The Mimico skyline appears like an ever-changing Oz on the horizon. The narrow band of shoreline it clings to between the Queen Elizabeth Way and the lake is not on an east-west axis like downtown. Rather, it’s an angle that curves south, around the west side of Humber Bay, the concave dimple on the city’s southern edge.

From High Park the cluster of residential buildings rise out of the lush green canopy beyond Grenadier Pond. From Hanlan’s Point on Toronto Island it and the Mississauga skyline behind it make this region look like a near endless metropolis. Driving along the QEW itself is akin to the Jetsons-like experience of the Gardiner downtown, flying by buildings with brief glimpses of people inside.

To think that just a decade and a half ago the two Palace Pier towers immediately adjacent to the Humber River were the only tall buildings in the area, landmark sentinels that watched people come and go from the city.

Sometimes called Humber Bay Shores, this is the Etobicoke Riviera. Riviera is no joke either: it’s nice. Last Sunday on a summer bike ride along the water the place was a riot of happy-seeming people. Some rolling or strolling along the waterfront trails, even as part of it is being reconstructed currently, others sitting on cafe and bar patios, as if it were an architectural rendering come to life.

With the whiff of house-owning snobbery, there have been dismissals of this new neighbourhood for a few years now as if it were some kind of uninhabitable wasteland. There are too many people, too many buildings, too tall, too this, too that: the usual complaints.

I’d like to see the Venn diagram of people who hold this kind of opinion, and those who live in so-called “yellow belt” neighbourhoods, areas restricted to lowrise or single-family homes, where adding even gentle density is near impossible. There’s likely a lot of overlap.

One of the reasons Toronto has incredibly intense clusters of development like this is that very little growth is allowed elsewhere. Like Liberty Village, it’s a hero neighbourhood that allows this city to accommodate more people. If you don’t like it, tell your councillor you’d like more density in neighbourhoods of detached homes.

This new cluster is certainly not perfect and has problems shared by other growing parts of the city: the lack of truly affordable housing in the mix, unit size that makes it difficult or impossible for families to fit and, most profoundly here, it’s a transportation desert.

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Though the clanging and snorting of diesel GO trains are in view along the north side of the neighbourhood, the tens of thousands of people who live here have limited transportation options. Like a lot of Toronto today and historically, the people came first and transit planning and politics scrambled to catch up later. The best hope for the area in the short term may be a potential GO train station added at Park Lawn Rd. that will help zip residents downtown.

Though the neighbourhood feels like it’s coming into its own, it’s still quite new and doesn’t have a messy, lived-in feel. The urban thinker Jane Jacobs said neighbourhoods need 20 years to mature, so it’s at the toddler stage now. A generation allows time for people to make alterations, for new, maybe more interesting businesses to arrive. Perhaps too Marine Parade Dr., the neighbourhood’s main street, might get some kiosks or more patios to give people more reasons to linger in public. It’s a work in progress.

Not all the building are boring glass boxes either. At ground level there are garden suites that look quite pleasant and green spaces throughout, like around the pond at Jean Augustine Park and along both sides of Mimico Creek where there’s a paved path between the condos and creek, though they don’t continue north of the railway corridor right now. Some of the older buildings, like Palace Pier, are essentially gated compounds, but the newer buildings are much more sidewalk friendly.

Everything here is new, even the land it sits on. Looking at the City of Toronto Archives collection of aerial photos reveals a shoreline that itself grew. In the 1950s there was just a thin strip of land beyond what was the “motel strip” along Lake Shore Blvd. By 1970, fill had extended the shore dozens of metres into the lake, after which the first “tentacle” of land that would become Humber Bay Park West grew at the mouth of Mimico Creek.

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By the end of the decade a similar tentacle to the east of Mimico Creek was reaching out into the lake and by the mid-1980s the landform we have now was completed, though quite barren then. In the last three decades it has grown in with trees, meadows, lawns and wetlands and today is a massive park at the front door of Humber Bay Shore residents, the latest additions to this new part of the city.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

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