The following paper will explore the
history of South Parkdale and its experience with, and establishment for,
gentrification. The paper will go further and unravel the larger concepts surrounding
gentrification, such as its stages and processes, explanations for its
existence, as well as exploring the rhetoric and government policy that has
been created for its promotion and support throughout the urban landscape.
As of 2001, 93% of South Parkdale
residents rented their accommodations, whereas the Toronto metropolitan average
of the same year was only 37% (Whitzman & Slater, 2006).
Further, the median household income of Parkdale was $34,491 in 2001,
substantially lower than the rest of Toronto at a median of $59,502 (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006).
South Parkdale has been described as the
final frontier of the Queen Street West stretch of gentrification, which has
transformed the area into an artistic, cultural and social haven for
Torontonians (Slater, 2004). South Parkdale remains
largely unscathed from the larger impacts of gentrification experienced to the
east, although you can see the beginnings already taking root with the plethora
of boutiques, cafes, hipster frequented restaurants and bars, and independent
art galleries springing up throughout the area (Slater, 2004).
The life of Parkdale
In 1889 Toronto annexed the Village of
Parkdale and this initiated a rapid development period for the newly christened
area. The southern portion named South Parkdale became an attractive commuter
suburb, with connections via the nearby railway as well as the addition of
streetcars later on (Slater, 2004). Access to Lake Ontario
and north to Queen Street directed the construction of street layouts (Slater, 2004). At the same time as Parkdale was being formed Toronto was
experiencing an apartment boom, and many developers were anxious to build in
the prestigious Parkdale area (Whitzman & Slater, 2006).
By 1915 over 200 units had been built amongst 10 large apartment buildings
concentrated largely along King Street and Queen Street (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006). Along side streets a further 22 smaller
apartment buildings had been constructed, bringing South Parkdale to hold one
third of all apartment buildings in Toronto at the time (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006). These apartment buildings were designed
and constructed well, housing mostly sales and clerical workers, yet the media
decried them as tenements akin to the slums of New York or London (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006).
In 1912, Toronto City Council voted unanimously
to ban all future apartment building construction, save for a few commercial
streets, after public health reports and politicians denounced these types of
living spaces as the breeding grounds of poverty and social decay, and further
were contagions to surrounding property values (Whitzman & Slater, 2006). This bylaw however did nothing to stop further apartment building
developments, as the number of projects actually increased within a few years (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006). And so, even back when South Parkdale
was inhabited by a majority of businessmen, clerical workers, and other
professionals, the same slum rhetoric was being used to associate multi-unit
housing with social decline (Whitzman & Slater, 2006).
Parkdale by 1941 contained 62% of its
single-family housing stock as multi-family occupant dwellings, nearly double
the average of Toronto at the time (Whitzman & Slater, 2006).
This trend to divide single-family dwellings was propelled by the Great
Depression, World War II, and the simple fact that the often large Victorian
houses were very accommodating to apartment conversion (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006). This influx of renters caused Parkdale’s
homeownership rates to drop from 51% in 1931 to 14% in 1941 (Whitzman &
Slater, 2006).
The 1950’s brought great change to South
Parkdale as planners began to regard many areas as slums that stood in the way
of construction for the Gardiner Expressway, and as such proposed that ‘urban
renewal’ via redevelopment was in order to ameliorate the problem (Slater, 2004). Deindustrialization had brought decay and disuse to much of the
waterfront of Toronto, and so the move to build highways that would open up the
city and spur foreign investment were heralded by planners as of more
importance than the neighborhoods their construction may displace (Slater, 2004). By the end of the 1950’s the Gardiner Expressway effectively
became a barrier between South Parkdale and the lake, demolishing over 170
houses and permanently erasing many streets from the landscape (Slater, 2004).
The latter half of the twentieth century
brought a North American wide change to its view on the care for psychiatric
patients, favouring deinstitutionalization and ‘community-based care’ (Slater, 2004). Toronto was not immune to this new persuasive argument, and was
pushed along by other forces such as the dismantling of the welfare state under
neoliberal political change following the economic recession of the 1980s (Slater, 2004). In the late 1970s Lakeshore Provincial Psychiatric Hospital had
been closed down releasing many psychiatric patients into the public (Slater, 2004). This was added to when just a few years later the Queen Street
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health transitioned thousands of additional
psychiatric patients into the general public (Slater, 2004).
The psychiatric patients were not properly
taken care of once reaching Parkdale, as their new neighborhoods disproportionately
lacked community aftercare programs or facilities (Slater, 2004). By 1981 there were estimated to be around 1,100 discharged
psychiatric patients living in South Parkdale that, even by 1985, only had
thirty-nine official group homes (Slater, 2004). Group homes are
traditionally designed to accommodate the needs of up to ten people; this would
leave more than two thirds of the discharged patients to seek out non-supervised
housing alternatives that were typically found in rooming houses, unofficial
boarding homes, or in the tiny bachelorettes scattered amongst South Parkdale (Slater, 2004). With this influx of psychiatric patients in South Parkdale came
the creation and stigmatization of a ‘service-dependent ghetto’ and a ‘little
ghetto of misery’ by the popular media, which had they effect of mutating this
disadvantaged group into a demonized minority of insane transients who’s presence
made the streets unsafe for children to play in (Slater, 2004).
South Parkdale’s past as an area of
poverty and stigmatized social groups had provided low housing prices to
middle-class gentrifiers in the late 1980s that sought out older, characteristic
neighborhoods within the city (Whitzman & Slater, 2006).
The 1990s brought pressure to city
planners and councilmen as multiple groups of residents expressed their
grievances against low-income housing within their neighborhoods (Slater, 2004). Toronto City Council acquiesced to their concerns and in 1996 put
in place an interim by-law in South Parkdale against the development or
conversion of rooming houses or bachelorettes until a study was conducted on
the area (Slater, 2004). The city’s study eventually
revealed that low-income residents with marital statuses as single were the
principal agents behind the areas social problems (Slater, 2004). The city then proposed to counter this problem by enhancing the
number of families to the area, thus diluting the concentrations of singles (Slater, 2004). The first part of the plan put forward in 1997 was a new zoning
system, which would prohibit any new developments from dividing the total
number of units per lot beyond two (Slater, 2004). The second part
of the city’s plan was to investigate the rooming houses and bachelorettes in
the area and to enforce stringent health and safety codes and to prosecute and
demolish those deemed beyond repair (Slater, 2004).
Explaining gentrification
Some academics have
attempted to explain the gentrification movement within Toronto in the 1970s
and 1980s as being the renouncement of the planned suburban landscapes created
from the conformist developers of the post-war period (Slater, 2006). The retaking and redeveloping of the city was an
effort to be applauded, and further that their actions were a “critical social
practice” (pg. 741, Slater, 2006) of a new
emerging middle-class intelligentsia that were shaping their own urban
experience (Slater, 2006).
Bridge (2001) views
the new middle-class fraction that makes up gentrifiers as being more
self-conscious than any bourgeoisie groups before them. These new fractions of
the middle-class are very aware of the differences of habitus between
themselves and those within higher or lower socio-economic groups (Bridge, 2001). They place aesthetics in very high regard, and pay
particular attention to trends of consumption, whether through fashion, dining,
or domestic expressions, with public visibility a must in their group’s
formation of habitus (Bridge, 2001).
Gentrification can be seen as a way for the new middle-class to further express
their habitus, using the inner city as the template from which to construct the
stage for their class distinction and identity to grow (Bridge, 2001).
Gentrification for others
is seen as an evolution of a city’s superstructure, brought about from economic
shifts that have altered the human capital base from which the cities once drew
from and functioned through (Redfern, 2003). With these shifts to cities often comes economic growth that, at
least partially, will translate itself into the increased abilities of reinvestment
in domestic property for individuals, or for cities to make increased
residential spaces available from prior uses (industrial, commercial, etc.)
later made redundant (Redfern, 2003).
Stages of gentrification
Gentrification has had multiple stages
in its growth throughout the twentieth century (Walks & August, 2008). Up
until the end of the 1970s, gentrification had been encouraged and funded by
the state through various ‘urban renewal’ schemes that razed targeted inner-city
neighborhoods in efforts to unearth their property value potential (Walks &
August, 2008). The 1980s saw Canadian municipalities sponsor neighbourhood
improvement programs that helped to revive the appearances of inner-city
neighborhoods in efforts to attract middle-class gentrifiers (Walks &
August, 2008). The current stage of gentrification, ongoing since the 1990s,
has been centered around the removal of tenant protections, rezoning and
investment in specific districts, and encouraging social mixing, all in efforts
to attract the ‘creative class’ (Walks & August, 2008).
Gentrification changed form at the end
of the 1990s as the majority of easily reinvigorated housing stock near central
business districts had been converted, and now the focus of investors and
developers had to move on and out to surrounding areas (Hackworth & Smith, 2001). These areas of the cities were often riskier investments,
containing public housing, mixed-uses, or simply greater distance from the core
(Hackworth
& Smith, 2001). With such obstacles to work with,
gentrification has had to seek assistance from the state to continue on with
the gentrification of the city (Hackworth & Smith, 2001).
The latest stage of gentrification has involved many parties to
create the new urban spaces for the returning middle-classes (Smith, 2002). Capital from all over the world flows into investment
opportunities for new developments of restaurants, retail, condominiums, and
other cultural facilities that will feed the demand of the new middle-classes
streaming into the recaptured urban landscape (Smith, 2002). Cities now work more concertedly than ever with
private interests to spur job growth, tourism, and an ever increasing
population of wealthier citizenry from whom larger taxes can be levied (Smith, 2002). As the world
continues to globalize, cities must now become increasingly competitive in
their efforts to attract and retain the investments of both human and monetary
capital available to them (Smith, 2002).
Mixing rhetoric
Social mixing has
always been associated with gentrification, as many gentrifiers profess a want
to live in more socially mixed neighborhoods, as they find it adds to the
diversity of an area (Lees, 2008). Furthering this mixing rhetoric has been the
government policies of many western nations over the past few years that have
promoted the mixing of social classes within inner city neighborhoods as a way
to expand the opportunities of the disadvantaged through increased and diversified
social networks, and to provide them with positive role models (Lees, 2008).
There appears to be a
large difference between policy and reality, however. Lees’ (2008) findings
show that mixing often does not take place between gentrifiers and the lower
socio-economic groups who they share their neighborhoods with. Middle-class
residents often form new relations through their children’s initial integration
with other children in their new communities (Lees, 2008). Lees’ research found that the children of the middle-class
subjects observed in her sample showed that the networks of their children
remained within their same socio-economic class and further that some
educational facilities used by the middle-class gentrifiers often had social
class restrictions in their memberships (Lees, 2008).
Poorer inner
city neighborhoods often have public housing projects within their confines,
and these have remained as some of the only affordable housing choices for the
less fortunate in the ever rising rents of most cities today. However, these
public housing projects have been under assault since the 1970s when famous
examples such as the Pruitt-Igoe projects were made into archetypes of the
failed methodology of high-rise public housing by the media and government (Heathcott, 2012). Examples like Pruitt
- Igoe helped spur policy change and a move towards ‘positive’ gentrification;
the replacement of public housing projects with mixed-income housing complexes (Lees, 2008).
These mixed-housing schemes have
displaced many public housing residents over the years, and those that remain
do not often mix well with the new market rate residents (Chaskin, 2013). New York City has
had a much better experience with their high-rise public housing than other
states. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been proactive in repairing
and policing their public housing projects, and unlike most public housing in
America, has for decades fought to maintain a balance of incomes within their
buildings; this has enabled them to secure higher rents from slightly wealthier
tenants to help subsidize the lower rents of the poor (Bloom, 2012). Because of this, NYCHA has not had the same concentrations
of poverty found in many other public housing projects (Bloom, 2012). New York
City’s public housing strategies may be a way for Toronto to secure the working
classes from being pushed out of the city by gentrification, by allowing a
widening of income eligibility into public housing. As of 2013, the NYCHA
allows a family of four to earn up to $68,700 (NYCHA, 2013).
Experiencing South Parkdale:
{Observations
recorded by the author in 2013, during the month of November}
As you emerge from the Dufferin Street
railway underpass, you get your first glimpse of Parkdale. The sidewalks are
now filled with a diverse set of citizens; from hipsters and stroller-saddled
mothers to what seems like every minority group Toronto has accumulated over
the decades, as one of the multicultural capitals of the world. The shops seem
just as diverse in their wares; cheap Vietnamese, Indian, and Tibetan
restaurants mingle with hipster coffee shops and boutique clothing and vintage emporiums.
Convenience stores and discount shops appear to be the highest in abundance,
with a steady stream of clientele circulating in and out with their purchases. Unlike
the rest of Queen Street, where every other street corner seems to be adorned
with a Starbucks coffee shop, in South Parkdale there isn’t a single one in
sight. Another segment removed from the area appears to be businessmen; save for
the hipster or two sporting skinny black ties, business suits are a very rare
sight in South Parkdale.
As you turn south and meander down the
streets between Queen and King your eye is drawn to some of the most beautiful
Victorian and Edwardian houses in Toronto, some kept up better than others.
Among the houses are a mixture of automobile brands from BMW and Mercedes Benz
to beat up, rusting Toyotas and Pontiacs. Renovation companies hammer away at
restorations to some of the homes along the tree-lined streets; tools and
building materials strewn about the lawns, large dumpsters filled with debris
in the driveways, with whole floors being razed or basements unearthed. Amongst
the houses, which are often so large it is easy to imagine why so many are made
into apartments, there are a sprinkling of low and mid-rise apartment
buildings, which for the most part appear to be well kept.
Turning onto Jameson Avenue your view
becomes filled with row after row of mid-rise apartment buildings. Groups of
residents congregate and socialize around the entryways, school children racing
in and out of the adults, playing games and screaming with laughter. The
working-class appear to make up the mixture of residents in the buildings, and
there are no traces of luxury cars to be found in the adjacent parking lots.
As you make your way onto the side
streets immediately surrounding the apartment blocks of Jamieson Avenue, one’s
view is met with a mixture of the common Victorian mansions of Parkdale, except
now there are low-rise apartment buildings intermixed with them that appear to
be run down. Residents of these buildings stand around socializing on the
porches, howling, laughing, and smoking cigarettes.
Once night falls on Queen Street, the
lineups of hipsters fill the sidewalks, awaiting their entry into one of the
many stylish nightclubs lining the block. At the nearby public library a group
of men dressed in disheveled clothing are passing around a soda bottle filled
with a suspicious dark liquid, sharing stories with each other in their
attempts to keep warm from the chill of the night air.
Walking through Parkdale is both a
relaxing and entertaining experience. The overall feel is loose and authentic;
the shops seem devoid of commercial marketing, and the people filling the
sidewalks appear to care either very little about their dress and appearance or
so greatly that it seems it must invade upon their every thought, dictating
every decision or action they make. Either way, the whole of Parkdale is a
refreshing glimpse of authenticity in a city where H&M uniforms seem to
dominate the landscapes of the more interesting and lively neighborhoods of the
city.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the history of South
Parkdale from the very beginning has had a constant mixture of residential
settings, which have been contested throughout the decades as to the types of
people they attract. While the more wealthy residents of South Parkdale have
always protested the lower social classes intermixed within the neighborhoods
from the abundance of cheap apartments, the city has been unsuccessful in its
attempts to support these middle-class families’ concerns with alterations to
legislation. The larger picture surrounding gentrification and its whereabouts
helps us to understand both the middle-classes and the less wealthy residents
of South Parkdale who are at odds with one another in their shared neighborhoods.
It appears as though the only real hope for South Parkdale’s original
low-income and working class populations is for government policy to act on
their behalf in securing a place for them to maintain their lives within
neighborhoods they have helped create. It seems as though this is unlikely, as
municipal leaders are entrenched in a neoliberal market driven landscape, where
every penny added to their coffers counts.
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