As cities develop, what is protecting the neighbourhoods that make them unique?

It’s a question Toronto is grappling with as gentrification creeps into neighbourhoods around the city.

Little Jamaica

The Eglinton Crosstown project — which is running a year behind schedule and set for completion in 2022 — has had a profound impact on the Little Jamaica neighbourhood, between Allen Road in the east and stretching west to Keele Street.

The project has reduced foot-traffic through the neighbourhood, leading to reduced business in the shops that line Eglinton Avenue. While this is felt across all 19 kilometres dedicated to the Crosstown, businesses closing in Little Jamaica threaten the cultural enclave.

Dalton Higgins is a long-time resident and homeowner in the Little Jamaica area. He has seen firsthand the impact of the Crosstown’s construction on the neighbourhood.

“Every season there’s a batch of new stores — mom-and-pop retailers — that are going under,” Higgins said. “I think that’s having an adverse and extremely negative impact on . . . the morale of neighbourhood residents and local business owners.”

The best way to preserve the neighbourhood is for money to be injected back into the shops that are struggling, Higgins said. Store owners “just want to be able to keep their doors open and weather the storm until 2022” when the Crosstown is now expected to be complete.

Area councillor Mike Colle moved Wednesday to do just that, urging city council to compensate small businesses on Eglinton Avenue after news of the project’s further delay. City council adopted the motion, which also requested a report on the feasibility of opening a section of the Crosstown, and moved to clean up construction equipment that blocks storefronts.

Black UrbanismTO was established in 2018 to help engage the community and businesses “from a cultural heritage perspective,” as a response to the displacement of Black communities.

Dane Gardener, who co-founded the not-for-profit group and has familial ties to Little Jamaica, said the easiest way to engage affected communities is simply through conversations with them.

“Having conversations, having safe spaces, being active on Eglinton and having consistent conversations with the businesses to notify them and bring them up to date” on project developments is crucial, he said.

A major worry for Gardener is that there won’t be a Jamaican cultural area to lean on when he eventually has children of his own. The neighbourhood could be lost, Gardener said, meaning “we’re going to have a bunch of people who are not going to be able to have an identity in the city.”

“I don’t understand why the city isn’t worrying about that,” he said. “We need to have self-identification. People need to know who they are and where they come from, and we need to celebrate that.”

Higgins pointed to systemic anti-Black racism as a contributing factor in the way the government approaches the Little Jamaica community.

“We like to pat ourselves on the back for being the most multicultural city on the planet,” Higgins said, but “urban planning and city building does not live on a separate island when it comes to anti-Black racism. It sort of hits us everywhere.”

If developments were disproportionately affecting a white community, there would be more attention paid by local area politicians to community concerns, Higgins said.

The issues faced by Little Jamaica are a microcosm of a larger issue of gentrification leading to a loss of historically-relevant cultural enclaves.

Parkdale

Chemi Lhamo calls herself a “product of Parkdale.” Lhamo grew up in the neighbourhood and attended Parkdale Collegiate Institute. She said that on-the-ground consultation with the community would help preserve the west-end neighbourhood’s large Tibetan diaspora.

While Lhamo said she couldn’t speak for every individual community member, she said “it would be great to see community consultations with the Tibetan community, specifically with Tibetan translators to speak to the elderly that walk around Parkdale.”

There are monasteries in Parkdale where Tibetan seniors come to pray, Lhamo explained. Going there and speaking directly to them could lead to meaningful discussion about community developments, she said.

“There’s a difference between consultations and meaningful consultations. If consultations are happening just because you need to meet the quota of saying that you’ve (spoken) with community members on the ground, that doesn’t do it for me,” Lhamo said.

As Parkdale continues to gentrify, Tibetan-run restaurants have faced massive rent hikes that make it too expensive to stay in business.

“We had Tibetan restaurants . . . (that) because of the rent hikes almost closed down multiple times,” Lhamo said. “I remember the times where a lot of other restaurants that tried to open up . . . weren’t able to keep up with the business because the rent was just too high.”

Lhamo said the rapid change in the community has made her reflect on the systemic issues that exist for racialized Torontonians.

It “really makes someone like me reflect on some of the systematic barriers that exist for racialized people but also for Tibetan refugees that had to be displaced not once but more than twice, from Tibet to India to Nepal,” Lhamo said. “Coming to Toronto for a better life and then being again systematically wiped out” through rent hikes or building managers that don’t handle the most basic of maintenance.

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“That is a way to push them out — because once the low income families that had been here for many years are driven out, they make minor renovations to apartments and then they hike up the rent by $500,” Lhamo said.

There’s no clear answer on how to avoid gentrification and a loss of culture, said Ute Lehrer, professor at York University’s faculty of environmental studies. “There’s two different things that come together,” said Lehrer.

“One is the infrastructure investment that is needed for the city to grow. And, at the other end, the economic interest of small business owners that don’t have a lot of extra capital on their side.”

“I think it is very, very important for the well-being of this city that we have these pockets of neighbourhoods where we have strong cultural identities,” said Lehrer.

Projects like the King Street pilot are examples of situations where those with political and media connections could get rapid response from government officials. “There was some outcry of some people who had direct links to the media and were very loud and were heard,” Lehrer said.

The need for grassroots community engagement is what has prompted groups like Black Urbanism, an urban planning group which facilitates community engagement events about culture and identity.

But if you’re a community without the connections, “then you are not heard,” Lehrer said. “The natural effect of this is that yes, there will be some businesses will stay on, they will survive. But others will go under and the neighbourhood will change.”

Regent Park

In the downtown community of Regent Park, the story of neighbourhood redevelopment has echoes of the issues faced citywide. Efforts to revitalize the neighbourhood came with community consultation and plans to build not only new buildings, but also social programs, said Ismail Afrah, a community member and volunteer with the Regent Park Neighbourhood Association.

“Revitalization was a two-pronged approach,” Afrah explained. As the project continued, it became clear that “one prong was forgotten.” While the building projects were completed, the social projects were not fully realized, though “there are some remarkable community benefit initiatives that came through (from developers),” Afrah said, pointing to Daniels Spectrum, an arts and culture centre that opened in 2012.

Whil Afrah is hesitant to say he’s optimistic that social programs will be fully implemented, he said the association is keeping an eye on things and holding the city accountable. “When they’re held accountable, they perform better.” Afrah and the RPNA attend community update meetings about the revitalization and negotiating with Toronto Community Housing to ensure resident needs are addressed.

One group that Afrah works closely with is Access to Recreation, where community members are fighting for better access to the Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre. Given the city’s centralized program registration system, Regent Park is battling all 2.5 million Torontonians for access to services. Data provided to the Star last winter shows that only about a quarter of registrations at the aquatic centre are for registrants who live in or near Regent Park.

“The facilities have been built, they’re beautiful but . . . some of our kids have never been in the pool. So the physical development has happened. You’ve built the facilities. However, given the policies and the institutions and the structures and the technology, we can’t access it. So that’s gentrification,” Afrah said.

“We are fighting a big machine” when it comes to gentrification, said Zhixi Zhuang, associate professor with Ryerson University’s school of urban and regional planning.

Conscientious planning is the easiest way to develop cities in a way that preserves neighbourhoods for community residents. “Whenever we do some big projects . . . Think about ‘what is the impact on the people and the local community?’ ” Zhuang urged.

If small, locally-owned businesses diminish, “the collective history of that neighbourhood, of (that) space will be gone. And it’s kind of destroying the urban fabric.”

Consultation with communities needs to go beyond simple public meetings, and urban planners can’t take it for granted that everyone affected by a development will show up, let alone know the schedule of when public consultations are being held, Zhuang said.

“You have to go to them,” she said. Instead of simply meeting at city hall or in board rooms, going into stores and public spaces to have these conversations is a better way to engage the public, Zhuang said.

“Any time the city has . . . long term construction like this, they need to plan that very carefully , because things get destroyed and we’ll never, ever get them back.” In turn, developments harm people and the community — especially underrepresented groups, Zhuang said.

“That’s really problematic because we pride ourselves as one of the most diverse and multicultural cities in the world. But when it comes to saving these cultural neighbourhoods, we are not doing anything and that’s a shame.

If we’re not even saving our cultural heritage, how can we claim that we are the most diverse and multicultural city?”

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