Richmond Hill has all the ingredients of an ideal suburb — beautiful homes, top schools, and endless amenities. Yet ask around, and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “There’s nothing to do.” How can a place with so much feel so uneventful? The answer isn’t about population or entertainment — it’s hidden in how we move, gather, and experience the city itself.
by: Zidan Li
Richmond Hill is a desirable place to live, featuring large homes, quiet neighborhoods, excellent schools, and many amenities and destinations: shopping plazas, parks, restaurants, libraries, and community centres. Yet locals can agree that we offer a certain level of “boringness” not found in cities like Toronto. Why is this?
Toronto’s advantage is not its high population or the numerous events, concerts, and attractions, but its walkability. The ability for people to access multiple destinations in a short amount of time in an environment that is safe, comfortable, and interesting.
In a walkable city, people can browse places efficiently without the need to commit to anything. You don’t have to assume an identity or engage with anyone. Friends can negotiate preferences on the spot and pivot with ease, increasing the odds of finding a place that suits everyone. More importantly, the act of walking and observing the environment immerses a person within a live corridor of society that is constantly changing and offering new sounds and sights – a destination in itself. Walkability is the allure of parks, college campuses, shopping malls, and historic city streets. Walking is the main attraction and finding something interesting is a bonus.
We don’t need to build condo towers or sacrifice on home sizes to be walkable.
In Richmond Hill, apart from the historical main area, most destinations are located along regional roads and are designed to serve regional populations. The places are more spacious, the parking lots are larger, and the roads leading to them are wider. These places are engineered to move people in and out quickly and efficiently, but the drawbacks are clear:
A typical resident needs to take the car since places of interest are statistically further away. These trips require planning and time, and group trips are especially challenging to coordinate. If the selected destination turns out to be unsatisfactory, the next best alternative may be on the other side of the city.
Residents with a fixed set of interests thrive in Richmond Hill as they can establish a routine, but those wishing to explore the city face constant friction. The “nothing to do” sentiment is a natural result of a system that makes it exceptionally challenging to discover new places and meet new people, and it is unsurprisingly our young adults that are the most negatively impacted.
You may ask, if the benefits of walkability are so clear, why have we not collectively pushed for it in Richmond Hill?
Our understanding of walkability is shaped by our lived experiences, which unfortunately are largely binary: you either get a large home inside a peaceful neighborhood but sacrifice on walkability, or you get the walkability but only in a dense urban area. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
We don’t need to build condo towers or sacrifice on home sizes to be walkable, as is the case in parts of Oak Ridges or Mill Pond, or the extremely wealthy and desirable neighborhoods in our region – Thornhill, Unionville, Rosedale, Forest Hill, The Beaches, and a few others. In Richmond Hill, improving walkability need not inconvenience residents with established routines, or damage the quiet and peaceful character of a neighborhood. When done well, walkability will only strengthen our character and make our city even more desirable.
By failing to provide walkable places, Richmond Hill is doing its residents, and especially the younger generations, a major social and economic disservice. We need to capitalize on the existing places by connecting them in highly walkable (or bikeable) corridors, accessible to the people who live in that neighborhood. We need to invite new businesses – bars, restaurants, grocery stores, arcades, art shops, golf simulators, activity centres, even currency exchanges – into our city and close to our residents.
We are lucky to have Yonge Street and other commercial corridors. It is time we treat these places with more respect and build a city for everyone.
We better now focus on cleaning up the snow from streets, specially around safety zones for children and elders; we will have enough time to make dreams. Thanks