Toronto – An Aspirational Trip

Greetings! Happy to be back in the region after our annual ICLV trip last week to Toronto. More than 100 regional leaders traveled together to ICLV, building relationships with one another and learning from an impressive region. Our visit to Toronto was aspirational – what could we learn from a region much larger than ours, from their successes and their challenges? This week’s blog is a long one because I’ll share my key takeaways. I’ll start with my overall impressions. First off, we all were impressed by the welcome we received. At every level we were warmly welcomed and provided the utmost courtesy. We heard from business leaders, several mayors, economic development entities, Toronto’s board of trade (their chamber of commerce), and Ontario’s Premier (the U.S. parallel would be our state Governor). The region is incredibly diverse, its leadership less so. Its density is impressive, as is its development, investment in green energy, diversity of commerce, walkability. We listened with an eye towards: what can we emulate, what should we avoid? Details below.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

WE NEED A REGIONAL STRATEGY
We need a plan in order to get buy-in across the various priorities. Toronto created an organization, CreateTO. Its mission: “Building the city we love.”  CreateTO is a regional real estate development organization, applying a strategic city-wide lens to Toronto’s real estate holdings. Thus far this organization has redeveloped over 8400 properties, close to 7000 buildings, for a collective value of $27B.  Commercial, innovation districts, parks, housing. Brilliant concept.

INVEST IN HOUSING
And remove anything the operates as a disincentive. Offer incentives wherever possible. And ensure there is buy-in on a regional plan to reflect the plan to grow housing at all price points. Toronto has been very supportive of immigration, and today is more than 46% diverse. But they didn’t ramp up their housing growth at a similar pace. So shortage is severe, pricing extraordinarily high. Here is context: in MN, we have approximately 5.7M people and we have about a 100,000-unit shortage for housing.  Toronto is 6.2M, and they have a 1.5M-unit shortage. More than tenfold higher than MN overall.  And their housing prices are 3.3X higher than our region.

INVEST IN TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE
Traffic is bad – really bad. Dare I say, worse than Boston. As with housing, Toronto is still catching up with its population in terms of its transit infrastructure. But I’ve gotta say – we rode the train to and from the airport. And the ride was comfortable, fast, safe, clean. Notably so on all those points.

DENSITY IS KEY
Toronto is impressive for so many reasons. The first is its pace of growth. For example: have you ever heard of the Crane Index? The RLB Crane Index tracks the number of operating tower cranes in 14 major cities across the U.S. and Canada. Toronto, North America’s 4th largest city (behind Mexico City, NYC, and L.A.), is #1 on the crane index. In fact, our hosts told us that its numbers are higher than all the following 13 cities combined. Skyscrapers fill the skyline and more 100+ story buildings are under construction.

Here's the kicker: density IS key.  Toronto’s 6.2M people live and work within a 155-mile MSA (metropolitan statistical area). That’s about 40K people per square mile. The Greater MSP region of 3.7M is spread across 3000 square miles – or 1200 people per square mile!! If we were squished into 155 square miles, we’d be much more dense – over 23K people per square mile.  So how we’re laid out absolutely impacts how we look as it relates to density in any one city or area.

INVEST IN SPORTS/ENTERTAINMENT FACILITIES AS AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT TOOL
PCL Construction gave us an amazing tour of Scotiabank Arena, where the Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL) and Toronto Raptors (NBA) play. This faclity also hosts a lot of majors concert tours and is the 4th busiest arena in North America after Madison Square Garden in NYC, Crypto.com Arena in LA, and United Center in Chicago. This building is 25 years old (same as the Xcel Energy Center) and its owners are 2 years into on an incredibly ambitious 5-year renovation of the building. Over the 5 years they will add clubs, restaurants, and public gathering spaces to the building, replace all of their seats and scoreboard, completely gut and refurbish all of their suites, and remodel all of the concourses, bathrooms, and concession stands in the building. A remarkable fact is they will stay open and not miss a single event in 4 of the 5 summers they are renovating. A huge thanks to PCL for getting us all personal protective equipment and being so gracious with their time during their very busy season. 

INVEST IN GREEN ENERGY
District Energy/Ever-Green Energy facilitated an introduction to Toronto-based district energy company Enwave, who was a gracious host and partner in supporting a panel discussion on sustainable energy and buildings. They also provided a tour of "The Well," a visionary 3 million square foot mixed use project that features an innovative approach to storing renewable thermal energy (heating or cooling) in a 2 million gallon water tank beneath the building. How “cool” is that? This energy system is fully integrated with Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC) system, a sustainable energy project that utilizes the very cool temperature of Lake Ontario to provide cooling to over 100 buildings in downtown Toronto. One noteworthy takeaway from our engagement with Enwave is seeing the level of collaboration occurring in Toronto between the private sector and local, provincial, and federal levels of government to move sustainable energy and infrastructure projects from concept to reality. It was informative and motivating for our ICLV group to learn from our friends on what is possible through collaboration – I know our Greater MSP region already is working on new energy projects and creative ideas to advance our community’s energy systems and am excited about the future!

CONTINUE TO INVEST IN DIVERSITY OF LEADERSHIP
Though our hosts referenced the diversity of its citizenry (46% diverse), the region struggles with diversity at leadership levels.  One female mayor we spoke with indicated that only approximately 20% of elected leaders are women. And we saw very little BIPOC representation among our hosts. It is important for our region to continue investing in ever more diverse leadership as well.

ULTIMATELY, DON’T BE AFRAID TO THINK BIG
We met the Mayor of Kitchener, Ontario, the “Silicon Valley of the North.” Kitchener and its sister city Waterloo, are the innovation hub of Ontario, with very creative strategies to invest in entrepreneurs, commercialization of technology, innovative companies. Very exciting ideas around P3 partnerships (public, private, philanthropy) as it relates to investing in incubators and pursuing companies to relocate and grow there. 

Great MSP always provides a helpful regional comparison on our host city:
As two of the largest cold-weather metro areas in North America, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region and the Toronto region share similarities. Each are centers of business headquarters, home to a half-dozen Fortune Global 500 companies and many other large private-sector employers. The regions benefit from highly educated workforces, with more than half of adult residents in the Greater MSP region and Toronto having attained postsecondary degrees.  The regions have similarly high median household incomes – approximately $86,000 USD – and slow population growth, bolstered by international immigrants.

Minneapolis-Saint Paul and the Toronto region also have notable differences. The two exist within different federal and local governance structures. With a population of 6.2 million, the Toronto region is the largest in Canada and is 68% larger than the Greater MSP region’s population of 3.7 million. Toronto is a superstar metro at the center of the smaller Canadian economy, anchored by major financial institutions, while the Greater MSP region is one star in a constellation of many within the world’s largest economy, with major companies in a variety of sectors. Toronto is much more racially diverse, with just 43% of residents identifying as non-Hispanic White, compared with 74% in the Greater MSP region, with especially large South Asian (19% of regional residents) and East Asian (13%) communities. Though each metro area benefits from international immigration, half of Toronto region’s residents are foreign-born, compared with 11% of the Greater MSP region’s residents.

Affordability and economic inclusion remain persistent challenges for both regions. Nearly half of the Greater MSP region’s renters are cost-burdened, and the region’s residents pay comparatively high prices for utilities, childcare, and groceries. Meanwhile, real estate is notoriously expensive in Toronto, with per-square-foot home prices more than 3.3x greater than Minneapolis. And in both metros more than one in four households earns less than $50,000 USD per year.

Our learning won’t stop here. We plan to dig deeper into the diversity issues and workforce development with our friends from RBC, for example. ICLV is meant to spark our thinking, now it’s up to us to make use of these new ideas.
See you in the trenches, 

​B