Growing up in a big city means never having to move far to find yourself (or a bigger yard)

Every generation seemed to push my family another 20 minutes north along the same road — you'd completely change your lifestyle but keep the same phone number

A lighter post from me this week, as I continue to mostly relax as my vacation wraps up (and for those who asked what old-school video games I was referring to last week: Commander and Conquer: Red Alert, The Sims 4 and Caesar 2, via an online emulator). But I did still enjoy my friend Jen Gerson's column at The Line, her new(ish) Substack effort. Jen wrote in praise of second-tier cities — that's the headline — and spoke of how her desire to live in a huge, bustling city waned as she exited her 20s for a more maternally focused 30s. Check out this section below, which I'm reprinting without permission (but I suspect she'll be OK with it, right Jen?!):

Toronto was a great city for me in my 20s. But I'm in my 30s, now. And many of the best parts of being a 20-something in Toronto are no longer relevant to the life of a basic middle-class mom with two kids and a mortgage who needs a Barbie Jeep just to get the two-kid monster stroller to the farmers’ market.

Do I miss living in a city with thousands of amazing restaurants and infinite fascinating streetscapes and a festival every weekend? Of course I do! Just as I miss being able to squander my free time tripping on magic mushrooms and trolling the Internet for an easy date.

I don't know what to tell you. Life changed.

You want to know how many times I hire a babysitter so I can leave my screaming kids at home to go to an actual restaurant, now? Let's just say that I don't need the option of thousands of venues anymore.

The rest of the piece is fun, too, so check it out. But I wanted to make a point that occurred to me when I read that, and when I saw some of the chatter Jen's piece created online: I've had the same general experience she had, but I've done it all within about three kilometres of Bayview Avenue. When you're born in a big city, you don't have to move a few thousand miles to experience what Jen did. You can just change neighbourhoods in your hometown, and keep your cellphone number — I’ve had the same once since I was 17 and you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. 

For non-Torontonians, Bayview Avenue is one of the city's major north-south arteries. It starts almost at the waters of Lake Ontario — well, Keating Channel, if we wanna get literal about this — and then moves north until the town of Newmarket, at the northern end of the GTA. It therefore passes through virtually all of Toronto and either through or near-to all of the major municipalities in York Region, one of Toronto's densely populated 905 suburban regions. It's not the biggest or busiest road in the GTA, but it's a major one.

I grew up in Richmond Hill, one of those municipalities to the north of Toronto. Richmond Hill underwent major growth in the late 20th century as baby boomers moved north out of Toronto to find affordable homes with extra bedrooms and backyards and good community amenities. Every year or two some huge swath of prime farmland was converted into a new subdivision, which was immediately snapped up by families looking for safe, affordable neighbourhoods. My parents were two of those boomers. They'd grown up in Toronto's Leaside neighbourhood, which borders Bayview Ave. In either '83 or '84 (I was too young to remember the details), they moved to Richmond Hill, about three klicks from Bayview (closer to Yonge Street, another major GTA road — essentially the GTA's spine). We moved to a bigger, better house in the same area when I was eight, but the neighbourhood remained my home for all my formative years and into adulthood. 

Downtown Richmond Hill

I went to university an hour or so away in Waterloo, and had an apartment or condo there for six or seven years, but always thought of Richmond Hill as home. The condo was just where I crashed during the school year. Having grown up close to a big city, the kind that Jen describes as coveting in her 20s, I didn't feel the kind of pull she did, probably because downtown was a short drive away. It's hard to be that impressed by something you can get to easily by bus, and for me, a smaller city like Waterloo — it had half the population of my suburban town — was itself the change of pace.

When university was done, I returned to Toronto and moved back in with my parents in Richmond Hill while I tried to figure out what to do next. My then-girlfriend, and current wife, also lived in Richmond Hill (we had met in high school though didn't become romantically involved for some years). My original plan after university had been to move to somewhere in northern Toronto, but as the relationship seemed to be going well, I figured it made sense to wait a year or so and see how things went. They went well! We got engaged and decided to move in together. We never even considered Toronto. Too much money, we figured. So we did what both of our families had done when embarking on the child-focused years: we moved even further north, again in search of reasonably priced homes with extra bedrooms and backyards and good community amenities. 

That wasn’t Richmond Hill anymore. In the nearly 30 years since my parents had moved north there, Toronto had basically swallowed it up. Housing cost a fortune there, in many cases even more than in much of Toronto, as the homes and properties were bigger. My fiancé and I moved another 20 minutes north, to a town called Aurora, to find the same things my parents had gone looking for a generation earlier. We had a lovely home in Aurora, spacious and modern, in a gleaming new neighbourhood. It was shouting distance from Bayview Avenue. Every generation seemed to push my family another 20 minutes north along the same road.

We didn't stay in Aurora long. My work life kept pulling me more and more downtown, and the Toronto commute, which became appreciably worse every year, was untenable once we had kids. It wasn't as big a deal when it was just my wife and I: we could adjust our schedules to still have a normal personal life and spare me most of the commuting (she was able to work very close to our home). Once the National Post newsroom moved further downtown, out of its original northern Toronto location, though, my commute became much longer, right around the time we began having kids. Babies impose their schedule on parents, and there were days where I'd only see my daughter sleeping: I'd kiss her goodbye in her crib in the morning while she slept, leave early to beat the traffic, and get home that evening, having braved two hours on the roads in the afternoon rush hour, after she was already down for the night. I was spending three to four hours a day commuting and it was frying my brain, and I wasn’t the kind of father I wanted to be.

These pressures, combined with an improved financial situation that made living in the city possible, caused us to look at Toronto. My wife was more skeptical, but gave me a list of things she wanted in a neighbourhood. There was one that was, in fact, a perfect match: Leaside, where my parents (and her mother, by coincidence) had started. After months of watching every house fly off the market overnight, selling after a bidding war for 30% over-asking, we lucked into a great opportunity in a perfect house at a shockingly good price. That was six years ago, and we're thrilled to be here ... in my fourth home in the GTA, still within shouting distance of Bayview Avenue.

Leaside

My story, of course, isn't quite the same as Jen's — as mentioned above, I basically skipped the "spend a few years finding myself downtown" stage, largely because I'd grown up close enough to it to not be drawn by its allure. I'm also programmed to prefer the quiet of a rural area to the buzz of downtown: many people, if free of responsibilities and financial constraints, would probably choose to live in the heart of a big city; I'd choose to live way off in a rural area on a big piece of land. (Maybe one day I'll tell you how I ended up alone in a cornfield and discovered I loved it.)

But to the extent that my changing family and professional circumstances forced me to make some moves over the years, Toronto was big enough to do it all without ever having to really travel beyond it. And if I had chosen to spend some part of my 20s living in the big city, I'd probably have ended up in the same neighbourhoods my friends chose: also within easy reach of Bayview Avenue.

I do wonder sometimes if I missed out on something. I have friends who moved around a lot, for school or for work, and gained the benefit of having lived in many places. I don't feel jealous of that experience, per se, but I do sometimes wonder if there was something I missed that they enjoyed. Perhaps! But I've found that the desire people have to live in Toronto — which they either cannot afford or struggle to afford — seems to exceed any desire I've ever felt to explore somewhere else. As the kids get bigger and, one assumes, as the danger of COVID-19 recedes, I expect we'll do more travelling as a family, perhaps including longer trips spent in places worth exploring.

But in the meantime, I'm mostly just pleased to have grown up in a time and place that made it possible to do all the professional and personal things I'd ever want to do without having to ever move too far. Jen has found happiness in a smaller city — and God bless her. I've found convenience in a large one, and wouldn't change a thing.

Except perhaps, of course, spending more time in those cornfields. It really was quite something.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney

Photo Credits:

Bayview Avenue sign, used under Creative Commons 3.0 Share-Alike Licence, photo by Floydian.
Downtown Richmond Hill, used under Creative Commons 4.0 Share-Alike licence, photo by VerifiedCactus.
Leaside homes, used under Creative Commons 4.0 Share-Alike licence, photo by SimonP.
Toronto skyline, used under Creative Commons 4.0 Share-Alike licence, photo by Jchmrt.