The great thing about living in Toronto is that every neighbourhood comes with bragging rights. Rosedale has prestige schools. Trinity-Bellwoods is the capital for small-batch picklers. Etobicoke has low crime rates, Scarborough has lush parks, downtown has the most transit. Every neighbourhood has something going for it. But Torontonians are competitive, and we like knowing how we stack up.
To that end, we present a ranking of Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods—a definitive document that separates the great from the good, the average from the awful. We teamed up with the urbanists, economists, sociologists and information scientists at the Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank at U of T’s Rotman School of Management. They crunched every stat they could drum up: census data, community health profiles, the Fraser Institute’s school report cards, the Toronto Police Service crime figures and independent studies.
The last time Torontolife ranked the neighbourhoods, in 2013, we conducted an online poll of Toronto Life readers to determine what they look for in their neighbourhoods. This time, Torontolife used the same criteria and weightings, but improved our methodology, adding new information and more controls for land area and population. The city has drastically changed, and so have our rankings (to wit: Rosedale, the former champion, has dropped to number 18).