Stepping out in downtown Toronto these days is likely to be a lonely experience for those north of 50 or so. Even though baby boomers are still a force to be reckoned with, their children, born between 1972 and 1992, now reign supreme in the wilds known as South of Bloor.

And while a casual observer might put this shift down to the concentration of nightlife, restaurants, boutiques and several large educational institutions south of Bloor Street, the smooth-cheeked, skinny-jeaned, bomber-jacketed hordes actually don’t leave the area at night. They live there.

The numbers tell the tale. An astonishing 47% of those who live in the federal ridings of Trinity-Spadina and Toronto Centre are between the ages of 20 and 39. Indeed, they are the ones driving Toronto’s rapid population growth: between 2006 and 2011, the city’s population leapt by 16.2%. That’s more than three times the rate for most of the previous decade.

This is even more intriguing given some daunting economic factors. Toronto’s unemployment rate continues to lag the province’s overall, and the country’s as a whole, as it has done for much of the past 20 years. There were more people working in Toronto in 1989, just before the recession of the early 1990s, than there are now.

To the chagrin of many naysayers, local house prices continue to rise. The average cost of a house in the Greater Toronto Area was $542,567 in May. That’s for a 60-year-old, unrenovated, three-bedroom bungalow outside the downtown core. Even with the forest of cranes and the highest rate of highrise construction in North America (167 units in March, compared with 91 in second-place New York in the same month), prices for condos and rental rates continue to climb. And it’s getting harder and harder to get around in this busy burg: the 2011 cost of congestion was estimated by the Toronto Board of Trade to be $6 billion.

What’s driving the sudden spike in growth? Hard to say for sure, but a January report from TD Economics entitled A Return to the Core suggests that echo boomers are giving up larger homes and backyards for shorter commutes, more amenities and proximity to transit and workplaces.

All this raises key questions – namely, how the city is going to get what it desperately needs now and will need even more in the near future: better public services, ranging from much more green space in the downtown core (those new condos are tiny!) to more effective policing to streets where cars and bikes (the strong preference of many echo boomers) can safely co-exist. Most of all, Toronto needs better transit.

A recent study by Metrolinx, the provincial agency charged with figuring out how to fund a $34-billion upgrade in provincewide transit, suggests a range of new taxes that target consumption spending. The annual cost, estimated at $477 per family, is a lot less than the $1,600 the same agency estimates the average family pays now in congestion costs. For the sake of the people who are now driving Toronto’s economy – and eventually that of the whole province – it makes sense to pay up now. Not doing so could leave both Toronto and the province choking on their own success.

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