A rail yard turned into one of Canada's densest condo neighbourhoods

CityPlace

Built starting in the late 1990s on former railway lands next to the Rogers Centre, CityPlace became one of the largest and densest condominium developments in Canada.

Toronto skyline
Toronto skyline, 2012 — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

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CityPlace occupies land that was, for most of the 20th century, an active rail yard serving the lines running into Union Station, just south of the Rogers Centre and CN Tower. As rail operations consolidated and the yard's footprint shrank through the late 20th century, the city and developers began planning to redevelop the vacant land into housing, with construction on the CityPlace development beginning in earnest in the late 1990s and continuing in phases for over two decades.

One of Canada's densest neighbourhoods

The result is one of the largest concentrations of condominium towers in Canada, packed into a relatively small footprint between the rail corridor and the Gardiner Expressway, housing a population that grew from essentially zero to tens of thousands of residents within a generation. CityPlace has become a frequently cited case study, for better and worse, in debates about high-density downtown condo development, cited both as a model for adding significant housing supply near transit and as a cautionary example of underbuilt community infrastructure trailing far behind rapid residential growth.

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