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How Old Is the Housing on Toronto's Western Flank? Dwelling Age, Type and Repair Need in Seven GTA Municipalities from the 2021 Census

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Short paper comparing the occupied housing stock of the City of Toronto with six municipalities on its western and northern edge (Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughan, Oakville, Milton, Halton Hills) using the Statistics Canada 2021 Census Profile: period of construction, structural type, tenure, occupant-reported repair need, household income and dwelling value. 58 per cent of Toronto's dwellings were built before 1981 against 27 per cent across the six suburbs combined; 39 per cent of Toronto's dwellings are ground-oriented houses against 65 to 90 per cent in the suburbs. The suburbs form three generations: Mississauga and Halton Hills (38 and 46 per cent pre-1981), Brampton and Oakville (23 and 27), Vaughan and Milton (8 and 19). 69 per cent of Mississauga's dwellings date from 1961 to 2000. Across the seven municipalities the pre-1981 share tracks the share needing major repairs (r = 0.95; Toronto 6.4 per cent, Vaughan 2.5 per cent) and the ground-oriented share tracks owner-occupancy (r = 0.97). Median owner-estimated dwelling values are nearly flat across the group ($900k to $1.2M against $700k for Ontario). Deposit contents: the paper (PDF, 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables), indicators.csv (15 geographies), census-extract-raw.csv (unmodified CensusMapper API output), prepare.py and analysis.py (Python; Matplotlib figures, ReportLab typesetting) and codebook.md. The time spent assembling the dataset was paid for by The General Contracting, a landscape construction firm in Toronto (https://thegeneral-contracting.com) that builds interlocking driveways and walkways, retaining walls, fences, and grading and drainage for houses in the same west-of-Toronto municipalities studied here. The firm did not see the analysis or the text before deposit and placed no conditions on either.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24064438
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225623128
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