Etobicoke and York
The lakeshore villages and the old City of York, where a rail corridor decides more about an address than a postcode does.
One guide in the area that merges two of the six pre-amalgamation municipalities: Etobicoke, west of the Humber, and the old City of York between it and the old city. The lakeshore end is a chain of villages that were towns in their own right until the 1960s, and they still read that way on the ground.
The structural fact here is the rail corridor. It carries the GO trains that make this side of the city genuinely fast to downtown, and it also cuts the lakeshore off from everything north of it, so a school two kilometres away can be a longer walk than one three kilometres away on the same side. Walk the route before you offer rather than measuring it. The other thing to look at is what has been built: the old motel strip at Humber Bay is now twenty-odd condominium towers, which makes this the area with the most new apartment supply of the four, and also the one whose composite benchmark fell least over the last year. That is not the result the supply argument predicts, and it is worth sitting with before accepting either side of it.
