New Toronto is not a suburb of Toronto and never was. It is the brand a syndicate of manufacturers put on a factory town they platted in 1890, and the company that coined the name was insolvent by 1897.
The town was a business plan
Toronto manufacturers, Thomas McDonald among them, put the scheme together in 1889 and 1890, modelled openly on Rochester, New York. The first plan was registered on 16 January 1890, and by that October ten factories were operating. First through Seventh Streets were platted for workers' housing, and both sides of Eighth Street were reserved for industry, with a rail spur later running south down Eighth to serve it. The grid runs from First Street west to Twenty-Third, with Lake Shore Boulevard West the only main street across it, the rail corridor to the north and the lake to the south. It was incorporated as a village in 1913, became independent in 1920, joined the Borough of Etobicoke in 1967 and was amalgamated into Toronto in 1998.
Every employer it was built for is gone
The names and the dates are the reason the ground here is what it is. Goodyear Tire and Rubber of Canada opened in 1917 on twenty-three acres north of Lake Shore between Ninth and Thirteenth Streets, made tires and Pliofilm, employed more than thirteen hundred people, and closed on 31 May 1987. Anaconda American Brass took over J. F. Brown's copper and brass rolling mills at 70 Birmingham Street in 1922, ran permanently from 1928 with about fourteen hundred workers by 1967, paid for the town's street paving, sewers, ice arena and swimming pool, and closed in 1989. Campbell Soup ran at 60 Birmingham from about 1930 until the closure was announced in 2018, and the plant came down in 2020 and 2021. Around those three were DuPont's Fabrikoid works from 1915, the Donnell and Mudge tannery from 1918 and Gilbey's distillery from 1933. Rubber, tanning, brass, chemicals, distilling and canning, all within a few blocks of the houses.
What stands there now tells you where the neighbourhood went. Daniels bought the Goodyear block in 1988 and built Lakeshore Village from 1992. The Anaconda site is the Toronto Police College, the Campbell Soup site is three logistics buildings with the plant's southern facade built into them, and the Gilbey land is now the Ford Performance Centre, where the Maple Leafs practise. The industrial land north of Birmingham did not become housing. It went back to industry.
What gets built here now
The housing descends directly from that 1890 worker plat: modest frame and brick bungalows and small two-storey houses, built roughly between the 1910s and the 1950s. In the City's 2016 profile for the neighbourhood, forty-six per cent of dwellings predated 1960 and single-detached houses were twenty-nine per cent of the stock. Larger houses sit in the pockets south of Lake Shore, the 1990s layer is mostly Lakeshore Village on the old Goodyear ground, and modern rebuilds arrive one lot at a time. I am not going to publish a typical lot frontage here, because I could not find an authoritative source for one.
Along Lake Shore the governing policy has been Site and Area Specific Policy 21, which states that building heights should not exceed four storeys between Etobicoke Creek and Dwight Avenue. That is why New Toronto looks nothing like Humber Bay Shores, four kilometres east. The City is now rewriting that framework through the Lake Shore Boulevard West Study, and its recommendations have not reached Council. Ask me where that study stands before you rely on the four-storey number.
The strip, the streetcar and the lake
Lake Shore is the only retail street, a low-rise run of two and three storey buildings with shops at grade, and the Lakeshore Village BIA, established in 1973, covers it only as far west as Twelfth Street. The landmarks are the 1935 post office at 2930 Lake Shore, Colonel Samuel Smith Park at the foot of Kipling, opened in 1996, with an outdoor skating trail in winter, and the Humber Lakeshore Campus, which was the Mimico Branch Asylum of 1889.
The same street carries the streetcar. The 507 Long Branch was restored as a separate route on 19 November 2023 because the merged 501 Queen had chronic reliability problems. It is a long ride downtown. I have not found a published running time, so make the trip yourself at the hour you would actually travel. The faster option is the train, and neither GO station is inside New Toronto. Long Branch sits off the west end and Mimico off the east, and both are mid-way through accessibility work with no published completion date. The Gardiner Expressway does not run through New Toronto. It ends at the 427 and QEW junction.
What I tell buyers to check
Assume the land has an industrial history until someone shows you otherwise. A Phase One environmental site assessment is a records review, a site visit and interviews. It involves no sampling and no laboratory analysis, so it tells you only whether there is reason to worry. If it flags a potentially contaminating activity, only a Phase Two, which is soil sampling and laboratory work, answers the question, and that costs more and takes longer. A Record of Site Condition, filed on Ontario's public Environmental Site Registry, is required when land changes to a more sensitive use, and industrial to residential is the example the province names. An existing house on a former industrial block may never have triggered that, so there may be no record at all. This is general information and not legal advice. Have your lawyer and a qualified environmental consultant confirm anything specific to a property.
Know which blocks carry the history. Contamination migrates, so the question is what was on the block and not only what was on the lot. I would always ask about the Goodyear footprint between Ninth and Thirteenth, the Birmingham Street sites, and anything near Eighth Street where the spur ran. On a new build on a former plant site, ask for the record and read the conditions, because a site can be cleaned to a generic standard or approved under a risk assessment that leaves contamination in place subject to conditions running with the property.
The houses were built before modern codes. Nearly half the dwellings here predate 1960 and the worker-housing core is older again. Have the inspector look specifically for knob-and-tube wiring and sixty-amp services, galvanised or lead water service lines, asbestos in vermiculite, pipe wrap and floor tile, lead paint, rubble foundations, clay or Orangeburg drain laterals, low basement head height, undersized footings under an added second storey, and buried oil tanks.
The rail corridor is the noise source, not an expressway. The northern boundary is the CN mainline carrying GO's Lakeshore West service, and Metrolinx is electrifying it and pushing toward service every fifteen minutes or better, which means more train events per hour permanently. The Birmingham employment lands are being rebuilt for logistics, so truck traffic there is permanent rather than temporary. It is the main reason north of Lake Shore and south of Lake Shore are two different purchases. Stand on the block early in the morning and again late at night.
Comparables here are thin, and often not comparable. A 1930s worker's cottage, a 1990s townhouse on the old Goodyear ground and a recent rebuild can sit within a block of each other and share nothing. Detached houses are under a third of the dwellings and much of the rest rarely trades, so widen the radius and you are pulling comparables out of Mimico and Long Branch, which sit under different planning rules.