Housing Price Appreciation, Housing Affordability, and the Spatial Restructuring of Toronto Commuting
Abstract
This study investigates the spatial relationships among housing-market appreciation, housing affordability, and automobile commuting to Toronto across 23 census metropolitan areas and municipalities in southern Ontario from 2016 to 2021. Utilizing Statistics Canada Census data, the analysis employed linear and quadratic ordinary least-squares regression, Global and Local Moran's I, and residual spatial diagnostics to assess geographic patterns in average dwelling values, owner shelter-cost burden, and lone-driver commuting. The study found that average dwelling values increased significantly throughout the region, maintaining a strong nonlinear relationship with distance from Toronto, which indicates a persistent metropolitan accessibility gradient. Commuter volumes also demonstrated pronounced nonlinear distance gradients; however, housing appreciation was not significantly correlated with percentage changes in commuting (R2 = .045, p = .331), suggesting that the expansion of the housing market did not result in proportional growth in Toronto-bound automobile travel. The shelter-cost burden exhibited weaker distance relationships and greater residual spatial dependence, indicating localized affordability influences not fully explained by distance or dwelling values. Overall, the findings suggest an increasingly extensive regional housing market with spatially heterogeneous affordability and commuting outcomes, highlighting the importance of integrating housing, transportation, and regional planning.
Related
- Commuting Toeplitz operators with harmonic symbols on the Fock space
- Commuting analytic and co-analytic Toeplitz operators on the harmonic Bergman space
- Essentially semi-commuting singular integral operators with Cauchy kernel on L2
- Finite Matrix Rings of Even Size Are Determined by Their Commuting Graphs
- Borel complexity for product of trees and commuting partial maps
BibTeX
@misc{berry2026housing,
title = {{Housing Price Appreciation, Housing Affordability, and the Spatial Restructuring of Toronto Commuting}},
author = {Shawn Berry},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.06308},
eprint = {2609.06308},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06308},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Housing Price Appreciation, Housing Affordability, and the Spatial Restructuring of Toronto Commuting
AU - Shawn Berry
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.06308
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06308
AB - This study investigates the spatial relationships among housing-market appreciation, housing affordability, and automobile commuting to Toronto across 23 census metropolitan areas and municipalities in southern Ontario from 2016 to 2021. Utilizing Statistics Canada Census data, the analysis employed linear and quadratic ordinary least-squares regression, Global and Local Moran's I, and residual spatial diagnostics to assess geographic patterns in average dwelling values, owner shelter-cost burden, and lone-driver commuting. The study found that average dwelling values increased significantly throughout the region, maintaining a strong nonlinear relationship with distance from Toronto, which indicates a persistent metropolitan accessibility gradient. Commuter volumes also demonstrated pronounced nonlinear distance gradients; however, housing appreciation was not significantly correlated with percentage changes in commuting (R^2 = .045, p = .331), suggesting that the expansion of the housing market did not result in proportional growth in Toronto-bound automobile travel. The shelter-cost burden exhibited weaker distance relationships and greater residual spatial dependence, indicating localized affordability influences not fully explained by distance or dwelling values. Overall, the findings suggest an increasingly extensive regional housing market with spatially heterogeneous affordability and commuting outcomes, highlighting the importance of integrating housing, transportation, and regional planning.
ER -