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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Is Toronto among the class of cities that are relatively new enough to be shaped by a large corporation moving in? From what I've heard, a lot of the development in that town has happened in the postwar, and is still in rapid development mode.

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It's a tad complicated. Toronto isn't that new. However a good portion of the city burned down in 1904 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_Toronto_(1904)

I didn't mean that the city itself was founded recently, more like compared to other east coast cities such as New York, Boston, or Montréal, a lot of parts of the city was built recently.

That's true. In part because of the great fire. In other cases, there was rolling development. There has been an influx of new tower construction over the past decade or so -- largely condos, mind you. As well as the Daniel Lee Chin crystal addition to the ROM and the new Varisty Blues stadium at U of T.

BlogTO has a large number of "then and now" photo series you can have a look at for comparison if you're interested.

http://www.blogto.com/city/2012/05/what_queen_west_used_to_l...

A city can be in 'perpetual rapid development' if they are constantly tearing down the old and building the new.

Toronto was reasonably spread out.

The Canadian economy is addicted to 'new construction' as a form of growth + plus mass-scale immigration. Without it, the GDP numbers would not be good. Granted - the GDP/capita numbers would be just fine, so the choice is ideological.

Toronto opened up it's downtown to residential construction and that has been most of the change: massive residential towers (or even smaller ones) closer to downtown.

Of course - the endless construction of identical looking homes for 100Km in all direction continues unabated.

Driving North out of Toronto now - it goes on forever: identical homes, a Timmies, a Starbucks, a Home Depot, a TD Bank, another batch of the same homes, a Timmies, a Starbucks, a TD Bank - reapeat ad nauseum.

I think the expansion has largely been a disaster and we'll look back on it mostly as an economic trick to fill as many homes as possible in a short period of time.

Well, at least it sounds like the opposite problem that the Bay Area has! And yet the real estate in Toronto is just as expensive?

Real Estate in TO is expensive, but nowhere near SF.

SF has:

A) Earthquakes B) The Bay is a hodgepodge of cities. TO is mostly one big city under the same management. C) SF has quirky and specific views of 'how they ought to be'. Oddly conflicting at times.

There's plenty of geography around the Bay - there's no reason that SF 'has to go vertical' while the other areas don't.

Too much blame on SF.

If it's safe to put 25 story residences in SF surely it is also in Palo Alto and Freemont etc..

Or maybe tech could find another hub?

Or better yet, forgo a hub at all :)

Toronto added 400k people in last 5-year census period, for a total of ~9% growth. The 5 years before that were similar. It is both the largest and the fastest-growing city in Canada.

Have you been to Melbourne, Australia?

What about Melbourne?

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