Two thirds of Toronto residents say they know only a few of their neighbours, or none at all. More than a third report feeling lonely at least three or four days a week. Toronto sells itself as one of the most multicultural cities on Earth, a global destination for culture and opportunity and openness. It is also a city where a large share of residents live surrounded by people they never speak to.
The Numbers That Nobody Wants
The Toronto Foundation's 2023 Vital Signs report, The Power of Us, found that 37% of Torontonians felt lonely at least three or four days in the past week. That is more than one in three people reporting loneliness as most of their week rather than an occasional mood.
Loneliness is subjective, and feelings are slippery. The neighbour numbers are harder to argue with: 66% of Toronto residents say they know only a few of their neighbours, or none at all, according to the Toronto Social Capital Study.
In a city of nearly three million people, two out of every three are surrounded by neighbours they mostly do not know. They share walls, hallways, elevators, and garbage chutes. They nod in the lobby and never learn each other's names.
The Culture of Giving Space
There is a particular Toronto behaviour that anyone who has lived there will recognize instantly, even if they have never named it. It happens on the TTC. You step onto a streetcar or a subway car, and what you encounter is a kind of aggressive neutrality. Eyes forward. Earbuds in. A careful arrangement of bodies to maximize personal space. If someone's bag is on the seat next to them, you will stand rather than ask them to move it. If a stranger makes eye contact, you look away by reflex, not out of rudeness.
The unwritten rule is: don't bother anyone. Give people their space. This is framed as respect. It functions as a wall.
NOW Magazine, Toronto's alternative weekly, ran a story asking: "Are we building a city for lonely people?" The architects, planners, and researchers interviewed for the piece broadly said yes. The condo boom of the 2000s and 2010s produced hundreds of towers optimized for unit count rather than community: no common rooms, no courtyards, no places to linger, lobbies built to move people through instead of inviting them to stay, hallways that discourage loitering.
The Diversity Paradox
Toronto is, depending on how you measure it, one of the most diverse cities in the world. The City of Toronto's own Toronto at a Glance figures put immigrants, meaning residents born outside Canada, at 51.2% of the city on the 2016 census. That is rightly a source of immense pride, and, in ways urban researchers are only beginning to grapple with, a factor in the loneliness crisis.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist best known for "Bowling Alone," published "E Pluribus Unum" in 2007, a study that caused considerable controversy. Drawing on a survey of 30,000 Americans in 41 communities, he found that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, residents of all races tended to "hunker down." They trusted their neighbours less, participated in fewer community activities, had fewer close friends, and watched more television. The effect held even after controlling for income, crime rates, and other variables.
Putnam was at pains to emphasize that he believed diversity was, in the long run, a tremendous social good. But in the short and medium term, he argued, it created challenges for social cohesion that communities needed to actively work to overcome. The key word is "actively." Diversity creates the conditions for connection. Whether connection follows depends on having structures and spaces that bring people together across lines of difference.
Toronto has the diversity. What it has not built, at anything close to sufficient scale, are those structures and spaces.
The Desolate
The Angus Reid Institute, working with Cardus, sorted Canadians into five groups along two axes: social isolation (an objective measure of how often they see people) and loneliness (a subjective feeling of lacking connection). The group scoring badly on both they called "The Desolate." They are alone and in pain about it.
The Angus Reid Institute put 23% of Canadians, nearly one in four, in that group. Visible minorities, Indigenous Canadians, LGBTQ2 Canadians, and people with disabilities were all overrepresented in it.
Toronto has a large share of several of those populations. That is a consequence of building a city that attracts people from everywhere and then provides no mechanism for helping them belong.
The Pay-for-Friends Economy
Timeleft, which uses an algorithm to seat groups of strangers together for dinner at a restaurant, is one entrant in what has become a booming market in Toronto. There is 222, a paid membership that runs a personality quiz and then seats you with five to seven compatible strangers for a dinner or an event. Friendship coaches, a concept that would have been unintelligible a decade ago, charge by the hour to help adults learn how to make and maintain friends. There are apps and meetup groups and speed-friending events modelled on speed dating, where you rotate through five-minute conversations and check a box if you'd like to exchange numbers.
The market exists because the need is real. That does not make it any less strange. Friendship, for most of human history, was a byproduct of proximity, shared experience, and time. You did not need to buy it because it was woven into the fabric of daily life. You made friends at church, at the union hall, at the playground while your kids played, at the neighbourhood pub where you went most Fridays, because the structure of your days put you repeatedly in contact with the same people under conditions that allowed trust to develop gradually.
What Toronto is experiencing is what happens when that structure collapses and the market rushes in to fill the void. The market is efficient in its way, but efficiency is not really the point of friendship.
Why the Cold Gets Colder
In a city where winter lasts roughly five months, the design of the built environment matters even more than it does in temperate climates. From November through March, the casual outdoor interactions that sustain social life in warmer months simply stop. The patios close, the parks empty, and the street life that fills Toronto's neighbourhoods from May to September retreats behind closed doors.
And yet Toronto has done very little to create indoor public spaces where people can gather without spending money. The city's libraries serve this function heroically, and their usage numbers reflect it. But libraries are quiet spaces by design, not places where you strike up a conversation with the person next to you. Shopping malls are warm, but they exist to sell you things. Community centres exist but are perpetually underfunded and often require memberships or program fees.
So for nearly half the year, the only warm, free, socially acceptable places to spend time are your own home and, increasingly, your own phone. Winter does not cause loneliness, but in a city that has failed to plan for the social needs of its residents, it concentrates and deepens it.
The Belonging Gap
Torontonians are not cold people. Spend any time in the city and you encounter extraordinary warmth, particularly in immigrant communities that have preserved cultures of hospitality and mutual aid: the Tamil community in Scarborough, the Portuguese along Dundas West, the Chinese communities stretching from old Chinatown through Markham. Within these enclaves people gather, celebrate, and support each other through crises.
The belonging gap sits between communities, in the spaces where they should overlap and don't. Nobody speaks in the condo elevator. On the transit route everyone is sealed into their own auditory world, and in the park, families from different backgrounds occupy different corners.
The great promise of the internet was connection across distance. What Toronto is short of is connection across very small distances. Across the hallway. Across the street. Across the park. Those are the connections that turn a population into a community, and Toronto, for all its global sophistication, has struggled most to build them.
For someone looking for that repetition now, the Toronto clubs directory lists groups that meet every week or month and links to the organizers. It sorts them by type: Toronto run clubs, Toronto book clubs and Toronto hiking and outdoor clubs.
Three million people live in a city designed for everyone and for no one in particular. Two thirds of them know few or none of the people on the other side of the wall.