Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 370

On most days, I walk to the office. That is going to be changing later this summer , but what I'm about to say will still apply.

Because I walk more often than I drive, whenever I have to go somewhere that necessitates a car and that obligates me to leave during the evening rush, the first thing I usually think to myself is "shit, it's going to really suck getting out of downtown."

I have very little patience when it comes to sitting in traffic. So when I'm faced with this kind of situation, my mind immediately goes to: "okay Brandon, what are your other options here?"

And this is exactly what happened this past Friday. I had a dinner up in Vaughan after work and I opted to take the subway to VMC station (the northern terminus of one of Toronto's lines).

It was actually my first time riding this new line extension and it was cool to see the area around the station. It's not yet a 15-minute community, but I believe it can get there with some narrow streets and the right kind of ground floors.

The entire trip took about 45 minutes, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought to myself, "this is way better than sitting in traffic."

Dr. David L. A. Gordon leads a research project at Queen's University that is focused on determining the proportion of the Canadian population that lives in a suburb. Why this is interesting is because the data isn't normally looked at in this way. As I understand it, the way Statistics Canada thinks about things is that you're either rural or you're urban, living in a major population center.

But this isn't exactly right. Obviously there's a difference between living in a dense transit-oriented community and living in a car-centric one. The former is actually "urban" and the latter is not.

So what the research team set out to do was more accurately classify Canadian cities. And after doing that, they ended up with four categories within each census metropolitan area: (1) active core, (2) transit suburb, (3) auto suburb, and (4) exurban. See above example. What they then discovered is that about 66% of Canadians live in a suburb. And in our largest cities -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver -- the figure is over 80%.

Canada is often referred to as one of the most urbanized nations in the world. But as we can see here, that's not exactly true. Canada is more accurately a suburban nation.

Image: Canadian Suburbs

This is an interesting chart from Bloomberg showing the most affluent metropolitan areas in the US in 1949. As you can see, at the top of this list is Detroit, followed by mostly older industrial centers.

Now here's the list today:

It's largely a different list; but importantly, it's not an entirely new list. San Francisco was a wealthy city in 1949 and it remains one of the wealthiest today. But could that be changing? Given the city's current challenges, some are questioning whether it might end up as another Detroit.

I don't see that happening. And for what it's worth, here's evidence of nearly 75 years of resiliency.

Images: Bloomberg