Best Toronto Neighbourhoods for Families: We Scored 158

Toronto has 158 neighbourhoods, and the guides that rank for this search recommend a handful each. We scored all 158 on four public datasets that shape everyday life with young kids. They are licensed child-care spaces, City parkland, schools run by the two English-language public boards, and TTC stops. Mount Dennis comes first, then North Riverdale and Dovercourt Village. Each measure is worth a quarter of the score, and the whole method is set out below. The guides' picks are spread right across the score. Thirty-nine City neighbourhoods carry a name they recommend. Seven of them reach our top 15, and fourteen land in the bottom half of the city.

The 15 highest-scoring neighbourhoods

Every figure below comes from open data files we downloaded on September 7, 2026. Child care is licensed spaces in the infant, toddler and preschool groups, set against the children aged 0 to 4 the 2021 Census counts in the neighbourhood. Parkland is hectares of City park inside the boundary, per 1,000 residents on the same census count. Schools are sites run by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) or the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB). The bracketed figure is how many of them per square kilometre. The score runs to 100.

Read that table for what it counts and nothing else. It carries no crime data, no house prices and no school test results. Two of the 15 carry the City's Neighbourhood Improvement Area designation: Mount Dennis in first and Black Creek in eleventh. That designation rests on income, health and civic measures the score leaves out.

Two neighbourhoods in the whole city beat the city-wide figure on all four measures at once. Both are in this table: Mount Dennis, which is why it leads, and Old East York in fourth. Every other row is uneven. The parkland column runs from 0.02 hectares per 1,000 residents in Danforth to 5.08 in Mount Dennis, and Danforth still places eighth on the strength of the other three.

One row needs a warning. University, the neighbourhood around the downtown campus, shows 244.8 licensed spaces per 100 resident children aged 0 to 4. It has 165 children in that age group, the fewest of any neighbourhood in this table. Its centres are largely serving students and staff who live elsewhere, so treat that number as capacity in the area rather than capacity for the area.

How the score works

Four measures, equal weight, one method.

Child care. We placed all 1,089 licensed centres in the City's file (run date 04SEP26) inside a neighbourhood, then added up their infant, toddler and preschool spaces. We divided that by the number of children aged 0 to 4 the 2021 Census counts there. City-wide that is 44,809 spaces against 123,415 children, or 36.3 spaces per 100 children. Read it as a ceiling, for two reasons. O. Reg. 137/15, Schedule 1, licenses a preschool group for children "30 months or older but younger than 6 years". Some of that capacity is held for children older than the ones we counted. And the supply is 2026 while the children are 2021, so a neighbourhood that has grown since the census looks better covered than it is. Both apply to the parkland measure too, which divides 2026 parks by 2021 residents.

Parkland. The City's Green Spaces file (refreshed 2026-09-01) classes 1,624 shapes as Park, and we used only those. That leaves out golf courses, cemeteries, hydro corridors, traffic islands and land held by other public bodies. We merged the parks into one shape so overlapping records cannot be counted twice, then cut that shape to each boundary. It puts 8,071 hectares of parkland inside the 158 neighbourhoods, which is 2.9 hectares per 1,000 residents city-wide. Adding the conservation authority, provincial and federal, other City and open green space classes back in gives the same 15 neighbourhoods at the top, in a slightly different order.

Schools. The City's school file (refreshed 2026-05-27) holds 795 addresses belonging to the two English-language public boards. Four are board offices rather than schools. Five more are extra buildings of a school already counted in the same neighbourhood. That leaves 786 schools, divided by the neighbourhood's area. Adding the two French-language boards also returns the same 15 at the top and the same three neighbourhoods with no school at all.

Transit. The TTC schedule feed of 2026-08-27 lists 9,402 stops, and 9,044 of them sit inside a Toronto neighbourhood. Those are divided by area too.

Each measure becomes a percentile rank across all 158 neighbourhoods. A rank of 75 means the neighbourhood beats three quarters of the city on that measure. The four ranks are then averaged. Ranking uses the exact computed figure, never the rounded one printed in the table, and neighbourhoods that end on the same score share a rank.

Where the famous names land

The guides recommend a handful each, five in one and nineteen in another, and the same names keep coming back. They also use everyday names that do not match a City boundary. One guide defines Riverdale as everything east of the Don Valley to Jones Avenue and south of the Danforth. That covers more than one City neighbourhood, so a popular name can appear on more than one row below.

Seven of those 39 rows make our top 15: North Riverdale, Old East York, East End-Danforth, Palmerston-Little Italy, Danforth, Wychwood and Runnymede-Bloor West Village. Fourteen sit in the bottom half, from Junction-Wallace Emerson in 82nd to Edenbridge-Humber Valley in 154th.

Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills shows how that happens. It has 18.55 hectares of parkland per 1,000 residents, the second most in Toronto, and more licensed spaces than resident children aged 0 to 4. It ranks 70th anyway, because it holds two schools across 8.84 square kilometres and 8.3 TTC stops per square kilometre. If you drive everywhere, none of that matters. If you want a school your child can walk to, it matters a lot.

Child care is the tightest of the four measures

The City says its licensed system "has over 1,000 centres and 24 home child care agencies providing early learning and care for children up to 12 years of age", and tells parents to "get on the wait list early to secure a spot". Our numbers show why the advice is blunt.

City-wide there are 36.3 infant, toddler and preschool spaces for every 100 children aged 0 to 4, so one space for every 2.75 children. The middle neighbourhood sits at 33.1 per 100. And 49 of the 158 neighbourhoods, close to a third of the city, are under 25 per 100.

Only four neighbourhoods have at least one such space for every resident child aged 0 to 4: Kensington-Chinatown, University, St.Andrew-Windfields and Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills. We cap this measure at 100 spaces per 100 children before ranking, because past that point the extra room is serving people who work or study nearby. It turns out to change nothing: with the cap removed, the top 15 is identical and University still sits 13th.

Parkland per person splits the city in two

Parkland is the widest spread of the four. The Parkland Strategy is the City's plan for this. It fulfils the Planning Act's requirement for a parks plan, which lets the City receive parkland from new developments. It "guides long-term planning for Toronto's parks, including where the City adds new parkland".

The middle neighbourhood has 1.51 hectares of City park per 1,000 residents. The highest is Morningside Heights in the northeast at 50.07. The lowest is Danforth at 0.02. That is not a rounding artefact: the whole Danforth boundary holds about 0.2 hectares of City park. Withrow Park sits roughly 300 metres beyond its edge and Monarch Park roughly 400 metres, so the neighbours are well served and the boundary is not.

This is the measure most likely to disagree with how a street feels. A ravine counts the same as a playground. If your child needs a splash pad rather than a wooded slope, check the actual park before you weigh this column.

Three neighbourhoods have no public school inside them

Yonge-Bay Corridor, Fort York-Liberty Village and Briar Hill-Belgravia each contain no school run by either English-language public board. Adding the French-language boards does not change that. It is three of 158.

Fort York-Liberty Village is the one that matters most for families, because it is full of new housing. The nearest TDSB school, The Waterfront School at 635 Queens Quay W, sits about 80 metres beyond the neighbourhood's edge. City School at 585 Queens Quay W is about 120 metres beyond it. So the schools are close. They are simply on the other side of a line the City draws for planning.

At the other end, East End-Danforth and Black Creek each hold eight schools, the most of any neighbourhood in the top 15.

Transit is the measure most of the city passes

Toronto has 14.1 TTC stops per square kilometre overall. The middle neighbourhood is above that, at 15.4, and 96 of the 158 clear the city-wide figure. A few very large, thinly served neighbourhoods drag the average down. Moss Park has 42.9, the highest in our top 15, and Bridle Path-Sunnybrook-York Mills has 8.3.

Stops are not the same as service. A street with hourly buses counts each of its stops the same as a subway platform. Treat this column as a measure of how far you walk to a stop, not how long you wait at one.

How to use this on your own shortlist

Start with the measure your household actually needs. A family with a toddler on a wait list should read the child-care column first and treat the rest as tie-breakers. A family with a nine-year-old can ignore it and read the school and transit columns.

Then check the specific address. Neighbourhood boundaries are a planning tool, not a fence. The City redrew them in April 2022, splitting 16 fast-growing neighbourhoods into 34 new ones, which is how 140 became 158. A park or a school one street beyond the line still serves you, as Fort York-Liberty Village shows.

Finally, go to the source for the two things that change. Child-care spaces open and close, so search the City's own child care list by address and join wait lists early. School placement is set by attendance boundaries, so put the exact address into the TDSB finder or the TCDSB school locator before you sign anything.