A shift to online work and schooling due to the pandemic has some Toronto residents choosing to move their home base outside the city.
A recent Toronto Star article interviewed residents on the move as well as several urban experts including UTTRI associated faculty, Professors Shoshanna Saxe and Richard Florida.
Professor Shoshanna Saxe says that this may be a time to make improvements such as investing more in infrastructure to support the city’s population growth, even if growth slows a little in the short term.
“Cities bounce back strong every time,” Saxe said. “There’s a very strong human instinct to be together and there are a lot of advantages of congregating big groups of people in one place.”
“I hope that we will see investing in our infrastructure and our shared space, our public amenities with more enthusiasm, see them as more important than we have in the past.
Professor Richard Florida also sees opportunities to improve the city:
“Cities are going to become more for city-dwellers. This reset in rents, this movement of certain people to remote work — if we take advantage of it and are strategic, convert some of the commercial buildings to affordable housing and put our nose to the grindstone, we could make cities better and more affordable.”