Toronto Today's coverage area is home to about 375,000 people. It covers the downtown core and a large part of the west end.
It's about as complicated as urban territories come: pockets of wealth and pockets of poverty; leafy neighbourhoods and towering high-rises; and all the rich complexity of decades of immigration.
In the thousands of lines of cold data produced by Canada's 2021 census, there are many insights into how people's lives are lived in a rapidly changing city. We've mapped 13 aspects of the census to look at our neighbourhoods from different angles.
In many ways, patterns of low income in the the east downtown were set in the mid-19th century, as desperate victims of the Irish potato famine crammed into those neighbourhoods.
More recently, though, Cabbagetown and the area south of Queen have become gentrified.
TorontoToday's coverage area arguably has three areas of higher income: Cabbagetown, Yorkville and the Annex, and the west-end neighbourhood bordering High Park.
Roncesvalles and Cabbagetown have lower rates of residents who identify as members of a visible minority, while rates in the high-rise neighbourhood in St. James Town are very high, at over 81 per cent.
The Islands are a special case, at just 1.7 per cent. That's the lowest visible minority percentage of any census tract in the GTA. The next-lowest are tracts in rural York Region on the shores of Lake Simcoe.
A map of households that normally speak English at home has a relationship to the income map, but not a precise one.
First-generation immigrants tend to concentrate in the core and further east, including the waterfront. Decades ago, this map would have looked different, showing much higher rates of recent immigration in Kensington Market and the neighbourhoods around Dundas and Spadina.
A map of top languages spoken other than English reflects successive waves of immigration since the end of the Second World War. The big picture: Mandarin in the core, Portuguese in the west end with a large Polish pocket and, in Parkdale, Tibetan.
The sole census tract that highlights Italian speakers is a sign of a changing city: decades ago, there would have been many more. In St. James Town, tracts popping out for Tagalog reflect immigration from the Philippines.
Perhaps surprisingly, population change is in large part a story of shrinkage. At least north of Queen, nearly all west-end neighbourhoods lost at least some population over the five-year period from 2016 to 2021.
From a climate change adaptation point of view, having fewer people living in transit-rich neighbourhoods isn't a great thing.
How do we get around? It's a central question that shapes urban life.
People living near the west end of King West have higher rates of transit use. So do people in St. James Town, which is in close proximity to Sherbourne and Castle Frank subway stations.
Surprisingly few people living along the Bloor subway line seem to use it to commute, however. (There also aren't very high rates in the core, home to many subway stations, though as we will see, that can be more easily explained.)
A map of drivers shows a fairly straightforward relationship between the west end and its proximity to downtown. The exception is northern Cabbagetown, which has the second-highest rate of car commuters.
Our bike commuter map might seem a bit confusing at first: wouldn't people in the core find it easier to get to work on a bike?
The answer is in the next map: people within a given range of where they work — let's loosely say maybe a kilometre or so — seem to find it easier, and perhaps safer, to walk.
The densest area is St. James Town. This map needs a bit of interpretation: the downtown core looks like it lacks density, but what we're being shown isn't density of activity, but, strictly, residential density.
The bigger takeaway is the low density along Bloor West near the subway line, something that's more or less replicated on the Danforth.
In large parts of TorontoToday's coverage area, more or less east of Spadina and south of Queen, roughly half of households are one-person.