Many dedicated Torontophiles have taken great offense to the line "Screw Jane Jacobs. We're outta here", and have heaped scorn on both the author and the people he profiled as traitors who have shunned their beloved city. The backlash has even spawned it's own Twitter hashtag: #UnfriendlyToronto, which accompanies heartwarming tales of how demonstrably friendly the city really is.
Others have quite rightly pointed out that the story isn't about 'The Burbs' at all since the destinations named are still distinct towns well outside the contiguous ring of Toronto suburbs.
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| by Brett Lamb, from The Torontoist |
The problem is the 60,000 other people who will follow them there.
Reading the stories of the young couples profiled in the piece, I couldn't help but recognize myself and my husband some twenty years ago. Not that we were at all disillusioned with our downtown Toronto lives - far from it. But we had a baby on the way and had (rightly or wrongly) bought into the notion that the city is no place to raise a kid. So we rented a house in Richmond Hill and then, after our son was born, kept looking west until we found a house we could afford to buy - in our case, here in Milton.
Like the 'New Suburbanites' in the story, we loved our new town and our new neighbourhood. We loved the fairs and the farmers market and knowing our neighbours well enough to entrust them with watching our son for an hour or two.
Like them, we never considered our new home to be the suburbs because when we got here it was still a small town. And really, it wasn't all that different from some of the Toronto neighbourhoods we had left behind, except that we had to get used to strangers making eye contact and even (gasp!) saying "Hi!" as they passed on the sidewalk.
It's still that way for us, and we still love living here. But we were lucky enough to find an older house in the historic downtown core where, despite the changes of recent years, we can still find most of what we need within walking distance and be on speaking terms with our neighbours.
Unfortunately, this is not the Milton that most of the people who came after us have experienced.
In the past ten years, unchecked development and population pressures from nearby Mississauga and Brampton have nearly tripled the town's population, causing it to grow its own ring of suburbs. As suburbs go, Milton's are actually quite nice, and certainly far more liveable than those built in earlier decades (like the one I grew up in). Developers and city planners haven't been entirely oblivious to the teachings of Ms. Jacobs, after all. But they're still suburbs, and ultimately not all that different from the "cookie-cutter, aluminum-clad, cul-de-sacky Mississaugaish" developments the couples in the article had hoped to leapfrog over.
Worse, many of the problems they say had caused them to flee the city in the first place - clogged roads, surly or indifferent neighbours, long waiting lists for daycare and sports programs - have now become problems here in Milton as the developments fill with urban exiles at the rate of five houses per day.
This is hardly the exurban utopia envisioned in the article.
I certainly can't fault anyone for making the same choice we did in moving to a small town in the outer GTA. But if they honestly think they can escape the pitfalls of both urban and suburban life simply by commuting to Toronto from a small distant town instead of from Mississauga, they should perhaps pay a visit to Milton.
A suburb isn't defined by its distance from an urban centre. It is defined by how dependent its residents are on a place other than where they live. So until these folks are willing or able to relocate their jobs and their social lives along with their bedrooms, they are just going to end up bringing the suburbs with them no matter where they go.
Welcome to Sprawlville.
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