Goodbye, big city
THERE ARE CHALLENGES WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE URBAN CENTRES EN MASSE
It was Easter 2020 when Annabree and Natasha Fairweather hit their breaking point.
They loved their rental, one of three units in a home in East Vancouver, and got along well much of the time with the neighbours with whom they shared the home. In fact, the families formed a bubble when COVID-19 descended, which helped guard against the pandemic isolation suddenly thrust on so many people.
But with that closeness and confinement, came a serious craving for space.
With everyone at home all the time, there were no private moments for piano playing (a de-stressor for Annabree), or letting their sons blow off steam, or family strife. When downstairs neighbours argued, the Fairweathers, upstairs, could hear it.
In time, one of their young sons had conflict with a downstairs child, and that spilled over into friction between the parents.
“I mean kids always have conflict, that’s fine right. But the fact that we couldn’t ever be alone … it just really came to a head,” said Natasha. “We realized for our kids’ mental health, they needed to have some space.”
The Fairweathers moved from Alberta to Vancouver two years ago and knew they couldn’t afford to make it their permanent home. But the pandemic accelerated their departure from the city.
Annabree, executive director of a small non-profit with an office in downtown Vancouver, had transitioned to remote work. This compounded their need for more living space — her office was a dresser in their bedroom — but also meant the Fairweathers could look for houses further from the city, knowing that even when she did go back to the office it probably wouldn’t be daily.
The Fairweathers landed in Port Moody, a waterfront community in Metro Vancouver, home to 34,000 people. They traded their three-bedroom apartment in the city for a $660,000 townhouse they could just afford, thanks to a very low mortgage rate. Despite the financial stress — “it was a bit sickening to take on that kind of housing debt,” said Annabree — the family was clearly captivated by their new home.
“We can walk to the playground, and we can go for a hike right from our doorstep, it’s so green and beautiful,” said Natasha. “And my kids can just run outside and run up and down the street ... and it’s a little townhouse community, and there’s just packs of eight-year-olds riding their bikes around.”
Families like the Fairweathers have attracted a flurry of attention in recent months. They belong to a cohort of Canadians who’ve elected to leave the country’s largest cities since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, relocating to suburbs or smaller communities further afield. It’s a trend that hasn’t fully manifested, raising major questions about how pandemic-driven urban exists will impact the places people live, or used to live.
Interviewing real estate industry insiders, Pricewaterhousecoopers and the Urban Land Institute found no consensus as to whether suburbanization will increase, “in a world of remote working, affordability concerns, and pandemic-related worries about dense environments and taking mass transit.”
However, “a significant number believe that there will be at least some movement away from major cities, even if they remain attractive to many people,” the 2021 report on emerging trends in Canadian real estate says.
According to a June 2020, survey conducted by Nanos for the Ontario Real Estate association, 61 per cent of Ontarians actively in the real estate market agreed or somewhat agreed that living in the suburbs was more appealing to them than before the pandemic. A similar percentage said the same of living in a rural area, while 34 per cent said so about living in a downtown setting.
Think about being stuck in the sky, in a 500-squarefoot box, with no green space and nowhere to go. You’ve realized remote work is a viable option, and for close to the same price as a condo, you can buy a house.
Broadly speaking, that’s Frank Magliocco’s take on some of the pandemic-era factors propelling interest in life beyond the urban core. “People started to say, ‘Hey, maybe buying a house outside of the city, a little further afield, is not a bad idea,’” said Magliocco, partner and national real estate leader at PWC Canada, in a February interview.
While he wasn’t predicting the collapse of urban centres, “from what I’m hearing from our interviewees, the longer this pandemic
lasts, the longer this kind of, suburbanization trend is going to take hold.”
David Gordon, a professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University, remembers lots of talk that the 2003 SARS epidemic would be Toronto’s undoing, by way of mass exodus. But ultimately, said Gordon, redevelopment of Toronto’s core for higher density actually intensified after SARS.
“I’m sure there’s lots of anecdotal evidence of people buying a place in the suburbs to have more room to raise their kids. But that’s been the story since the end of World War Two,” he said, in March. “At the moment, we haven’t been able to untangle this from the regular suburbanization process.”
And there are downsides to suburbia — from infrastructure costs, to the public health and equity challenges associated with car-centricity, to the environmental impacts of less-dense living.
One might suggest, as Canadian Home Builders’ Association CEO Kevin Lee did, that working from home could help address a long-standing concern around urban sprawl: commuting, and the associated pollution.
“It’s really been a game changer in many ways,” said Lee.
Gordon noted that there are usually two working
people in suburban homes, and he doesn’t expect both will end up doing so remotely. However, he said there’s always an opportunity to look at more sustainable suburb planning.
“We have to get better at this,” he said. “It just doesn’t work, adding more lanes to the Queensway.”
In January, Statistics Canada released annual estimates related to population change at the sub-provincial level, including migration within the provinces. While the data don’t fully capture the impact of the pandemic, the agency did conclude that more people are choosing to live outside the country’s largest urban centres.
In migratory exchanges with other areas of their respective provinces, the Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal census metropolitan areas (CMAS) continued to see more people moving out than coming in. In the latter two areas, these net losses hit record highs (-50,375 in Toronto, compared to -46,549 the year before, and -24,880 in Montreal, compared to -14,117 the year before.) Statcan also observed that urban sprawl continued inside all three CMAS, with the fastest growing municipalities more often found in suburban areas.
The agency suggested that health, higher housing costs, and remote work, “are among the most important
factors contributing to the decision of many Canadians to continue (or to no longer continue) living in large urban centres hardest hit by the pandemic.”
Richard Shearmur, professor and director of the school of urban planning at Mcgill University, said he doesn’t think the COVID-19 pandemic will significantly change the demographic makeup of large Canadians cities such as Montreal. That would require tens of thousands of additional people leaving, he told this newspaper, in March.
But where a relatively small number of urban out-migrants can have a marked impact is in smaller communities receiving them. Countryside communities can see home prices rise, as well as changes to their local culture and economy.
“They see the community changing around them,” said Shearmur, “In a way that some are happy with, but some are not happy with.”
Between increased housing insecurity for existing residents and the gentrification of local commerce, Concordia University’s Ted Rutland sees little that’s positive about the movement of city-dwellers into small towns.
“One of the only things that it does do is it provides a bunch of pretty menial jobs to people in those communities to like, plow driveways, do cleaning for Airbnbs... chop and deliver firewood,” Rutland, an associate professor of urban studies, said.
“It creates a few jobs while making the overall situation of existing residents really difficult.”
The Ontario Real Estate Association, meanwhile, has
framed some of the “side effects” of the COVID-19 pandemic — greater workfrom-home opportunities and increasing appetite for homes with more space and outdoor amenities — as offering “a golden opportunity for a small town comeback.”
In all the talk about city-dwellers departing for greener pastures over the past year, it’s easy to overlook the fact that relocation, for many people, is not simply a pandemic whim.
On her website, Ninety Minutes From Toronto, Audra Williams outlines layers of considerations related to her own potential move out of the city with her fiancé, Haritha Gnanaratna. The pandemic is part of the picture, but so is the precarity of renting and cost of living in Toronto.
Her own research into possible places to move has blossomed into a public project, where Williams pulls together and presents an abundance of information about cities and towns within a 90-minute drive from Toronto, from average house prices, to transit service, to the presence of Pride events and percentage of BIPOC individuals living in the community. It’s her sense that, in general, affordability is a primary factor pushing people who appreciate the information they’ve gathered towards a move.
“Not a single person has been like, ‘I’m excited to leave the city,’” she noted, in a March interview.
What Williams is hoping for, though, is that people can gather enough information that they feel positive about a relocation, “Like they’re moving toward something.”
IT JUST DOESN’T WORK, ADDING MORE LANES TO THE QUEENSWAY.