An update on the potential local impacts of truck tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canada By Yihoi Jung, Karen Chapple, Jeff Allen, Tara Vinodrai Canada’s Medium Heavy Duty Vehicles (MHDVs) industry is highly reliant on U.S. exports. This blog post covers the increase in demand for newer trucks due to environmental regulations, the decrease in exports due to the…
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The impacts of lumber tariffs on Canadian cities
An update on the potential local impacts of lumber tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canada By Yihoi Jung, Karen Chapple, Jeff Allen, Tara Vinodrai Lumber is a big export item for Canada. This blog provides an overview of the history of the Canada-U.S. lumber trade and examines recent economic challenges due to the softwood lumber tariffs and their potential…
Want to Prevent a Doom Loop? Look at Canada
Graphics by Jeff Allen and Byeonghwa Jeong The slow return of office workers to downtowns in the United States and Canada has raised fears of the urban doom loop, a downward spiral in which empty offices and related decline in retail, restaurant, and entertainment expenditures downtown lead to declining rents and land values, decreases in the commercial property tax base,…
A “Flight to Quality”? Not So Fast.
Research: Karen Chapple and Byeonghwa JeongGraphics: Scott McCallum, Byeonghwa Jeong, Jeff Allen As the COVID-19 pandemic waned, economists began writing about a “flight to quality,” the phenomenon whereby new commercial office buildings with more amenities are able to maintain net effective rents even as rents decline on new leases in older buildings. These green, energy-efficient buildings typically include not only…
Transit-oriented communities and post-pandemic urban resilience in Toronto
Research: Amir Forouhar, Ramesh Pokharel, Karen Chapple, Jeff AllenGraphics: Isabeaux Graham, Jeff Allen The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted urban mobility, work, and social interaction. But how resilient were our neighbourhoods? Our study, published in the Journal of Transport Geography (2025), investigates how transit-oriented communities (TOCs) – dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods near frequent public transit – fostered recovery in Toronto. By analyzing mobile…
What’s the poop on dogs and cities?
Dogs of all shapes and sizes thrive in cities. Some city residents love dogs, and others hate them. But regardless, dogs play a critical role in keeping urban inhabitants connected and healthy. In the School of Cities’ new occasional video series, Dog Days in the City, we show how dogs foster interaction that builds social capital. In an upcoming video,…
Understanding post-pandemic recovery for individual buildings
By Byeonghwa Jeong, Karen Chapple & Jeff Allen On this website, we’ve tracked post-pandemic recovery patterns in the downtowns of many North American cities, based on location-based mobility data from cell phones supplied by Spectus. While we’ve compared recovery across different cities, as well as created a tool to explore how results vary for different definitions of downtown, policymakers often…
The death of downtown? Let’s make sure that’s not Toronto’s story.
One by one, downtowns have come back to life from the dark days of the pandemic’s onset. But Canadian downtowns? Not so much. Looking at cell phone activity at points of interest (POI) in the downtowns of the top 62 cities in North America, the median downtown has seen about 56% of its activity come back (Figure 1) (comparing Spring…
Greenfield development does not equal sprawl. So what? We can do better.
In a recent blog, TMU researchers Frank Clayton and David Amborski argue for “orderly and comprehensively planned low-density development,” based on the contention that not all greenfield development is sprawl. But sprawl is only the development we don’t want. What about the development we do want? The places we want now What are Ontarians trying to accomplish–rather than just avoid–when we…
Revealing the Invisible: Countering Land Theft to Create Inclusive Cities
The following is the text of a talk given by Karen Chapple at the 3rd Urban Economy Forum, October 4, 2021 I sit here on land stolen from the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit, and there’s a good chance that most or even all of you are right now also on land that was stolen in some form.…