FROM APRIL/MAY 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

In the mornings, I walk my dog Neptune, a black and white mini bull terrier who bolts any chance she gets, down Parkdale’s sidewalks. She greedily eats the remnants of Popeye’s that she finds, as though she isn’t fed at home. We have an affinity for Spencer Street, and unless it’s raining, most days we make our way there. Folks around the neighbourhood always say hello to her as we trot toward Masaryk-Cowan Park while she sniffs out dead rodents and takes a second to smell flowers along the way, something she’s taught me to do over time.

For the past two years, people on this side of the city have come to know the person strolling toward them in the bright orange toque as Neptune’s parent, and these walks have brought me closer to them. We used to live in a mid-rise on Jameson, where I was woken by the sound of cars exiting the Gardiner, the calls of a mother telling her child to hurry up on their trek to school, dogs trying to out-bark one another, seniors tracing the sidewalk with their canes. When I walked Neptune, we followed parents pushing strollers and holding the hands of their bigger children, consoling them as they denied them ice cream. I watched the light reflect off the disc-shaped windows of the former Queen Victoria Public School on Close Avenue, and took my time as Neptune hopped over the grates on the sidewalk, knowing to step over them as toddlers do. We stopped to admire the portraits of Parkdalians on the concrete planters, a visual tale of the people who came before us, and of others who are still among us.

Every day, we walked with the children, the seniors, the dogs, and the many others. There was a certain pace that felt unique to the sidewalks of Parkdale. Now, as the snow on them has melted and gentrification has advanced by one more season, the movement we encounter is perceptibly faster. People dodge one another. They are always trying to get somewhere.

Studying the sidewalks on my walks over time serves to remind me of the people this neighbourhood has made space for – newcomers, the working class, artists, mental health patients – a conglomerate of people who seek refuge in the West End. They’ve created homes in the hundreds of apartments that line Jameson Avenue, finding work – at the McDonald’s, now closed, on King Street West, the No Frills at King and Jameson, the Salvation Army near Jameson and Queen – while walking thoughtfully to get to where they needed to be.

Neptune and I usually walk past Brock, where the brick façade of the corner unit at 1354-1360 Queen has been painted “gentrification grey.” The nickname, I learn from Law(n)ful Developments – a group that formed out of a community mapping workshop on housing and development hosted by the Parkdale People’s Economy – is an indicator that a neighbourhood is losing its eclectic composition. The “others” – the ones marked by their newcomer, class, disability or gender status, or their lack of education due to costs or migration, who face core challenges in a capitalist world – are forced into leaving. Eviction rates in Parkdale are roughly double the city average, research from the Wellesley Institute indicates, while the average South Parkdale bachelor according to CMHC data now rents for $1,343, up from $849 in 2010. Those who move in tend to be neighbours who thrive in capitalism, in part because of their success in conforming to it.

I notice that those who walk rapidly are the people who wear toques like I do, have a Timbuk backpack. Sometimes their clothing suggests a graduate degree; their reusable plastic sacks are Baggu. They walk on the heels of those who use grandmother carts to haul their food. It isn’t their fault that they walk at such a fast pace – capitalism rewards those who use their leisure time productively. It’s harrowing to witness someone walking behind a grandmother hauling two cases of water in a cart, along with groceries that are only increasing in price, while releasing heavy sighs, as though that elder’s survival is an inconvenience. But that is fundamentally what makes gentrification work for the gentrifier, and more so for developers. The preservation of who and what was there before is counter-productive, decreases property value and is an inconvenience.

We are taught that capitalism drives innovation, but in reality, in neighbourhoods like Parkdale it rewards those who produce what the wealthier among us consume, what they feel they can relate to: fried chicken shops, $115 neon hearts, businesses with marble floors and renovated units resulting from renovictions of the working class.

The “other” is a symbol of non-conformity to capitalism, of failing in capitalism, of denying capitalism’s existence. It’s a visible threat, and so when I received a letter from my landlord telling me that I needed to alter the state of my balcony because it misrepresented the building, I lost it. My balcony served as storage; my cousin and I had garden tools on it, a futon. This was a building that was infested with cockroaches; half the machines in its laundromat didn’t work. Yet it had also become a building trying to stand out from the others on Jameson as a beacon for higher-income earners. So I cleaned up the balcony, and made it a garden oasis of sorts with friends, and when people passed by from below, they would have seen fairy lights and dinners for two. We were increasing the building’s property value.

I meet with the Law(n)ful Developments group every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Like walks with Neptune, it keeps me in a state of connection to the community. When I ask one member, Mary Gelinas, how she sees gentrification playing out at the sidewalk level, she brings up Dave’s Hot Chicken. (She calls it “that chicken place across from PARC.”)

She describes the sign outside of Dave’s that says the business is cashless – credit or debit payments only – which excludes parts of the population from purchasing chicken there. While walking Neptune near Queen and Sorauren, I’ve been stopped more than once by 20-somethings on their way to Dave’s – an international franchise owned in Toronto by Raptors founder John Bitove and invested in by Drake – asking me where they can park. I preferred Pete’s Corner Grill, a 12-year-old business where you could get a $6 breakfast special, a good meal, but it didn’t necessarily attract more traffic into Parkdale.

A bit east of Dave’s Hot Chicken, next to the bright yellow sign of Sam’s Convenience, is 1521 Queen St. W., a mid-rise building that was formerly Queen’s Hotel.

In August 2015, 27 tenants were unlawfully evicted and given seven days’ notice to leave the premises. On eviction day, they came home to find their belongings on the side of the road. Many had nowhere to go. In 2017, BSäR pleaded guilty to four counts of unlawfully recovering possession of a rental unit and was fined $14,000. The Justice for Queen’s Hotel Coalition has been campaigning since 2019, and has been advocating against BSäR Group of Companies, a boutique condominium developer attempting to build an eight-storey luxury apartment building in the Queen’s Hotel’s place. Organizers conducted deputations in front of the Toronto and East York Community Council. They set up a memorial and distributed a petition to demand the replacement of the 27 affordable dwelling rooms and that community oversight be built into the replacement process. They also demanded the former tenants receive repayment, a sum equivalent to a year’s worth of rent and therapeutic support for the trauma caused by the events, but those demands have yet to be met. The coalition also integrated art into their work; they built a ghost house, a miniature home that has 27 windows representing each tenant, that is currently installed at Capital Espresso at Queen and Dunn.

Neptune and I sometimes walk to Loga’s corner for momos and hot sauce. Across the street is 1375 Queen St. W., the site of a former gas station that’s being redeveloped by Skale Developments. The project has been approved for seven storeys and 50 rental units, but Skale’s deadline to apply for the Affordable Housing Program this winter, by February 24, has come and gone. Market rents seem likely; enter the fast walkers.

I left that apartment on Jameson. Now I reside in a mid-rise on a street in Parkdale that’s lined with detached houses converted into one- and two-bedroom apartments. The mailboxes in my buildings are lined with packages from Amazon, Knix, Indigo Books, purchased by tenants who can afford to pay for a Prime membership or shipping fees. Delivery trucks park on the sidewalks as they navigate tight one-way streets to meet their commitments. Neptune and I walk around them, usually a few a day, quickly taking up the street and returning to the sidewalk. We are such a ridiculous pair, just looking for a safe place to walk, at a soft pace, for the pleasure of going nowhere in particular.