Robert Caplan is optimistic about the future of Mount Dennis — and has been for a long time now, even as he admits that right now, the sparse business district at Weston Rd. and Eglinton Ave. W. is not much to look at.

That may soon change. In 2021, the Mount Dennis station on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is slated to open and the owners of the rundown storefronts along Weston will almost certainly make some modifications.

But for now?

“The whole street is waiting for the development to happen — to see what’s going to happen,” said Caplan, who owns Caplan Appliances and is chair of the Mount Dennis Business Improvement Area (BIA).

The BIA is participating along with Toronto’s Economic Development Department in working up a strategy for the revitalization of Mount Dennis. Earlier this month, the city presented findings from a survey on what may become a main street for the community.

“There are so many uncertainties,” said Caplan. “We know it’s going to get better, but we don’t know how or what it’s going to look like. But we’re excited by it. We’re investing in it.”

Even without the new station, Caplan and his family have invested considerably in the community.

The family-run business straddles both sides of Weston Rd. On the east side are the main offices and showroom. On the west, a new gallery showcasing the high-end kitchen products of Miele: ranges, refrigerators and other appliances.

Caplan built the gallery on the footprint of two garages — old structures that were more in line with the rundown form of the properties fronting on Weston south of Eglinton.

Caplan’s gallery stands out. The business properties on Weston Rd. through Eglinton have been relatively stagnant since the late 1990s, when Kodak Canada closed its operation on the northeast corner of Eglinton and Weston. South of Eglinton, an early 1990s decision by the former of City of York to zone commercial properties for residential has led to the virtual shuttering of businesses there as storefronts have been converted to apartments or simply left vacant.

To the north, a business district does persist — but it struggles. On a weekday tour with local York South—Weston councillor Frances Nunziata, just a handful of pedestrians walk the street between hair salons, bars and dark storefronts.

Nunziata said that even with the coming LRT, businesses and property owners in the area will need incentives to improve.

“This area really needs a lot of focuses and incentives for businesses and developers to come and build,” said Nunziata. “It would be so much easier if it was one owner, but they’re all separate owners and that’s so difficult to do — to assemble everything.”

Some of those properties have been assembled and Nunziata said that some of those are going through the process of redevelopment with the city.

Nunziata said that ultimately, many of the rundown, lowrise properties should be torn down and redeveloped into new street-level retail with offices and residential development on higher storeys.

“We just need the city to be a little more co-operative, working with these developers and trying to encourage them to develop and not giving them a difficult time,” she said. “If you give them a difficult time they’re just going to walk away.”

Caplan said it shouldn’t take much for the community to improve and to attract that development. From his point of view, the location is perfect — particularly for customers looking for bigger-ticket items like high-end appliances.

“We see it every day — we bring customers from an hour away without any issues. It’s the nature of where we are, it’s a very unique geography in Toronto. If you look at a map of the GTA, it’s almost central,” he said.

Building on that location — and bringing in more employers as well as more homes — is ultimately going to start things moving, says Cassandra Nicolaou, who owns Supercoffee — a neighbourhood mainstay at the corner of Weston and Eglinton.

“There isn’t a lot of residential nearby, and because of the boundary of the tracks and the river, the residential is not dense and so there aren’t a lot of people in the immediate area to draw to Weston Rd.,” she said. “So what we’re looking forward to is an increase of residential density and business density. We’re bringing in all these people on the Eglinton LRT so they can live here and work here.”

According to city figures, the number of businesses in the area have been declining while employment has been on a slight upswing since 2011.

The city survey shows that for the most part, the neighbourhood is home to smaller businesses run by their owners, who operate in leased space — and rely on customers from outside the area.

The survey also found that owners were, like Caplan, optimistic about the future.

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The question now becomes: what will that future be?

Earlier this year, the Urban Land Institute presented a set of ideas for a more holistic approach to revitalizing the area — ideas that included creating a neighbourhood trust that would bring amenities to Mount Dennis and the creation of an innovation district in employment lands to encourage higher-level employment.

And the city itself isn’t done with planning Mount Dennis. At Nunziata’s request, Toronto council approved in 2017 not only the economic development study but also a land-use planning study of the area, to see exactly how the area should be reshaped.