Ask a single person in Toronto why dating here is difficult, and the conversation tends to circle two things almost immediately: money and space. Everyone's priced out of somewhere, everyone's condo is too small to host anyone, and the version of a social life that used to involve casually inviting people over has quietly become a luxury most Torontonians in their twenties and thirties can no longer really afford.
That instinct holds up under real scrutiny. Toronto has some of the most current, most rigorously collected loneliness data of any city in this series — and it points directly at the city's own housing and cost-of-living crisis as a structural cause, not a coincidence sitting next to it.
What Toronto's own research found
The Toronto Foundation's 2023 Vital Signs report, built on the 2022 Toronto Social Capital Study — a survey of more than 4,000 residents conducted with the Environics Institute — found that 37% of Torontonians report being lonely, a figure the report's lead researcher described as making Toronto one of the loneliest cities in the country. The same study found the share of Torontonians with six or more close friends had fallen to 28%, down from 37% just four years earlier, and that close to 40% of residents said they usually don't have anyone they can depend on when they really need help — up sharply from 27% in the prior survey. Based on those figures, the report estimated that roughly 200,000 Toronto residents have no close friends to turn to at all.
This is not a national estimate applied loosely to Toronto. It is Toronto's own data, collected specifically about Toronto, tracked against a prior wave from the same instrument so the change over time is directly measurable rather than inferred.
The housing crisis, and what it does to a social life
Toronto is now the most expensive city in Canada to live in, having surpassed Vancouver, and the most expensive in the country in which to buy a home. A 2024 analysis found that affording an average home in Toronto requires an income of roughly $200,000 a year — a threshold only about 15.5% of Toronto-area households actually clear, according to Statistics Canada income data. The practical result, as one recent housing analysis put it plainly, is that homeownership remains out of reach for the overwhelming majority of the region's residents: an estimated 85% of the roughly 6.5 million people across the Greater Toronto Area.
This has a specific effect on dating that goes beyond simple cost of living. Toronto's housing stock has shifted heavily toward small condominium units, built at a pace that, in recent years, has badly lagged population growth — one widely cited estimate found Toronto's population growing more than ten times faster than its supply of new rental units. A city dominated by small, expensive units doesn't just make living alone harder to afford. It makes the ordinary, casual version of hosting — the dinner party, the "come by after work" gathering — logistically difficult for a large share of the dating-age population, in the same way it does in New York, but compounded here by a genuinely worse ratio of housing cost to income than almost any other city in this series.
The newcomer factor, considered structurally
Toronto has one of the highest shares of foreign-born residents of any major city in the world: according to the 2021 Census, 46.6% of the city's population was born outside Canada, with more than 12% having arrived in just the ten years before the census. This is, by a wide margin, the most distinctive demographic fact about Toronto relative to every other city in this series, and it carries a specific structural implication for dating that has nothing to do with where anyone is from and everything to do with how long it takes to rebuild a social network from scratch.
Every new relationship draws, to some degree, on an existing web of friends, coworkers, and casual acquaintances who provide introductions, shared context, and the ordinary social scaffolding that makes meeting someone new less daunting. A city where close to half the adult population has, at some point, had to rebuild that entire scaffolding after immigrating is a city where a very large share of the dating pool is doing the work of building local social capital from a more recent starting point than the national average — not because of any individual shortcoming, but because that is what immigration structurally requires, regardless of how long ago someone arrived or how settled they've since become.
What Toronto has going for it, and why it isn't enough on its own
None of this means Toronto is a bad place to date, or that its singles are approaching the market wrong. The city is genuinely one of the most diverse and dynamic in North America, with a strong economy, a growing population that continues to choose the city despite its costs, and a level of civic attention to its own social health — through efforts like the Toronto Foundation's ongoing Vital Signs research and the GenWell Project's work on face-to-face connection — that few cities match.
Those strengths are real. They just run into the same two structural walls the data describes: a housing market that has made the ordinary, casual version of a social life measurably harder to afford, and a population where a large and growing share is still in the process of rebuilding the local social networks new relationships tend to draw from.
What the data actually implies
The fix implied by Toronto's own numbers isn't "host more dinner parties" or "give the market time to cool," both of which run directly into the structural conditions described above rather than around them. It's something that works regardless of condo size or income bracket: a room, built and paid for by someone else, that puts people together directly rather than depending on anyone's apartment being big enough to host or their social network being established enough to introduce them.
Relish has hosted structured social evenings in Toronto for exactly this reason. Not because Torontonians aren't trying — a city that just measured its own loneliness rising sharply and responded with a 150-day civic campaign is a city taking the problem seriously. Because the city's own research, its housing crisis, and its demographic makeup all point at the same conclusion: getting two people together in a market this expensive and this full of residents still building their local social footing takes more deliberate engineering than "host a dinner party" allows for — and an evening built to do exactly that is a more honest answer than waiting for a bigger apartment.
Relish hosts structured social evenings for driven professionals in Toronto and 50+ other cities across the US, UK, Canada and Australia since 2014. Find a Toronto evening →
Sources
Toronto Foundation and the Environics Institute, 2022 Toronto Social Capital Study, as summarized in the 2023 Vital Signs Report: The Power of Us, and reported by NOW Toronto and CBC News
Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, Toronto immigration and place-of-birth data
The Green Line, "Toronto's high rent and housing costs have created a crisis," citing Ratehub.ca and Statistics Canada income data, 2026
Toronto Metropolitan University, The Crisis of Affordable Rental Housing in Toronto, research summary citing CMHC and city data
U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023, cited for national comparison