Fall in Midtown

TIFF wraps up this Saturday, and somewhere between the last screenings and the first grey morning, Toronto flips seasons. The patios start stacking their chairs. The trees on the ravine trails go from tired green to red in what feels like a week. Midtown does not hold a press conference about it. It just gets on with the best two months of the year.

Fall has always been my favourite season in this part of the city. The air is cool enough to walk without planning around the heat. The neighbourhoods show their structure, the way a house shows better once the furniture is arranged. And this year there is something new in the air: for the first time in a very long time, you can move through the middle of Midtown without a fence in your way.

The Colour Season Starts Close to Home

You do not need to drive north to see fall colour. Some of the best of it runs through the middle of the city.

The Beltline Trail follows the old railway corridor from the Allen Road down through Forest Hill and into Moore Park. In October the canopy over the path turns every shade of orange a maple knows how to produce. It is flat, shaded, and mostly quiet, and on a Saturday morning it fills with runners and dog walkers who all seem to be in a better mood than physics allows.

Chorley Park, tucked off the north edge of Rosedale, drops down toward the ravine and gives you the same colour with almost none of the foot traffic. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, for all its formality, is one of the city's great autumn walks, long quiet roads under mature trees, the kind of canopy that takes a century to grow. Cedarvale Ravine on the west side of Forest Hill is the same idea in miniature.

The farmers markets wind down with the season, but not all at once. The Stop's market at Wychwood Barns runs Saturday mornings year-round, moving inside when the weather turns. The June Rowlands Park market at Davisville and Mount Pleasant runs Tuesday afternoons through late October. Evergreen Brick Works keeps its Saturday market going at the edge of the Don Valley, and a morning there followed by a walk up through Moore Park Ravine is about as good as a Toronto October gets.

The First Autumn of the Crosstown

The Eglinton Crosstown opened in February after close to fifteen years of promises, detours, and hoarding. Most of us stopped believing it would ever happen somewhere around year ten. Then one morning the trains were running.

This is the first fall with the line in service, and if you live near Yonge and Eglinton you can feel the difference. The intersection that spent a decade under construction is open. The fences are gone. You can walk from the subway platform to the shops without a detour around a scaffold. For years, clients asked me how much the construction was hurting values at Yonge and Eglinton, and the honest answer changed depending on the season. That question has quietly retired itself.

Line 5 changes the map of Midtown in practical ways. It runs east-west across Eglinton, from Mount Dennis in the west to Kennedy in the east, with stops at Cedarvale, Forest Hill, Chaplin, Avenue, Eglinton, and Mount Pleasant along the way. A neighbourhood that always had the subway now has a second line under it. You can live in the eastern stretch of Leaside or the quiet pockets around Chaplin and reach the spine of the city without a car. That was not true a year ago. Buyers notice these things slowly, usually in the first year after they happen. Which means right about now.

After Dark: Nuit Blanche and the Castle

Midtown after dark in October belongs to two traditions.

Nuit Blanche runs the night of October 3 into the morning of October 4. This is the twentieth edition, and the theme is Tomorrow's Memories. More than seventy installations go up across the city, all free, all night. The smart way to do it is not to try to see it all. Pick one or two zones, wear shoes that forgive you, and let the night run long. The city's arts community builds these things for a single night, and there is something honest about art that knows it will be gone by breakfast.

At the north end of the neighbourhood, Casa Loma celebrates the tenth anniversary of Legends of Horror through October. The castle opens its gardens, tunnels, and stables after dark for a self-guided walk that runs about two kilometres and takes about an hour. It is theatrical, a little ridiculous, and very Toronto: a century-old castle doing its best haunted house impression. Family hours run earlier in the evening for the smaller ones who want the atmosphere without the scare.

The Fall Market

Fall is the second act of the Toronto real estate year. The spring rush gets the headlines, but the weeks between Labour Day and early December are when serious buyers and serious sellers tend to find each other. The market this fall is worth being precise about.

TRREB's August figures put the GTA's average sale price at $993,410, down 2.8 per cent from a year earlier, on 5,057 sales. The composite benchmark sat at $925,900, down 4.5 per cent year over year. Inventory sits at 4.8 months of supply, which puts the market in balanced territory by any conventional measure. Not a buyer's market. Not a seller's market. A market where condition, location, and price do the deciding.

What that means in practice is this. Sellers who price to the market are trading, and quickly. Sellers who price to their memory of 2022 are sitting. Buyers have more time to look than they did two years ago, but the good houses, the ones with the right light and the right street, still move. Balance rewards accuracy on both sides of the table.

If you are thinking of buying this fall, walk the neighbourhoods while they are at their best. See the streets under colour instead of snow. If you are thinking of selling, the next eight weeks are the window. The market does not wait for January.

Fall in Midtown is not a consolation prize for summer ending. It is the season this part of the city was built for. The streets hold the light differently, the ravine trails put on their show, and for the first time in a long time, you can stand at Yonge and Eglinton and actually see the neighbourhood. I will be out walking it. Come find me at the market.