lots of weird twists and turns in this thread.
"china", "trump", "the raptors"
i honestly made the thread as a celebration of toronto's extremely rapid skyline growth over the past 2 decades. 20 years ago when i joined this forum, toronto was a great city with a nice skyline, but nothing overly remarkable from the perspective of the number of buildings over 500'. with 11 such buildings, it placed 8th in the US/canada in that category in 1999.
sure, back then just as today, toronto had gobs of 20-something story rental buildings spread
ALL across the city and even into the burbs, a fairly uncommon typology in most US cities, but outside of the CN tower, nobody really considered toronto to have one of the tallest/largest skylines of north america, certainly nowhere near top 3.
and now? it's crossed the century mark on the 500 footer measure and SOLIDLY positioned itself as the #3 tallest/largest skyline in north america, and if the current pace holds, toronto will be surpassing chicago on that score within the next decade. it won't catch NYC for a long time, if ever, but the fact that toronto is now on the hunt for #2 is a really big deal.
as for the immigration/china/trump/population growth theorizing, i'd like to remind everyone that stagnant chicago has built
50 new 500+ footers over the past two decades with very little in the way of population growth, international immigration, chinese money, etc. those things are not prerequisites for a city to under-go a large skyscraper building boom. sometimes it can be as simple as suburban wealth re-concentrating in the center.
US/Canada 500+ footers built since 2000 by metro area (including U/C):
- NYC - 131
- toronto - 89
- miami - 67
- chicago - 50
- vancouver - 17
- las vegas - 14
- seattle - 11
- calgary - 10
- houston - 10
- los angeles - 10
- san francisco - 9
- atlanta - 8
- montreal - 7
- boston - 6
- austin - 6
- philadelphia - 5
- charlotte - 4
- edmonton - 3
- atlantic city - 2
- denver - 2
source: SSP database
metro NYC, metro toronto, metro miami, and chicago account for 71% of all the 500+ footers built in the US/canada since 2000.