King West vs Davisville Village: Two Ends of the Yonge Line

Last updated 10 September 2026. Written by Jatin Dua, Broker of Record at RE/MAX Quantum Realty, 799 The Queensway, Etobicoke · Toronto neighbourhood comparison · 9 min read

Opposite ends of Line 1, and both mostly renters

The reason these two get compared is that they’re structurally the same bet. Both are dominated by high-rise apartments. Both have a resident population that mostly rents. Both sit directly on Line 1, one near the southern end and one ten stops north. And in both cases the thing you’d actually buy is a one- or two-bedroom condo in a building put up in the last twenty-five years.

The differences are in the surrounding fabric. King West is downtown: the Entertainment District core is 0.986 square kilometres in Ward 10 Spadina-Fort York, and the resident population went from 750 in 1996 to 7,500 in 2005 to 25,094 in 2021. Davisville is midtown, built along the Yonge spine between Davisville Ave and Eglinton, with a low-rise interwar house belt sitting immediately to the east of Mount Pleasant Rd.

Neither of these is one neighbourhood

King West is a marketing name with no MLS code. TRREB files the sales in C01, split between Waterfront Communities C1 and Niagara; the City spreads the area across #164 Wellington Place, #165 Harbourfront-CityPlace and #166 St Lawrence-East Bayfront, from a legacy unit numbered #77 Waterfront Communities-The Island.

Davisville Village is worse, because the City moved the lines underneath it. TRREB uses C10, made up of the communities Mount Pleasant West and Mount Pleasant East. On the City side, the legacy unit was #104 Mount Pleasant West, with a 2016 population of 29,658. In the April 2022 restructure it was split in two: #173 North Toronto, 11,111 people, and #174 South Eglinton-Davisville, 18,547. Adjacent units are #99 Mount Pleasant East, #100 Yonge-Eglinton and #97 Yonge-St. Clair.

There’s a second split that matters more day to day. Davisville is bipolar by built form. West of Mount Pleasant Rd, along Yonge, it is overwhelmingly high-rise rental and condo. East of Mount Pleasant Rd, it is interwar detached and semi-detached houses. Buyers who say Davisville often mean one and get shown the other.

The money, and the one benchmark that went up

Community-level figures below are Q1 2026 (January to March), the most recent quarter TRREB publishes at community level and therefore roughly six months old. Benchmark figures are August 2026. TRREB doesn’t publish a Home Price Index at community level, so for King West the closest published backdrop is the city-wide benchmark.

Read the last two rows twice. In a market where the City of Toronto composite fell 3.73% and the city’s apartment benchmark fell 6.88% year over year, C10’s composite rose 2.56% and its apartment segment fell only 1.53% — by a wide margin the least-bad apartment benchmark in midtown or north Toronto. That is the single strongest argument for Davisville, and it isn’t an argument about the units. It’s an argument about the district.

Two further C10 figures for August 2026: the district carried 3.8 months of inventory against a city-wide 4.6, and it has done 426 sales year to date at 99% of list and 29 days on market. Its August detached and semi counts — 5 and 3 sales — are far too small to read as anything but examples, and I’d say the same to a client’s face.

Who is actually living in these buildings

Davisville’s tenure split is striking. In #173 North Toronto, 89.9% of the 9,430 households are in apartments of five storeys or more, 81.4% rent, the 2020 median household income was $70,000, and 30.9% of the stock was built between 2016 and 2021 — nearly a third of it is under ten years old. There are 15 single-detached houses in the entire neighbourhood. In #174 South Eglinton-Davisville, 85.7% of 13,185 households are in 5+ storey apartments, 69.6% rent, median income was $80,000, and 21.7% was built 2016 to 2021.

Cross Mount Pleasant Rd into #99 Mount Pleasant East and the picture inverts: 29.9% single-detached, 22.0% semi, 55.1% owner-occupied, a 2020 median household income of $110,000 and 51.5% of the stock built before 1960. Same identity on a listing, different country.

King West’s renter picture shows up in the lease data rather than the census. TRREB’s C01 leased 4,233 apartments in Q2 2026 — the deepest rental pool in the city — at average rents of $1,934 for a bachelor, $2,475 for a one-bedroom, $3,494 for a two-bedroom and $4,446 for a three. If your plan is to rent the unit out, that depth is the meaningful difference: it’s the gap between a two-week vacancy and a two-month one. All census figures here are 2021 Census with income for 2020.

Getting around: ten stops against a walk

Davisville has Line 1 at Davisville station, 1900 Yonge St, opened 30 March 1954 and accessible since 2002, plus Eglinton and St Clair. Line 5 Eglinton opened 8 February 2026, adding Eglinton and Mount Pleasant stations to the area; Mount Pleasant station reuses the catalogued, brick-by-brick-disassembled façade of the 1928 Imperial Bank of Canada building. Buses at Davisville are the 11 Bayview, 14 Glencairn, 28 Bayview South and 97 Yonge; at Mount Pleasant, the 34 Eglinton, 74 Mount Pleasant, 103 Mount Pleasant North and 334 Blue Night. Davisville to Union is 10 stops on Line 1; Eglinton to Union is 11. There’s no GO station and no direct expressway frontage — the DVP comes via Bayview or Bloor St E, the Allen via Eglinton Ave W.

King West doesn’t count stops to Union because you can walk to it. Union Station is the only Toronto stop shared by all seven GO lines and UP Express, and it’s walking distance from the eastern end of the corridor. Line 1 stops at St Andrew and King, both directly on King St; the 504 King streetcar runs 504A Dundas West to Distillery Loop and 504B Dufferin Gate Loop to Broadview, with the 304 King overnight every 30 minutes, plus the 501 and 301 Queen, 510 Spadina, 511 Bathurst and 509 Harbourfront. Gardiner ramps sit at Spadina, Rees and York/Bay.

Two disclosures. The King Street Transit Priority Corridor runs Bathurst to Jarvis and cars entering it must turn right at the next intersection, with left turns prohibited — the City’s July 2024 dashboard reported a 19% decrease in motor vehicle volumes on King and a 50% reduction in movement violations in the PM peak, alongside a 16% decrease in all-day weekday transit ridership against 2019 and a 111% increase at weekends. And Ontario Line tunnelling began 20 April 2026 on a $34 billion project with no firmer timeline than the early 2030s; the City’s own dashboard records that Ontario Line closures on Queen pushed an extra 200 to 300 vehicles onto King in Fall 2023, a 33% PM-peak increase.

Schools, with the caveat that matters

The Fraser Institute figures below are data year 2023/24, and both the TDSB and OPSBA dispute the methodology — I quote them because buyers ask, not because I think a single rating settles anything about a school.

Davisville’s secondary numbers are its selling point: North Toronto CI ranks 46 of 742 with a rating of 8.4 — a five-year rank of 17 and rating of 8.8 — and Northern SS ranks 65 with a rating of 8.2 and is improving. Lawrence Park CI, adjacent to the north, ranks 15 with a 9.1. Elementary is more complicated. Davisville JPS ranks 1,426 with a rating of 6.2 against a five-year rank of 461 and rating of 7.5, and the school was displaced by the site rebuild, which may well be confounding the data. Maurice Cody JPS, Hodgson Senior PS and Eglinton JPS are not ranked in the current report, which is not the same thing as rated poorly.

King West’s nearest TDSB schools are Jean Lumb Public School at 20 Brunel Crt, JK to 8, capacity 550, built with the Canoe Landing community campus specifically to serve the downtown condo population, and Niagara Street Junior Public School at 222 Niagara St, JK to 6. Neither area is a school-driven purchase in the way Leaside or Lawrence Park is. And in both cases, check the TDSB Find Your School tool against the exact address — no agent can promise you a catchment.

Where each one actually hurts

King West

• The supply overhang. 953 new listings against 297 sales in Q1 2026, 530 active at quarter-end, a 32% sales-to-new-listings ratio. It’s leverage when you buy and a problem when you sell.
• Crime above the city average. In 2025 City neighbourhood #164 Wellington Place recorded assault at 1,169.6 per 100,000 against a city-wide 767.9, and break and enter at 293.7 against 189.5.
• A very long construction horizon. The Ontario Line has been tunnelling since April 2026 with no firm opening date, and the corridor already absorbed the traffic displaced from Queen St.

Davisville Village

• Condo oversupply is real and measurable. Mount Pleasant West took 226 new condo listings against 89 sales in Q1 2026, at 40 days on market. The district benchmark is holding up; individual resale is still a competition.
• The area has been a construction site for more than a decade. The Yonge and Eglinton node has been under continuous construction for over ten years, the Davisville Community and Aquatic Centre runs to an expected February 2027 completion, and Davisville Ave itself is under an active City street-redesign consultation.
• Davisville Yard sits at the station. The TTC’s main Line 1 maintenance yard is right there, which is why the Beltline has to bridge over Yonge at this point. It’s not a deal-breaker, but you should stand on the site before you decide that.
• The identity is split. A $632K average condo west of Mount Pleasant Rd and a $2,323K average detached east of it are not the same market, and quoting one Davisville price misleads whichever buyer you’re talking to.

What’s being built on each side

Davisville’s civic project is the Davisville Community and Aquatic Centre, going up on the former Davisville Junior PS site east of Yonge and Davisville jointly with a rebuilt TDSB school: three storeys, a six-lane 25-metre pool plus leisure and tot pools, a dance studio, a teaching kitchen and rooftop fitness. Groundbreaking was 12 November 2024 with completion expected February 2027. The school gets pool access; the City gets the school’s double gym and parking garage outside school hours. Above that sits Midtown in Focus / Ready, Set, Midtown, the City’s Yonge-Eglinton secondary plan and zoning review programme.

King West’s headline is KING Toronto at 489 to 539 King St W by Bjarke Ingels Group: 440 condo units reported 92% pre-sold, 46,000 sq ft of office, 122,000 sq ft of retail, Whole Foods occupancy expected August 2027, completion in the first half of 2027 and a Tarion outside occupancy date of 31 May 2028. Allied Properties REIT assumed full operational control from Westbank as of its 2025 year-end report.

One amenity difference worth knowing. Davisville has the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, built on the Toronto Belt Line Railway that opened in 1892; it bridges Yonge and the Davisville Subway Yard just south of Davisville Ave and runs on through Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Retail runs Yonge from Davisville to Eglinton, plus the Mount Pleasant Village BIA, Bayview Ave and the Yonge-Eglinton Centre node.

The call, by buyer type

• King West if you work downtown and want to walk or take one streetcar to it, if you want the deepest rental pool in the city behind your investment, or if you want the negotiating position that 530 active listings hands a buyer.
• Davisville Village if you’re holding longer, if you want a district whose composite benchmark rose 2.56% while the city’s fell 3.73%, if the North Toronto CI and Northern SS numbers matter to you, or if you want to be able to step across Mount Pleasant Rd into a house later without changing neighbourhoods.
• Look harder at Mount Pleasant East if you’re actually after a house rather than an apartment. In Q1 2026 it recorded 13 detached sales at an average $2,125K in 9 days at 100% of list, and 12 semis at an average $1,523K in 20 days at 106% — small samples, but a very different market from the towers a block west.

If you want to see how the current quarter is running rather than the six-month-old community data, my market report tracks the district numbers as they publish.

Common questions

Related reading

• Roncesvalles vs King West: Which Is Better?
• King West vs Willowdale: Which Is Better?
• The Annex vs Davisville Village: Which Is Better?
• Roncesvalles vs Davisville Village: Which Is Better?
• Free AI home value estimator
• Free AI condo value estimator
• This month’s Toronto and GTA market report

Community figures are TRREB Q1 2026, the most recent quarter published at community level, and benchmark and district figures are August 2026. Fraser Institute ratings are data year 2023/24 and both the TDSB and OPSBA dispute the methodology. Nothing here is an appraisal of a specific unit. General commentary on two Toronto neighbourhoods, not investment advice and not a valuation of any specific property. Market statistics are as published by TRREB for the periods stated and change every month. School boundaries, transit service and development approvals all change — verify anything you are relying on before you make an offer.