Toronto is often called “the city of neigh­bour­hoods” because of the strength and vital­ity of its many com­mu­ni­ties. The city has upwards of 240 dis­tinct neigh­bour­hoods within its bound­aries. Before 1998, Toronto was a much smaller munic­i­pal­ity and formed part of Met­ro­pol­i­tan Toronto. When the city amal­ga­mated that year, Toronto grew to encom­pass the for­mer munic­i­pal­i­ties of York, East York, North York, Eto­bi­coke, and Scar­bor­ough. Each of these for­mer munic­i­pal­i­ties still main­tains, to a cer­tain degree, its own dis­tinct iden­tity, and the names of these munic­i­pal­i­ties are still used by their res­i­dents. The area known as Toronto before the amal­ga­ma­tion is some­times called the “old” City of Toronto, “Toronto proper”, the Cen­tral Dis­trict or sim­ply “Downtown”.

The “for­mer” City of Toronto is, by far, the most pop­u­lous and dense part of the city. It is also the busi­ness and admin­is­tra­tive cen­tre of the city. The uniquely Toron­ton­ian bay-and-gable hous­ing style is com­mon through­out the for­mer city.

The Old Toronto refers to the City of Toronto and its bound­aries from 1967 to 1997. It is some­times referred to as the “South” or “Cen­tral” dis­trict, and includes the “down­town core”. Some of these names such as “The Fash­ion Dis­trict” are (or were) used as mar­ket­ing for the areas or by BIAs; this area is actu­ally called “King-Spadina” by locals. Another exam­ple is the “Old Town of York”, known also as “King and Parliament”.

The “inner ring” sub­urbs of York and East York are older, pre­dom­i­nantly middle-income areas, and eth­ni­cally diverse. Much of the hous­ing stock in these areas con­sists of old pre-war single-family houses and post-war high-rises. Many of the neigh­bour­hoods in these areas were built up as street­car sub­urbs and con­tain many dense and mixed-use streets. Mostly they share many char­ac­ter­is­tics with sec­tions of the “old” city, out­side of the down­town core.

East Toronto, Ontario (Incor­po­rated 1888, annexed by Toronto in 1908) was an incor­po­rated com­mu­nity in what is today a part of the city of Toronto, Canada. It cov­ered much of what is today the Upper Beaches neigh­bour­hood, stretch­ing up to Dan­forth Avenue in the north. The cen­tral street in the com­mu­nity was Main Street, run­ning south from Dan­forth to Kingston Road. The main com­mer­cial cen­tre of the town was located at the inter­sec­tion of Main and Lake View (now Main and Ger­rard). As Toronto’s true main street was named Yonge, the name Main Street was main­tained even after amal­ga­ma­tion with the city of Toronto. This explains why Toronto’s “Main Street” is far from the city centre.

East York, located north of Dan­forth Avenue between the Don River and Vic­to­ria Park Avenue, devel­oped con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously with the West End of the old City of Toronto, and is sim­i­lar in form and char­ac­ter. It is cur­rently admin­is­tered as part of old Toronto. How­ever, until 1997, it was an autonomous urban borough.

The “outer ring” sub­urbs of Eto­bi­coke, Scar­bor­ough, and North York are much more sub­ur­ban in nature (although these bor­oughs are devel­op­ing urban cen­tres of their own, such as North York Cen­tre around Mel Last­man Square).

For admin­is­tra­tive pur­poses, the City of Toronto divides the city into 140 neigh­bour­hoods. These divi­sions are used for inter­nal plan­ning pur­poses. The bound­aries and names often do not con­form to the usage of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion or des­ig­nated busi­ness improve­ment areas. A num­ber of neigh­bour­hood maps of Toronto do exist, some pro­duced by real estate firms and some by inter­net por­tals. A project to map the neigh­bour­hoods accord­ing to the com­mon usage of the res­i­dents was done by the Toronto Star news­pa­per. Based on feed­back from Star read­ers, it has pro­duced the most com­pre­hen­sive, albeit infor­mal, Toronto neigh­bour­hood map.

After the update of Toronto Mul­ti­ple list­ing ser­vice (MLS) on July 5, 2011, the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) intro­duced a new search­ing mech­a­nism for the Toronto MLS, used by real estate agents oper­at­ing in the region. MLS searches can now be refined at three lev­els and MLS users can search houses by area, then by munic­i­pal­ity, and then by neigh­bour­hood or com­mu­nity. It uses Bing Maps. This was the first change of this mag­ni­tude in about 50 years of Toronto MLS his­tory. Even if many are upset by the name of the area they live in!

The change was designed to elim­i­nate the obso­lete cod­ing sys­tems whereby Greater Toronto was divided into 86 arti­fi­cial dis­tricts denom­i­nated by alphanu­meric codes. Due to the grow­ing pop­u­la­tion in the city and the increas­ing dif­fi­culty of brows­ing the code-based sys­tem, TREB made this rad­i­cal change which is intended to sim­plify the use of MLS for real estate agents as well as home buy­ers.

Because Toronto is an enor­mous munic­i­pal­ity of its own, the core city area will con­tinue to be split into coded dis­tricts, although each of the dis­tricts will in turn con­tain neigh­bour­hoods. Hence, the City will be eas­ily search­able as well.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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