Welcome to East Gwillimbury, the fastest growing municipality in Canada

Thestar.com
Feb. 10, 2022

Exiting Highway 404 about an hour’s drive north of Toronto, a sign welcomes visitors to the Town of East Gwillimbury. It’s a tucked-away town residents describe as a quiet place where everyone knows their neighbours.

The sign reports a population of 26,000 -- but lately, residents have had a lot more neighbours to get to know, as the town was the fastest growing municipality in Canada among those with 5,000 or more people between 2016 and 2021, according to census data released Wednesday.

“It progressively got busier and busier,” says Jacqueline Hart, 60, who has lived in the town for 30 years.

Off the highway, the East Gwillimbury GO station has seen more traffic of late, residents say, with more riders hopping aboard bound for Toronto’s Union Station. Turning onto the town roads, more signs announce new housing developments, and others still, “Coming soon!” Right nearby are barns dotting farmland. Convenience stores pop up in small plazas around town.

“We first moved here when we were just married, because we wanted a smaller community to raise our family,” said Hart, a semi-retired computer analyst. She moved to Holland Landing, one of several communities within the town.

“It was a nice little community, Newmarket was close, but you know all your neighbours and there were only a couple subdivisions. There wasn’t a lot of growth going on at that point in time.”

That’s changed. Between 2016 and 2021, the town grew from a population of 23,991 to 34,637 -- a 44.4 per cent increase.

And housing academics caution that with a big population boom comes big responsibilities, saying urban sprawl and the rapid growth of distant suburbs can have a considerable impact on the environment and requires a mix of housing to meet the needs of the growing population.

The mayor of East Gwillimbury says they’re up to the task.

“Our focus is on building diverse, and attainable housing, job creation, while at the same time promoting environmental sustainability,” said Virginia Hackson.

Hackson said several new parks and trails were built in the last few years and a new distribution centre is being built in the community, adding the town is working to grow into a more urbanized community rather than just a suburb.

“People are moving up north from the GTA and I believe it has to do with the style of the houses we are creating. People want a front door and a back door,” she said.

Statistics Canada notes the growth in East Gwillimbury is part of urban spread. Out of the 25 municipalities with the highest population growth in Canada, most were within large or small urban centres, or close to them.
The outskirts of census metropolitan areas are also seeing faster growth compared to suburbs closer to the centre, indicating urban spread is reaching farther out.

More “distant” suburbs may be attractive due to lower housing prices and being close to nature, and the growth could also be fuelled by the work-from-home shift since the pandemic’s onset, according to the statistics agency.

The population surge in East Gwillimbury is not a surprise, said Roger Keil, a professor and political scientist who specializes in urban geography at York University. He said it mirrors the growth rates Vaughan and Markham experienced 20 years ago

However, the level of expansion can be shocking to see up close, he said.

“I’ve been driving up there a couple of times lately, and it’s an exploding community, it’s mind boggling even for someone like me who has been studying suburbanization,” said Keil.

He said lands were made available by the province in the 1990s and early 2000s, which has led to development of single-family home construction in East Gwillimbury, he said.

But there are concerns when it comes to the climate and the impact of sprawl if proper planning is not done now to create more diverse housing, Keil said.

Needing cars to get around a suburb, and a suburb that is becoming more dense, will become an issue, said Keil. “Even if all the cars were electric cars, we would still have traffic jams and a completely unsustainable form of living. They need to urbanize and densify immediately,” he said.

Job creation, a hospital and more schools are crucial, he explained. (Hart said there wasn’t a high school in Holland Landing when she moved there, and many residents still go to schools in Newmarket or Georgina.)

Some residents in East Gwillimbury have expressed frustration with its rapid growth and use of whitebelt lands, which is the land between the greenbelt and the developed lands of the Toronto CMA.

Housing developments have popped up where wildlife once wandered.

“I call them chicken coops, they’re so close together,” Marilyn Castagna, a resident of River Drive Park, another community in East Gwillimbury, said of the developments. “It’s affected the deer.”

Even without the area being fully built up, the new-build housing is attractive to many -- but it comes with a price tag. Donald Gooding lived in East Gwillimbury up until five years ago and still comes to the same pharmacy, located in a small plaza between two elementary schools.

“I used to live around the corner,” said the 63-year-old who now lives further north, in Georgina. “The guy who bought my house, he ripped it down and now the property’s worth $1.8 million. And I sold for $500K.”

People are coming to the town to get out of the city, Gooding said, where housing prices are pushing people out of the market. But the area is starting to get expensive now, too.

In the first half of 2020, the average price of a detached home in East Gwillimbury was about $833,163. By the first half of 2021, it had increased to $1,301,817, according to a report by Re/Max

“Where are you going to go?” Gooding said. “To rent a house now, you’re looking at $3,000-plus. Then if you’ve got kids, there’s daycare, that’s a couple grand. Then you’ve got your cars. It’s just frickin’ nuts.”

Valerie Preston, a geography professor at York University, said people are attracted to places like East Gwillimbury due to its housing being constructed in large numbers.

“By Toronto standards, it’s relatively cheap for a single-family house. People are moving out because they want a detached house,” she said.

East Gwillimbury is taking fields and quickly turning them into houses -- and a serious conversation needs to be had about the environmental impact of intensified urban growth, Preston explained.

Residents are having to choose between small apartments in Toronto, or sprawling housing, and there needs to be more of a middle ground -- housing that can attract families in places like Toronto, she said.

“For example, in places like Paris and Berlin and New York, children grow up in apartments ... but they are generally lower, about six storeys,” she said. “It’s clear that we can’t keep sprawling out into East Gwillimbury, it’s not sustainable.”

At some point, there will not be enough land left to develop detached or low-density sites. Until that happens growth will happen but not as rapidly, as East Gwillimbury is not a huge area, she said.

“Part of what will curb sprawl is that even though those single-detached and row houses are cheaper in East Gwillimbury ... they are still expensive,” she said.

Despite the town’s growth, East Gwillimbury still feels like the place Hart moved into three decades ago.

“We still have that small town community and the facilities are just getting better and better, because they’re building around us,” Hart said. “I still love it. It still feels like home.”