Willowdale East

Willowdale East is home to numerous green spaces scattered throughout the area. Massive malls including North York Centre and Yonge-Sheppard Centre are visible in the area. This area is also a food hub of the city with restaurants filling the streets including Yonge St., Sheppard Avenue, and North York Centre (Empress Avenue). The area has multiple routes for biking, trekking and just simply walking.Despite all this, Willowdale East is also extremely quiet in spite of the major streets and highways that are present in it.

The planning mostly uses the major streets vs minor street layout where most of the commercial plots are near streets like Yonge Street and most institutional and residential are more within the communities. However, there is one significant feature that you can notice, there is a significant increase in elevation from around the Willowdale-Sheppard intersection towards the Bayview-Sheppard intersection. As we get closer to the intersection, the streets south of Sheppard and north of the 401 start to become more windy, most likely to keep the low speed limit while allowing easy access to higher elevation.

Willowdale East is a fairly populous neighbourhood, with a population of 50,434 people, this is a 12% increase between 2011 and 2016. With this population the neighbourhood has 10,087 people/km2. The neighbourhood also has a huge number of immigrants, making up 61.8% of the neighbourhood, 10.6% more than all of Toronto’s. The neighbourhood’s male to female percentage is 47% to 53%.

71% of the neighbourhood has a non-English mother tongue and 51% use that language at home. In this 8595 people have Mandarin as their mother tongue and 6730 speak it at home. 75% of the neighbourhood is a visible minority and 49% of the neighbourhood is from East Asia.

Many areas in the neighbourhood are not easily accessible with transit. For example, areas from Hollywood Avenue in the south and Byng Avenue in the North, also Kenneth Avenue in the West and Wilfred Avenue in the East. The closest subways are on Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue and the bus service on Bayview Avenue is extremely slow.

I would change the parks and rec development plan in the north-eastern part of the neighbourhood. I would most likely add quite a bit of new parks and rec areas.