Toronto: You’re Magnetic, Attractive, What’s Your Secret?
December 12th, 2007 Categories: Home Buyers, Home Ownership, Home Sellers, Lifestyle News, News Wire
The first-ever metropolitan benchmarking study, “City Magnets: Benchmarking the Attractiveness of Canada’s CMAs”, has just been released by The Conference Board of Canada. I thought the Executive Summary was quite interesting; here’s my Toronto-focused recap.
This study looks at the features that make Canadian cities attractive to skilled workers and mobile populations. It compares the performance of 27 census metropolitan areas (CMAs) across seven domains: Economy, Health, Society, Housing, Environment, Innovation and Education.
Should Toronto Be a Magnet?
How important is a city’s ability to magnetize? Well, it is believed that cities without the ability to act as magnets and attract new people and the business investment they encourage will struggle to stay prosperous in the years to come. Struggling, not such a pretty look!
Toronto Scores An “A”
As a native Torontonian, I have always felt its pull. And I’m not alone, as Toronto scores an overall “A”, second only to Calgary in the overall ranking of attractiveness. Calgary’s red-hot economy edged out Toronto for the number one spot.
Where does Toronto shine? We placed first in the Health and Society domains. In Health, Toronto leads the pack and ranks first on both average life expectancy of men and women, and access to specialist health care. In Society, Toronto is again the top CMA. Not unexpectedly, the biggest cities are noted for their multicultural fabric, a younger-than-average population profile, a talented pool of writers, artists and musicians, and urban density and public transport systems.
I was really pleased to see Toronto outscore the other bigs in safety.
Not surprisingly, the smaller cities are among the most affordable places to buy and rent houses. Toronto’s ranking was affected by its affordability levels.
Would you like your own copy of the Executive Summary? Send me an email and I would be happy to send you the pdf.
[…] is magnetic and attractive, and there’s a study that proves it. The Conference Board of Canada study looked at the features that magnetize or make cities […]