While he was beginning to bounce between municipalities as a teenager, years of rapid, sprawling expansion were beginning to yield cracks and crevices in the city’s infrastructure and planning, and Toronto started to invert. After years of middle-class and wealthy migration to increasingly far-flung suburbs, the city’s center of wealth began to move back downtown, with gentrifiers recolonizing its core. Corresponding rises in land values pushed lower-class residents into the inner suburbs like Etobicoke and Scarborough and North York, while the middle-class moved further out to bedroom communities like Vaughan and Mississauga.

Unfortunately, those inner suburbs now occupied by droves of lower-class Torontonians—many of whom were, and are, recent immigrants and/or people of color—were originally designed for use by a car-owning middle class. (This trend towards outward migration was already beginning to develop when the city was amalgamated, and has only accelerated since.) To make matters worse, the new residents of these areas were hit especially hard by poor transit and connectivity; they lacked the essential tools for which their neighborhoods were designed. Combined with the increasing money and power held downtown and the expanding inequality that’s affected every other North American city this century, class- and geographically-based resentment started to take root throughout Toronto.

People living downtown couldn't fathom the difficulties of living anywhere north of Bloor Street, a longstanding separation marker, and found themselves struggling with their own traffic and density problems; people living anywhere else cursed the rich, latte-sipping elite who were demanding new condos and downtown transit lines while they waited for packed, irregular buses. This wave of urban/suburban division has been the not-so-hidden dynamic powering the last few Toronto civic elections, and was in fact the very force that propelled international laughingstock Rob Ford to victory in 2010: He was able to amplify the anger of people living in the suburbs and give voice to their frustration with the so-called downtown elite.

Tackling issues of widening inequality and crumbling infrastructure while trying to keep the city united in the face of a neighborhood-based resentment that’s becoming generational are all real problems for Toronto that will affect many of the biggest decisions the city will face over the next few decades. But the version of Toronto that lives in Drake’s music and lyrics is a city divorced from these quandaries—it’s a city where the boundaries separating each former municipality, and resident from resident, are blurring into non-existence. This is why Drake is the ideal ambassador for a new Toronto: He’s a reflection of its idealized form—a form that has yet to truly bloom in any meaningful political or sociological way yet. Kids from all over the city can find a piece of themselves in his music, or a location they recognize, and his songs express a love for the city as a unified whole, rather than discrete parts. When he celebrates the power of the 6, he’s talking about more than a specific neighborhood: From Rexdale to the Bluffs, from the Zoo to Long Branch, that one number encompasses nearly every inch of Toronto. The purity of his affection for the city can touch anyone who’s ever known what it’s meant to call somewhere home.