Fort York and Liberty Village residents are starting to worry about this summer’s World Cup
Thousands upon thousands of soccer fans will head to BMO Field in June
Now that the province has paid its $97-million portion of FIFA funding, the countdown to June is really on. A recent Deloitte report prepared for Airbnb estimated that 146,000 tourists requiring accommodation will visit Toronto for World Cup matches, plus we can expect thousands of others from the GTA to descend on BMO Field.
Related: Airbnb is paying Torontonians to rent their homes to World Cup fans
According to a CBC story, some local residents are beginning to get concerned.
“We do have some concerns about litter and how that will be handled with the high volume of visitors that will be coming to the area,” said Jennifer Poon, a volunteer executive member of the Fort York Neighbourhood Association, at a community meeting this week. “Certainly transit impacts are something that we’re also thinking about, and safety considerations. We want to make sure that everyone who visits and lives here is safe and secure for the duration of the games.”
Jesse Topliffe, the chair of the CityPlace Fort York BIA, told the CBC that his organization had taken notes during the World Series last November. “Some of the learnings would be: you need more staff than you think, you need more product than you think, if you have scheduled a vacation during that time, you might want to reconsider,” he said. “And certainly, traffic and transit become a bit trickier with that volume.”
Liberty Village residents have complained for years about traffic congestion, well ahead of the World Cup’s planned arrival. In a summer 2024 update, Councillor Ausma Malik posted on her website, “I share the serious concerns of Liberty Village residents and visitors about worsening traffic congestion. While I know many of the challenges are not new, and are a result of planning decisions over many years, they have worsened with construction and events in the area, and the situation is at a critical point. My commitment is to keep working with seriousness to address the issue and make progress together.”
In an update last December, Malik detailed improvements made in the area, such as the installation of signage, speed bumps and traffic cameras.
Last year, Malik established a neighbourhood planning table focusing on transportation, event management and public engagement.
The first World Cup game in Toronto takes place June 12.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
