How many highrises are going up in Toronto? Well, that depends.
That was nice of them: The Canadian Urban Institute’s new report about Canadian cities’ downtowns [PDF] uses the highrise construction map I made back in November to demonstrate that, as they put it on page 88, “downtown Toronto is attracting many new high rise towers, particularly in the south western quadrant of the core.” Very true! (Over at OpenFile, John Michael McGrath pulled a few other interesting things from the report.)
But hey, speaking of tall buildings: how many are actually being built, right now, in Toronto? The correct answer is both “a whole lot” and “more than anywhere else in the world, thanks,” but beyond that, it gets complicated. I’ve read a million news articles over the last year that make some mention of how many highrises this city has under construction, but the number’s always lower—by a hundred or so—than the 239 I ended up counting six months ago.
When you measure a number like that matters, of course, but what it really seems to depend on is what you call a “highrise.” I went with the City of Toronto’s definition: seven storeys and up. But everyone else seems to be using whatever construction research company Emporis says, and their definition of a “highrise” is weird: it only covers buildings between 12 and 40 storeys tall. If a building’s taller than that, it’s called a “skyscraper,” not a highrise, and doesn’t count in their totals. Whether a not an 11-storey building’s a highrise is something to argue about, but a 44-storey building should probably count as one, and when someone writes an article about the boom of highrise construction in Toronto, they probably don’t mean to exclude from their count the buildings that actually rise the highest.
Not that my methodology of using active building permits and shoring permits was perfect, either, and I’m sure that the number I came up with has changed since I measured it. But, Toronto, please, when you want to brag about how many tall buildings we have, err on the side of bigger.
