Neglected for years, Black business owners in Little Jamaica are saving themselves
FROM OCTOBER 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Salon owner Jason McDonald, who was recently appointed chair of the York-Eglinton BIA, says he is looking forward to implementing changes in the way the BIA relates to its Black members.
For much of Little Jamaica’s history, Black business owners felt they couldn’t count on the three BIAs that cover the neighbourhood. Now, things are finally changing
For the past 50 years, Vernal Small has been running Jamall Caribbean Custom Tailor from the brown brick building at the corner of Oakwood and Eglinton Avenues. Inside, Small carefully crafts custom suits surrounded by teetering stacks of fabric, super-sized spools of thread and other sewing paraphernalia, while customers’ shirts, pants and jackets hang suspended from a ceiling-height railing, awaiting alterations. Outside, the vibe is a little less chaotic. The building occupies two units on Oakwood – 611 and 609 – instantly recognizable by its cheery mint green façade framing its doorways. It’s this concession to curb appeal that Small highlights as the best example of the support he’s received from the local BIA. “They gave me a little paint job, and they try to come around and give us good encouragement, but I wasn’t in the position to get much [support otherwise],” Small says.
He is quick to clarify that he hasn’t been denied help. “I wasn’t looking for it. It’s not like I was looking for it and didn’t get it,” he explains. It’s just that he also wasn’t proactively offered help, which is strange when you consider the strain small-business owners in the neighbourhood have been facing for more than a decade now.
Small’s shop is located in the heart of Little Jamaica, a part of the city that has been battered by construction of the Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail Transit (LRT) since 2011. For the past 12 years, businesses have faced loud, disruptive construction. Their utilities have been periodically shut off, there was little parking, and storefronts have been blocked by machines and construction waste. Foot traffic evaporated, and, thanks to the lack of parking, fewer people are purposefully making the trip to Little Jamaica.
Adding insult to injury, the neighbourhood has been dealing with these challenges for much longer than planned. The 19-km, 25-station light rail line was scheduled to be completed by 2021, but in early 2020, that date was pushed back to late 2022. Then, last September, Metrolinx president and CEO Phil Verster released a statement on the transit authority’s site saying construction was delayed indefinitely. Verster did not provide a new timeline at that point, but this May, news broke that the LRT had a new completion date of 2024. Between these construction delays, the looming threat of gentrification and COVID, the impact on small-business owners in Little Jamaica, many of them Black, has been profound.
Little Jamaica stretches along Eglinton Avenue West from Allen Road to Keele Street, intersecting several neighbourhoods, Briar Hill–Belgravia, Fairbank-Caledonia and Oakwood Village, and the catchments for three different BIAs: York-Eglinton BIA, Eglinton Hill BIA and Fairview Village BIA. (There are also two stretches of Eglinton West that aren’t covered by any BIA.) According to Jay Pitter, an urban planning expert who is leading the City of Toronto’s efforts to designate Little Jamaica as a cultural district, the area has been home to Black people, stores, advocates and community organizations for almost 100 years.
However, a 2020 report co-authored by Black Urbanism Toronto (BUTO), the Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA) and the Open Architecture Collaborative Canada (OACC) found BIA leadership has historically been white, and these organizations “have a history of not being accountable and responsive to the Black business owners they represent.”
But change is afoot in the form of new leadership at one local BIA (York-Eglinton), shifting attitudes among the city’s political class and the presence of the Black Business and Professional Association in the neighbourhood, and it can’t happen soon enough. If the business owners of Little Jamaica don’t get more support than they’ve historically received, they will join the estimated 140+ businesses that have closed since LRT construction began.
As Small says in Tallawah Abroad, Toronto journalist and filmmaker Sharine Taylor’s 2019 short film about gentrification in the neighbourhood, “They tell you, ‘We don’t come to Eglinton anymore. No parking, no nothing.’”
Little Jamaica is already a Black cultural district
While Little Jamaica has been home to Black people for nearly a century, its history as a specifically Caribbean neighbourhood began in the late 1950s, when the first immigrants began settling in the area after Canada began implementing the West Indian Domestic Scheme, an immigration program that allowed Caribbean women to immigrate to work in Canadian homes as domestic servants. The women who successfully applied for entry to Canada under this program, most of whom were from Jamaica and Barbados, could choose between Toronto and Montreal; for those who opted for the former, many settled in what would soon become known as Little Jamaica. Further immigration reforms in 1962, 1967 and 1971 sparked subsequent waves of Caribbean immigration, and many of these newcomers were the husbands and children of the women who first came to Canada in the ’50s. The largest group by far hailed from Jamaica; about 100,000 Jamaicans came to Canada during the 1970s and ’80s, and they too mostly settled along this stretch of Eglinton West.
Soon, Little Jamaica wasn’t just a neighbourhood, it was a cultural and economic hub for Caribbean immigrants, and a “global hotbed for reggae music,” as writer, rapper and poet Rollie Pemberton, who performs as Cadence Weapon, wrote in The Walrus in 2020. For years, its record shops, recording studios and clubs helped make it the second-largest producer of reggae music in the world, eclipsed only by Kingston, Jamaica. Members of the Caribbean diaspora flocked to the neighbourhood on weekends from other parts of the city, the suburbs and even farther afield, eager not just for hard-to-find ingredients that reminded them of home and barbers who knew how to cut their hair, but also for a sense of community and belonging.
But despite all of this, the neighbourhood didn’t seem to be respected outside of the city’s Caribbean communities, even by its own BIAs.
According to Kay Matthews, executive director of the Ontario Business Improvement Area Association (OBIAA), BIAs are meant to function as placemakers. “We’re community development professionals,” she says. “Part of our goal is to bring the community together. We just had a speaker at a conference who talked about joy experiments and the idea that the placemaking that BIAs do really relates to giving people a better life.”
More prosaically, they oversee the maintenance and beautification of their territory: hanging seasonal banners, planting and caring for flowers, trees and other greenery, repairing sidewalks, commissioning public art, removing graffiti, etc. They also work to promote the area as a shopping district, both to neighbourhood residents and visitors. But not everyone sees their value.
“To be honest, I don’t know what the BIA does,” says Carole Rose, co-owner of the iconic jerk chicken spot Rap’s. “For instance, I talked to the person in charge of the BIA several times [at the time, that was York-Eglinton BIA chair Nick Alampi] because we have a laneway that’s blocked regularly. I’ve approached them on several occasions to have that laneway go one-way, because quite a few times there have been fights because people are coming from both directions and nobody wants to back up. It’s been rough, and I’ve asked them several times to look into it. He told me that he was going to put a letter together and bring it so that everybody along here could sign, but I haven’t seen or weighed in on that letter.”
And it’s not just Rose and Small. According to the BUTO/SOCA/OACC report, the BIAs that were meant to oversee Little Jamaica have demonstrated a pattern of neglecting to address business owners’ concerns. They also didn’t seem to value the community that already existed there.
“Many of the [neighbourhood’s small-business] owners voiced their concern with the BIAs within Little Jamaica and the lack of support provided by the BIA boards of management,” the report says. “The BIAs in this area have a high concentration of Black-owned businesses along Eglinton West but have little to no representation of Black people on their BIA boards. The history of bias towards the Black community, lack of care or responsiveness to the needs of Black businesses to succeed, and resistance to promote Eglinton West as Little Jamaica by the Eglinton Hill and York-Eglinton BIAs have eroded the relationship and trust of the Black businesses in the area.”
These small-business owners describe a pattern of being excluded from decision-making, including not receiving advance notice of BIA board meetings, BIAs making decisions without meeting quorum and events held without their input. They cited the creation of Reggae Lane as on example of BIAs influencing local decision-making without input from Black business owners. (“A cultural mural tucked out of sight by an alleyway with a high concentration of drug use was not something that business owners saw as a positive representation of Caribbean culture,” the report noted.) And they raised questions about how democratic the BIAs are, considering the long tenure of some board members, including Alampi, who served as York-Eglinton BIA chair for more than a decade, and the fact that only some board positions were opened for elections.
For years, area BIAs didn’t seem to want to acknowledge Little Jamaica’s Black and Caribbean culture
But the problem wasn’t just about day-to-day functions. It was also about the spirit of Little Jamaica. If the BIAs that oversee the area believed their role included placemaking, it seems that did not mean maintaining its cultural heritage or honouring the Caribbean community that had thrived there for decades. According to a 2019 Streets of Toronto article, then York-Eglinton BIA co-ordinator Aalida Valiallah acknowledged that “a lot of businesses have been closing due to LRT construction, and those that are replacing them are not necessarily Caribbean businesses.” New residents moving into the area have a “disconnect” to the long-established businesses, she explained, which means businesses have to adapt their models to the changing environment and clientele in order to survive. Although the BIA does highlight the area’s Caribbean culture in events it organizes, such as Jane’s Walk and its signature event, South of Eglinton, Valiallah said ultimately, “it is not the BIA’s mandate to preserve the area’s ‘Little Jamaica’ culture.” This attitude is a stark contrast to the approach BIAs in other cultural neighbourhoods take. Chinatown’s BIA explicitly states that its key purposes are to “preserve the Chinese heritage and culture, improve Chinatown’s streetscape, health and safety, and to create exciting community events and projects to promote the area and draw visitors and locals to eat, shop, and explore the neighbourhood.”
It also lends credence to some Black advocates’ belief that the BIAs have idly watched as Black-owned businesses have been displaced, if not actively contributed to that displacement. As proof, Dane Gardener-Williams, one of BUTO’s co-founders, points to the decision to name the area “International Marketplace” despite a decades-long history of referring to it as Little Jamaica. (Pemberton perfectly described the moniker as “meaningless and strangely broad, reminiscent of the International Foods aisle at FreshCo.”)
“There have been multiple calls to have that title changed,” Gardener-Williams says. “Our organization worked with [Councillor] Josh Matlow to officially brand and name it Little Jamaica back in 2020, but [the BIA] has been silent on that front [ever since]. The city provides the recommendation, but the BIA has to actually activate, and what the BIA has done is stand idle. They have close to $800,000, $900,000 in funds, and they’ve been using those funds for planting, lighting, these weird one-off projects. And this is one of the things that the business owners have said: The BIA is supposed to support the businesses, and you guys think that going out and getting money and doing these things is supporting what we want, but you haven’t come to us to discuss with us our priorities.”
For Black advocates in the neighbourhood, there are reasons to be hopeful
There are signs that things are changing, though. Politicians are finally paying attention to the neighbourhood; in 2020, Matlow, whose ward includes Little Jamaica, put forward a motion to support Black-owned and operated businesses in the area in a variety of ways, including introducing commercial rent control, exploring ways to provide Black business-owners with financial relief, requesting that Metrolinx and Crosslinx Transit Solutions give Black-owned and operated businesses first right of refusal for retail spaces opening in new LRT stations, and calling on BIAs to work with Black advocacy groups to rebrand the area in a way that “reflects [its] Jamaican-Caribbean history” and “develop new, culturally focused events and initiatives that will celebrate the Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage of Eglinton Avenue West.” City council adopted the motion on Sept. 30, 2020, though there has been a delay implementing some of the motion’s elements (like that rebrand). MPP Jill Andrew, who represents Toronto-St. Paul’s, has also emerged as a staunch advocate for the neighbourhood. In 2020, she called for the government of Ontario to compensate struggling business owners up to $30,000 to offset the financial losses caused by the ongoing LRT construction, COVID and flooding in the area, and re-upped that request when the latest delay was announced in 2022. And non-government organizations have also stepped up.
The Black Business and Professional Association (BBPA) emerged as a de facto BIA for Black-owned businesses in Little Jamaica, also during COVID. Initially, its role was restricted to helping businesses get their books in order so they could apply for pandemic loans and grants, but after hearing directly from business owners about how much they were struggling and how few resources they had, the organization realized the community needed more consistent and robust support. So CEO Nadine Spencer applied for and received funding from the City of Toronto and the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario to open an office in Little Jamaica for a three-year term. Staffed by BBPA program manager Michele-Ann Halsall, the office works directly with business owners and liaises with BIAs to “leverage multiple services,” Halsall says. The goal is to build relationships with both business owners and BIAs, and hopefully between these groups, too.
And Halsall thinks it’s working. She says that while the BBPA conducts a lot of outreach itself, including to new businesses that are opening in the neighbourhood, business owners are also coming in to the organization’s office on Eglinton near Oakwood to ask for help with different issues, a sign “they feel supported.” And she has seen a change in the conversations BIAs are willing to have about their role in supporting Black-owned businesses and protecting Little Jamaica’s cultural heritage. But, she says, leadership shake-ups are essential if BIAs are going to genuinely understand and represent the community.
“When BIAs have festivals, they do make an effort. They have Black singers on the roster. But I believe that without strong cultural representation in the leadership of the board, you’re not really getting the real cultural lens,” she says. “That’s why you have to really make an effort to reach out to Black board members. They’re not just going to put up their hand without any urging – if it’s not a comfortable enough space, then they’re really not going to gravitate towards it. And I think that’s what happened in the past.”
At the York-Eglinton BIA, one such leadership shake-up recently occurred; salon owner Jason McDonald, who has operated Casual International Hair Salon since 1999, was elected chair of the board, and he’s looking forward to implementing some changes in the way the BIA relates to its Black members.
“I’m not criticizing the previous regime, but I can say that whenever I’m in talks with Metrolinx, they say the BIA never really discusses small businesses in their agenda,” he says. “Anytime they discuss small businesses, they talk from a different perspective, they don’t talk about impact [of ongoing construction on these businesses]. So, with me as BIA chairman, Metrolinx conversations are going to be different.”
While none of these interventions alone was enough to change things in Little Jamaica, they’ve all made an impact. The political situation is vastly different now than it was three years ago – and so is the retail landscape. In fact, that’s what makes Halsall the most hopeful.
“Every six months or so, we’ll do the full walk [through Little Jamaica] and track the businesses to see who’s closed and who’s new. And yes, there are still businesses that are closing. But there are lots that are opening, too. Caribbean businesses that want to open, and are opening, in this area. That’s why it’s so critical right now to have all hands on deck, to really focus on bringing business tools to Little Jamaica. We’re sending out that message that we’re open, welcome back, whatever it is so we’re bringing people intentionally to this area to help the businesses so that no more close.”
FAQ
Everything you never wondered about how these little-understood groups operate
Is a BIA a money-making business?
No – it’s a not-for-profit group that supports the businesses in a given neighbourhood.
What exactly does a BIA do?
It basically has two core functions: The first is boosting local businesses by attracting shopping, tourism and employment to the neighbourhood through festivals, events and marketing initiatives. And the second is the makeover detail: beautifying the commercial strip though planting projects, organizing and footing the bill for graffiti removal, plus helping maintain publicly owned properties and structures like the 70 installations of the Downtown Toronto West BIA’s ArtWalk. There’s also an engagement and advocacy side to the work: addressing BIA member concerns and repping their interests to all levels of government. For example, the Church-Wellesley BIA controversially convinced the city to remove the statue of residential school proponent Alexander Wood. In nearby Cabbagetown, the local BIA successfully advocated for a hefty reduction in the fees restaurants pay to participate in the CaféTO Program.
Who runs a BIA?
In partnership with the city, BIAs are managed by volunteer boards typically composed of local business and property owners. Board members are elected by the BIA membership during annual general meetings. Once approved by city council, board members serve four-year terms – board chairs are then selected by board members. City councillors are automatically designated as additional board members for any BIA in their ward. BIA boards meet regularly to create annual budgets and plan local initiatives like the Bloor-Yorkville BIA’s approximately $25-million Bloor Street Transformation Project and the recently opened Bentway Staging Grounds. Some BIAs use a budget line to hire staff.
Why does it seem like some BIAs are run by the same guy for decades?
As far as board members and directors go, the city bylaw says that once their term ends, they can get reappointed. As for the chair and other executive positions, there’s no city-imposed cap; it depends on the BIA’s specific bylaws. So in some neighbourhoods, a chair can get re-elected by the board of directors over and over again, while other BIAs might impose limits.
Where does a BIA get its money from?
Its funding is mostly generated via a special levy imposed on every commercial and industrial property within a BIA’s boundaries. The levy varies depending on the location and size of the property. It’s essentially an additional fee assessed on top of regular municipal property taxes. After the city collects the levy, the funds are released to the BIA’s board. BIAs also receive funding from public and private grants, as well as from BIA financial incentive programs offered by the city. All funds collected are reinvested directly back into the BIA, making it a self-sustaining machine for neighbourhood enhancement. — Ali Amad
This story is part of a larger series called “Taking care of business,” a deep dive into the workings of Toronto’s B.I.A.s. To read more stories like this, subscribe here, or order a single copy of the October issue here.