Five years ago it seemed the gen­tri­fi­ca­tion of Park­dale was inevitable. So why hasn’t it happened?

Danielle Groen – The Grid

The lights are dim and the vol­ume inches higher at Parkdale’s new restau­rant, Grand Elec­tric. Bill With­ers is stuffed back into an album sleeve, replaced on the turntable by Dr. Dre’s The Chronic; in the crook of the L-shaped bar, two guys in their early 30s remind each other of the lyrics. It’s a Wednes­day in late Novem­ber, open­ing night, and every­one is crowded dark-denim-knee to dark-denim-knee. There are more than a dozen bour­bons lined up on wood shelves and as many Mex­i­can dishes scrawled on the black­board: tacos, pozole, pollo frito. At a red pic­nic table near the restaurant’s win­dow, a group of six demol­ishes the entire menu.

So this is the new Park­dale, right? It’s the hip, well-heeled ful­fil­ment of a prophecy writ­ten six years ago on the yel­low stuc­coed wall of a Star­bucks seven blocks east: “Drake you ho, this is all your fault.” As soon as the Drake and Glad­stone made them­selves over and lured that green-mermaid bea­con of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, it was only a mat­ter of time before the bistros and bou­tiques crept west past Duf­ferin, under Queen Street’s CN bridge, and reached into gritty Parkdale.

Toronto Life first spot­ted gentrification’s fin­ger­prints back in 2005. In an arti­cle on Parkdale’s chang­ing land­scape, the mag­a­zine crowed, “Queen Street’s wild west­ern fron­tier is pret­ty­ing itself up faster than you can say yee-haw!” A year later, the Park­dale Lib­erty Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion part­nered with Ryerson’s fourth-year urban plan­ning stu­dents on a study called “Man­ag­ing Gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in Park­dale.” And in early 2007, local politi­cians and city thinkers gath­ered at the library to pon­der the same, in a dis­cus­sion titled “Where goes the neighbourhood?”

But so far, the shiny con­dos, which have come to dom­i­nate the east­ern side of the under­pass, haven’t been built. Parkdale’s social-service hubs remain—almost two dozen of them, in an area roughly bor­dered by Ron­ces­valles and Duf­ferin, the train tracks north of Queen and the lake. Step out­side Grand Elec­tric on a late Novem­ber night and you’ll find a pawn­shop imme­di­ately to the left. Along the same stretch, there are bright cof­fee houses and Asian gro­cery stores, a mul­ti­cul­tural asso­ci­a­tion and a Fran­cis­can food-service min­istry, a jew­ellery stu­dio, dentist’s office and a knit­ting café. There’s a legal-aid clinic and a com­mu­nity health cen­tre in the base­ment of which, this spring, a food co-op will open—Toronto’s first in 28 years.

“In the last four years, there was a lot of talk about what’s going to hap­pen to Park­dale,” says Heather Dou­glas, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the neighbourhood’s busi­ness improve­ment area. “We’ve seen some change, but nowhere near to the extent that every­body pre­dicted.” Alan Walks, a geog­ra­phy and plan­ning pro­fes­sor at U of T, agrees: “Park­dale is still one of the areas that is slow to be affected by the onslaught of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in the inner city of Toronto.”

But because of the archi­tec­ture that Park­dale was given, and the stub­born­ness that Park­dalians bring, some­thing else has taken place. It’s not exactly gentrification—instead, it’s a more inclu­sive kind of evo­lu­tion, one that reflects and caters to the diver­sity of this neighbourhood’s res­i­dents and encour­ages them to stay put.

In its clas­sic form, gen­tri­fi­ca­tion occurs when the social makeup of a neigh­bour­hood trans­forms from work­ing class to mid­dle class and higher. That’s often seen through the decon­ver­sion of rental hous­ing: Nice old build­ings, built orig­i­nally for owner occu­pa­tion then turned into rental units, are reclaimed by own­ers once more. A broader view of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion would include new con­do­mini­ums or for­mer ware­houses trans­formed into lofts, since they cre­ate space for mid­dle– and upper-class res­i­dents, as well. Either way, lower-income renters are out of luck.

There are signs of clas­sic gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in the neigh­bour­hood. “Above Queen, espe­cially west of Lansdowne—that area has changed very much,” U of T’s Walks says. “The hous­ing is low-rise on beau­ti­ful streets, and a lot of the rentals there have been changed into owner-occupied houses.” Along the side streets north of Queen, Buga­boo strollers now appear about as often as shop­ping carts.

I live on the sec­ond floor of a lovely, creaky Vic­to­rian row house near the Park­dale LCBO (loca­tion!), and I’ve been known to panic that every improve­ment my land­lord makes to the place is a trou­bling sign she wants to move back in. But then I reas­sure myself by softly repeat­ing: Park­dale is a com­mu­nity of ten­ants. Some 77% of us rent our hous­ing, com­pared to a city-wide aver­age of 32%. In South Park­dale, below Queen, that num­ber climbs to 91%. Ten­ants are here because the archi­tec­ture exists for them here: there are low– and high-rise apart­ment build­ings, bach­e­lorettes and enor­mous man­sions that were divided into units almost a cen­tury ago.

“If the dom­i­nant stock for rentals is main­tained in its cur­rent form, then the gen­eral social com­po­si­tion is likely to main­tain, as well,” says Walks. He cites the mid-rise, high-density apart­ment com­plexes along Jame­son Avenue—those sandy-brick boxes that sprouted up in the ’50s and ’60s—as an anchor for Parkdale’s low-income res­i­dents. Known locally as “the land­ing strip,” Jame­son has pro­vided the first home for waves of new immi­grants. In the 1980s, West Indi­ans and Tamils came; in the late 1990s, Tibetans did, and now they num­ber almost 2,000 in Park­dale. Three years ago, thou­sands of Roma joined them, flee­ing vio­lence in Hun­gary. Com­mu­nity iden­tity is strong here: In 2009, a pub­lic art project snapped 250 black-and-white head­shots of Jameson’s res­i­dents and tiled them onto tree planters that line the busy street.

There’s the dan­ger that a condo behe­moth or two could dis­rupt all that. But ward coun­cil­lor Gord Perks thinks it’s an unlikely sce­nario. “Those apart­ments are built on very tight sites, so you couldn’t knock them down and put in some­thing big­ger,” he says. The com­mu­nity has also taken active steps to ensure that hous­ing remains for its lower-income res­i­dents. The Park­dale Pilot Project, a decade-long munic­i­pal pro­gram that legal­ized room­ing houses in Toronto, was com­pleted in 2009, with almost 80 houses licensed and improved. Because of that, Perks says, “we’ve cre­ated a hous­ing stock which means that close to 1,000 peo­ple can’t be dehoused by the marketplace.”

Had hous­ing stock turned over and been replaced by glass con­dos for the upwardly mobile, Walks says, “You would’ve seen a lot of new busi­nesses move into Park­dale.” The reces­sion has, unques­tion­ably, played a role in slow­ing that devel­op­ment. But there’s another rea­son that it has been dif­fi­cult for bars and restau­rants (and bars mas­querad­ing as restau­rants) to find a toe­hold. “Gord Perks is play­ing a very, very active role in terms of new liquor licences,” Park­dale BIA exec­u­tive direc­tor Heather Dou­glas says.

Exactly how active? Every time a liquor licence is applied for, the Alco­hol and Gam­ing Com­mis­sion of Ontario noti­fies the city; coun­cil­lors may then declare the licence to be against munic­i­pal inter­est. Perks does that every time. Gen­er­ally, licences are still granted, but not before he has sculpted some con­di­tions; Kanji Sushi, a restau­rant being built on Queen, saw 13 stip­u­la­tions added to its liquor licence. Among them: no audi­ble noise after 11 p.m. and, aside from spe­cial occa­sions, no cover charge.

That’s not to say that Queen Street hasn’t become notice­ably louder and more crowded, espe­cially on week­end nights. Last year, Perks con­fessed to The Globe and Mail that he was con­cerned Park­dale would become the next West Queen West. But his fears have since abated. Or at least, he tells me, “It will be a long time com­ing, and over my dead body.”

My friends are mostly east-enders now. They live in nicely appointed if archi­tec­turally unmem­o­rable houses; they get their cheese and cof­fee beans in Leslieville. None of them is really any closer to the down­town core than I am, but some­times it can be tricky to entice them under the Queen Street bridge, even if din­ner and drinks await on the other side. Occa­sion­ally, a mild joke is made about what else might await them there, too.

“There’s still that stigma of, ‘Why would I go to Park­dale?’” con­firms the BIA’s Dou­glas. “‘It’s all drugs, pros­ti­tu­tion, vio­lence.’” Samten Tser­ing, owner of Tsampa Café, arrived in the neigh­bour­hood from Tibet 10 years ago. At that time, he recalls, “I heard there were a lot of drug deal­ers, drug users, street hook­ers. I hear that still. But it’s not true! I don’t see it.”

Toronto Police sergeant Jeff Zam­mit has patrolled Park­dale, on and off, for 24 years; he says friends and fam­ily con­tinue to raise an eye­brow when he men­tions where he works. “They’ll go, ‘Ooooh, that’s a bad area,’” he says. But by what met­ric is safety mea­sured? If it’s crime, then rates are down in Parkdale—by the end of 2010, the annual num­ber of sex­ual assaults had dropped from the pre­vi­ous year, and instances of theft, break­ing and enter­ing, rob­bery and assault had plum­meted by two-thirds. Crime cer­tainly hasn’t van­ished here: It remains a dense neigh­bour­hood with the inevitable big-city prob­lems. But across Toronto, the decline of those same rates is mea­sured mostly in sin­gle digits.

And if it’s drugs, then the com­po­si­tion of drug users has also changed. While they are still a pres­ence in Park­dale, accord­ing to Zam­mit, mar­i­juana has largely replaced crack. “It’s a softer drug, so what we call our ‘clien­tele’ is a lot softer to deal with than your hard-nosed crack­head,” he says. “We have to dig to find crack use. Park­dale is very safe.”

There is a dis­tance, then, that exists between the way Park­dale can be per­ceived by peo­ple who don’t live or work within its bound­aries and the way it is expe­ri­enced by those who do. The CN under­pass along Queen Street doesn’t just serve as the phys­i­cal bar­rier to Parkdale—it presents a psy­cho­log­i­cal bar­rier, as well: a scarcely lit, usu­ally pud­dled strip that promises the same kind of sketch­i­ness on its west­ern side. That can intim­i­date fam­i­lies, who might pre­fer to put down roots in Ron­ces­valles or the Junc­tion.

But the dis­tance between the per­cep­tion of Park­dale and the real­ity has been present since the vil­lage was first incor­po­rated in 1879. Con­ven­tional wis­dom holds that the neigh­bour­hood began as Rosedale’s lake­side ana­logue, a leafy sub­urb sup­plied with expan­sive man­sions that catered to the über-rich. Only Park­dale never was a tony enclave—it may have pro­moted itself that way to the press and poten­tial land buy­ers, but its demo­graph­ics were, from the out­set, far more mixed. Because of its prox­im­ity to train tracks and fac­to­ries, half of Parkdale’s first house­holds were actu­ally work­ing class; the most com­mon occu­pa­tion at the time was “railwayman.”

In the 1970s, thou­sands of mental-health patients were dis­charged en masse from Toronto’s insti­tu­tions, and more than half of them found their way from the nearby Queen Street Men­tal Health Cen­tre to Park­dale. This is usu­ally held up as the cat­a­lyst of the neighbourhood’s fall from grace; as the Toronto Star’s Joe Fior­ito writes, “We opened the doors of our var­i­ous asy­lums and let peo­ple fend for them­selves. So began the rapid con­ver­sion of our once-grand man­sions into room­ing houses.”

But plenty of those once-grand man­sions were already gone. In the early 20^th cen­tury, as clerks, car­pen­ters and seam­stresses moved in, many of the area’s estates—then con­sid­ered too large for sin­gle, ser­vant­less families—were refash­ioned into multiple-unit flats. When work­ers streamed into the city dur­ing the world wars, that hous­ing con­ver­sion only accel­er­ated; by 1951, a full 70% of the neighbourhood’s for­mer single-family dwellings had been par­celled into apart­ments. De-institutionalized patients chose Park­dale because room­ing houses already existed for them there.

Park­dale has never been an easy place to accu­rately define. But sad­dled with a stigma that makes too much of its pre­cip­i­tous decline, it has become an easy place for gen­tri­fiers to overlook.

“By legit­imiz­ing cer­tain ways that peo­ple live, they can par­tic­i­pate in soci­ety,” says Vic­tor Willis, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Park­dale Activ­ity Recre­ation Cen­tre (PARC), a drop-in com­mu­nity cen­tre near Sorau­ren Avenue. Early this year, PARC opened a sup­port­ive hous­ing unit next door for mem­bers bat­tling addic­tion and mental-health issues. The 1913 her­itage build­ing that con­tains the unit had become one of Toronto’s largest ille­gal board­ing houses, with 55 rooms and fewer than 10 toi­lets; in 1998, a fire there killed two peo­ple and left 49 more home­less. Now renamed Edmond Place, the prop­erty boasts 29 self-contained, afford­able apart­ments and a 50-year lease from the city.

When PARC first pro­posed Edmond Place at the end of 2006, there was con­sid­er­able resis­tance from the Park­dale com­mu­nity. “I had been in office three days,” recalls Perks. “And I had to go to a meet­ing and lis­ten to a group of res­i­dents com­plain that it would lead to low-income men stand­ing on Queen Street smoking.”

Willis and his col­leagues real­ized they could improve how they engaged with the neigh­bour­hood, so they hired 10 ambas­sadors from the cen­tre and sent them out to speak with busi­ness own­ers and res­i­dents on PARC’s behalf. “We shared our expe­ri­ences with men­tal health or addic­tion,” says Ter­ence Williams, an ambas­sador who him­self strug­gled with men­tal ill­ness and had been home­less for two years. “Peo­ple learned that we were really involved here. There had been a lot of NIM­BY­ism, but with most of the com­mu­nity, we went from a space of NIMBY to a space of YIMBY: yes in my back­yard.” When Edmond Place held an open house in late 2010, nearly  $10,000 was raised from the com­mu­nity through dona­tions at the door.

As Parkdale’s exist­ing neigh­bours have moved toward greater tol­er­ance for all mem­bers of their com­mu­nity, new res­i­dents have also brought with them a sense of social con­science. Roger Rien­deau, pres­i­dent of the Park­dale Res­i­dents Asso­ci­a­tion, has seen an influx of young Toron­to­ni­ans in the area, buy­ing houses or becom­ing renters. “What I’m impressed by is their more inclu­sive atti­tude,” he says. “I moved to Park­dale in 1983. The gen­er­a­tion that lived here then would have been fear­ful of diver­sity, because they aspired to a more homo­ge­neous Park­dale. But I’ve found the thir­tysome­thing gen­er­a­tion is mov­ing in because of the diver­sity, rather than in spite of it. They like the nature of the community.”

Perks agrees. “No one in their right mind moves to Park­dale if they want every­one to look the same and act the same,” he says. “So there is a bit of self-selection that goes on.”

That’s true not just for the neighbourhood’s res­i­dents, but for the com­mer­cial space in the area, as well. Busi­nesses are com­ing to Parkdale—50 new ones in the past two years, although at eight% the vacancy rate is four times as high as neigh­bour­ing Ron­ces­valles and West Queen West. Still, what’s opened here recently is a reflec­tion of Parkdale’s com­plex makeup: a Tim Hor­tons, not a Star­bucks; vin­tage shops like Philis­tine and more upscale restau­rants like Keriwa Café; social ser­vices such as Edmond Place and the Break­away methadone clinic.

The BIA’s Heather Dou­glas has noticed a con­certed effort by new busi­nesses to work with the char­ac­ter of Park­dale, not against it. “They’re not chang­ing the face of Parkdale—they’re adding to what’s already here,” she says. “We’re not quite shiny. But we like that.” That’s why, she explains, when the BIA designed its new logo in 2009, the name Park­dale was writ­ten on an obvi­ous slant. “It’s not exactly straight. It’s got its own edge.”

Not every­thing is exactly straight at Grand Elec­tric, Parkdale’s new Mex­i­can restau­rant, either—likely because own­ers Ian McGrenaghan and Colin Tooke built much of it them­selves, often after watch­ing YouTube videos on how to oper­ate power tools. An unframed map, tacked on the wall, is illu­mi­nated by a string of light bulbs; the striped nap­kins are actu­ally IKEA tea tow­els. It all feels far less glossy, far more DIY than your typ­i­cally gen­tri­fied bar.

“We want this restau­rant to be as approach­able and inter­est­ing as pos­si­ble,” McGrenaghan says. “It’s rare to find a neigh­bour­hood that’s not fully gen­tri­fied and that’s filled with nice, sup­port­ive peo­ple from all ends of the spec­trum.” The appeal of the loca­tion, he says, is the peo­ple cur­rently com­ing through the door, not the higher-income peo­ple who might swing by in a few more years. “I’m not blind to the fact that a condo is going up,” McGrenaghan says. “But we’re enam­oured with Park­dale as it is now.”

Ah, yes, the condo. Ten years ago, Royal Queen Devel­op­ment pur­chased land at the south­west cor­ner of Queen and Duf­ferin; this spring, it intends to break ground. Res­i­dents are watch­ing that cor­ner care­fully, wait­ing to see if Q Loft is finally the har­bin­ger of Parkdale’s long-anticipated gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. Prob­a­bly not. “Almost 30 years of liv­ing in Park­dale has taught me that our diver­sity is not going away,” says the res­i­dents association’s Rien­deau. When Q Loft pre­sented its blue­prints to the com­mu­nity, the com­mu­nity, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, came back with ideas of its own: Instead of the pro­posed glass, a brick façade would bet­ter match Parkdale’s land­scape; the major­ity of Q Loft’s eight sto­ries should be stepped back from the street. Changes were made on the basis of this dia­logue. And Q Loft says half of the 50-odd units already sold have been ear­marked for rent, in keep­ing with Parkdale’s tenant-heavy composition.

Cer­tainly, the con­do­minium will have an effect on the area, and per­haps another devel­oper will be tempted to fol­low suit. But any Park­dalian too con­cerned about Q Loft’s impli­ca­tions need only glance at the map it uses online to entice prospec­tive buy­ers. The major­ity of restau­rants, shops and ser­vices on Parkdale’s side of Duf­ferin have been left off entirely; instead, it stretches east, loop­ing down to Lib­erty Vil­lage and extend­ing all the way to Bathurst. Posi­tioned next to fit­ness clubs, Trin­ity Bell­woods Park and the Drake Hotel, Q Loft stands con­spic­u­ously at the map’s west­ern­most edge. The condo has already found its gen­tri­fied neighbourhood.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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