Instead, what it did was strengthen the delivery of public health.”

A good example of this: according to Heritage Toronto, the Bloor Viaduct was constructed throughout the Spanish Flu pandemic. In fact, its unveiling ceremony in 1918 was called short “because, as Toronto’s then-mayor Thomas Langton Church said in stopping a speaker, ‘We will not have any more speakers for, if we keep you any longer, we will be violating the Medical Officer’s regulations as to gatherings of people.’”

Sound familiar? Toronto has survived a pandemic before. It will survive this one.

The pandemic may have temporarily eliminated the ability of people to gather safely, but it hasn’t eliminated the desire to gather itself