Where to live in Toronto
Toronto is six municipalities that were merged in 1998 and 158 neighbourhoods the City draws boundaries around, and the single most useful thing to know before you start is that the market has become two markets. Over the year to July 2026 the City's detached benchmark fell 4.4% and its apartment benchmark fell 7.1%, and the gap is wider in some districts than the fall itself. These are 4 neighbourhood guides, one in each community council area, filterable below.
Browse dedicated guides for The old city and East York, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke and York.
4 communities across the city
Four guides, one in each of the City's four community council areas, chosen so the set spans the city rather than clustering downtown. Filter by area, or read them against each other: the four fell by very different amounts over the same twelve months.
Agincourt
The cheapest detached house of these four guides and the steepest fall of the four, in a neighbourhood whose subway is still being built.
Mimico
A lakeshore village behind a rail corridor, with twenty condominium towers on its old motel strip and the smallest price fall of these four guides.
The Annex
Bay-and-gable houses on 1880s lots between two subway lines, and the first part of Toronto allowed to build six units on one of them.
Willowdale
A village that became a suburb that became a downtown, with a detached house and an apartment three and a half times apart on the same street.
Showing 1–4 of 4 communities
The four areas at a glance
One city, one tax rate, four housing markets that behaved differently over the same twelve months. The MLS® Home Price Index composite for each guide's TRREB district fell 3.62% in Mimico's, 5.59% in Willowdale's, 5.62% in the Annex's and 8.66% in Agincourt's, and a detached house costs two and a half times as much in the first of those as in the last.
| Community council area | Neighbourhoods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| The old city and East York | The Annex | The pre-amalgamation city and the borough beside it. Victorian and Edwardian stock, two subway lines, the most expensive low-rise in the country, and the only wards where six units are permitted on a lot. |
| North York | Willowdale | A postwar suburb that built itself a downtown on the subway. A detached benchmark of $1.9 million and an apartment benchmark of $559,000 within a few hundred metres of each other. |
| Scarborough | Agincourt | The cheapest detached houses in the city and the steepest falls of the last year, on a transit network that is still a promise rather than a line. |
| Etobicoke and York | Mimico | The lakeshore villages and the old City of York, where the rail corridor decides more about an address than the postcode does. |
Both tiers here are the City's, which is unusual on this site. Every other city covered here gets a grouping we had to invent and then apologise for. Toronto's four community council areas are statutory: the City of Toronto Act provides for community councils, council has established four of them, and they decide local planning and traffic matters that never reach the full council. Below them the City publishes 158 social planning neighbourhoods, raised from 140 in 2022 when sixteen high-growth ones were split. So the only editorial act left is which four of the 158 got a guide, and that choice is one per area rather than a survey. Real places are missing: Leslieville, the Danforth, Parkdale, Rexdale, Malvern, Don Mills and a hundred and fifty more.