Skyscrapers in Toronto
Toronto has had more high-rise buildings under construction than any other city in North America for most of the past fifteen years, usually with New York a long way behind. Almost all of them are condominiums, which is why the skyline looks the way it does.
The CN Tower is not a building
The first question anyone asks about Toronto is whether the CN Tower counts, and the answer is no. At 553 m it is a free-standing broadcast and observation tower, and a tower is not a building because it has no continuously habitable floors. The CN Tower carries one seven-story pod near the top, with a restaurant and two observation levels; above and below it is a concrete shaft with elevators in it. Nobody lives or works along that height. The same distinction keeps the Eiffel Tower off building lists.
It held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975, when it opened, until 2007, when Burj Khalifa passed it during construction. It just does not appear in a ranking of buildings. The definition pageexplains where the line falls, and theobservation decks page treats it as one of the best decks anywhere.
The tallest actual building
First Canadian Place at 298 m is the tallest building in Toronto and has been since it opened in 1975: 72 floors of offices on King Street West, with the Bank of Montreal as anchor tenant and a white marble cladding the owners have spent years replacing with glass. Nothing has passed it in fifty years, which for a place building this hard is an odd fact, and it is about to stop being true. Three approved supertall towers are topping out now, led by SkyTower at Pinnacle One Yonge on the waterfront and The One at Yonge and Bloor, and all three clear 300 m.
Behind it come the St. Regis at 277 m, Scotia Plaza at 275 m and Aura at 272 m, but the architecturally important tower is shorter than any of them. Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower from 1967 is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work and the centerpiece of the Toronto-Dominion Centre, his clearest built statement of the black steel-and-bronze-glass tower. Its details, down to the bronze I-beam mullions that carry no load, were copied across Canadian downtowns for twenty years.
How many there are
At the 150 meter threshold the Council on Vertical Urbanism uses for city rankings, Toronto has roughly 60 to 70 completed buildings, around 30 of them above 200 m. Drop the bar to 100 meters and the count runs into the many hundreds. Toronto alone holds more tall buildings than Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary put together.
The completed total is not the unusual figure, sinceNew York and Chicago are both well ahead of it. The pipeline is the unusual part, and so is what sits in it. Only a tenth of Toronto's towers over 150 m predate 2000, and almost everything since has been a condominium. That is why the skyline reads as slender residential: a condo tower puts a small floor plate on a small lot and goes up 60 or 70 floors, where an office tower of that height needs a deep plate and a whole block.
More cranes than New York
Counts of high-rise buildings under construction have put Toronto first in North America in most years since about 2010, often with more than 120 towers going up at once against roughly 80 or 90 in New York and a similar number in Mexico City. Rider Levett Bucknall's crane index agrees: Toronto carries more tower cranes than any other city it surveys.
Why Toronto builds up
Three things push in the same direction. The first is population: Canada ran one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the developed world through the 2010s and early 2020s, and the Toronto region took the largest share of it.
The second is where that population cannot go. Ontario's Greenbelt, legislated in 2005, protects about 810,000 hectares of farmland and moraine in an arc around the city and forbids most development on it, and the lake closes the south side. Growth that in Houston would have spread outward as subdivisions had to go up instead.
The third is how the towers get paid for. A Toronto condominium is financed on presales: the developer sells 70 percent or more of the units off a floor plan before a lender releases construction money, and the deposits cover the early cost. That needs no anchor tenant, so a tower can start on demand that does not exist yet.
Where they stand
Most of the height is downtown, between the lake and Bloor Street, and the condominium boom has concentrated along the waterfront and through the Entertainment District west of the financial core, where parking lots and low warehouses turned into 50-story towers inside a decade. Three satellite clusters sit outside the center: Yonge and Eglinton, North York Centre and Scarborough Centre, each at a subway station, each a product of the policy of pointing growth at transit.
Underneath the financial district runs the PATH, about 30 kilometers of pedestrian tunnel linking more than 70 buildings, six subway stations and Union Station, with roughly 1,200 shops along it. Guinness World Records has listed it as the largest underground shopping complex. In February its purpose is obvious: a worker arrives, eats, shops and leaves without going outside.
The oldest towers are easy to miss between the new ones: the Royal York Hotel of 1929 and the Canadian Bank of Commerce building of 1931 were each the tallest in the British Empire. Seeskyscraper cities for how Toronto ranks.