Trends

Here are a few highlights of the trends revealed by my annual survey of the street-level businesses on Bloor Street in Toronto between Spadina and Christie. (You can explore the data yourself on this page.)

Some notable changes in the composition of the businesses on the strip between 1995 and 2023:

  • the percentage of businesses selling prepared food (restaurants, cafés) and personal care (hairdressers, spas, nail salons) increased substantially
  • the percentage of businesses selling fresh food, clothing, home furnishing (furniture, beds, futons, kitchen equipment, home decoration, cushions, candles), art, literature, and music (art supplies, photo finishing, books, records, CDs), and travel products decreased substantially


The number of businesses selling prepared food increased steadily up to 2019, declined in 2020, and has held steady since then.

The number selling personal care items and services increased steadily from 2000 to 2013, and has leveled off since.

The number of travel-related businesses decreased a bit up to 2009, but has dropped dramatically since then. Some of these businesses have survived, but have moved from street level to the second floor. Presumably a good bit of business has moved online.

The number of clothing stores has decreased from a high of 27 in 1996 to 10 in 2023.

Businesses selling prepared food are mainly restaurants, cafés, and establishments I classify as purveyors of "fast food". The number of restaurants has been on a broadly upward trend, while the number of cafés has fluctuated. The number of fast food outlets has been fairly steady, with a decline in recent years.

Among restaurants, the number serving Japanese food increased a lot up to 2015 and has declined a bit since then, while the number of Korean restaurants peaked in 2008.

Meanwhile, Indian and Italian restaurants had disappeared in 2016, but since 2019 Indian restaurants have had a renaissance.

Many restaurants do not last long. The next chart shows, for each year since 1995, the number operating in 1995 that survived until that year (the blue bars), and also the survival of the ones that opened in subsequent years. For example, of the 48 restaurants operating in 1995, 39 remained in 1996, 34 in 1997, and only 5 in 2023 (Imonay Korean Restaurant, By the Way Café, Korean Village Restaurant, Korea House Restaurant, and Tacos El Asador). Of the 10 new restaurants observed in 1996, 5 survived until 1997, and all of these were out of business in 2017.

Many cafés do not last long either, but the total number of them varies more year-to-year than does the total number of restaurants.

A distinctive feature of the stretch of Bloor Street between Bathurst and Christie is the large number of businesses catering to speakers of Korean. I put a business in this category if it has significant signage in Korean. ("Significant" is subjective. I try to be consistent.) The number of businesses in this category grew substantially from 1995 to 2005, and has steadily fallen since then, from a peak of 74 to 40 in 2023. In the late 1990s, a significant number of businesses also catered to speakers of Spanish, but since then that number has steadily dwindled.

In every year, some stores are vacant. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the number of vacancies peaked during the 2007–2008 financial crisis (although the number was high in 2006, before the crisis). Also since 2014, and especially since 2020, the number has been high. (The numbers since 2017 include five spaces vacant because of the pending redevelopment of Mirvish Village, including the block occupied by Honest Ed's.)