When they're not beingscaled by resident raccoonsor terrifyinglycollapsing into busy intersections, construction cranes serve to define the Toronto skyline, signalling the city's ever-hot housing market and somehow insatiable appetite for condos.

Even despite the global pandemic that has stagnated much of the economy, development in the GTA is booming, with Toronto boasting more cranes than anywhere else in the continent.

They paved paradise and put up a condo block !

— BRIGUY (@BriGuy2017)September 29, 2020

According to the latest numbers from theRider Levett Bucknall Crane Index, Toronto has a staggering 124 cranes in operation working on various large-scale developments right now while residents move into thesecond wave of COVID-19and potentiallyfurther lockdown.

This makes us the urban centre with the most cranes in North America by a long shot, with 29 per cent of the cranes of all the cities surveyed by RLB across the continent.

And, as anyone who lives in Toronto could guess, it's not a title that the city is unfamiliar with — we've topped the listmultiple times now, with far more of such construction activity than cities like New York (12), Chicago (14) and Los Angeles (41), especially while some other cities have imposed restrictions on construction.

As the report notes, "COVID-19 does not seem to have affected the number of cranes in use" in Toronto and "residential projects continue to dominate the market."

With new home saleshitting record highsin recent months rather than being tempered by the health crisis,some of our most beloved institutionsfacing the dreaded fate of being converted into high-rise condos, and the city being one of the fewon the verge of a housing bubble, the news isn't exactly surprising, though some may find it a little concerning.