Comment 6776

By Rusty (registered) - website | Posted May 26, 2007 at 11:48:01

Hey JH,

I think you are saying that the yuppies are taking over Regents Park - yes? The creative classes move in, the house prices/rents go up and low income folks get evicted - am I on the right track?

I'd have to defer to your knowledge on the Regent Park evolution, I haven't looked at any data. But when I stroll around the Regents Park/Cabbagetown area it strikes me that these are still very segregated in that Cabbagetown is still a pretty well-defined enclave of white middle-class, mainly childless residents living in solid, expensive older row houses between Dundas, Parliament, Bayview and whatever that one to the north is.

Once you go west of Parliament and south of Dundas it's affordable housing all the way. As with most neighbourhoods there is no real mix in this neighbouhood (my reference to Regents Park was the proposed development there, which includes a mixtures of all types of housing).

Roncesvalle is being swallowed up though. The Yuppies are coming! I saw the same thing happen in Toronto's east end, when I lived at Pape/Danforth. Little (i.e. affordable) homes were bought up along Browning and all areas north and south of the Danforth between Broadview and Pape, and then knocked down and replaced with Super Yuppie structures for white Execs and their 2.2 kids.

What was once a nice mixture of different income types became another Yuppie enclave. I used to stroll down to Carrot Common on the Danforth and watch the young urbanites fuss over which bagels to select for their Sunday brunch. You can get a very shallow view of the world living in such places (OK, so now I'm being cynical...!)

I'm not sure how you prevent this Yuppification of 'up and coming' neighbourhoods. Obviously if the affordable homes are owned by the municipality or province that would help I suppose. It would prevent the sell off. I'm not a fan, however, of massive institutionalized housing. Homeless shelters are a case in point. I may be a booster of mixed neighbourhoods but I'm not going to support a 600 bed homeless shelter in my back yard. That's nonsense. Scale is everything.

I'm assuming many of our poverty activists have more enlightening ideas and solutions for this topic. I agree with Ryan that Revitalization fanatics like us are often seen as being at odds with Anti-poverty folks. That's a bad thing, and it's not reflective of our 'agenda' at all. Nobody here is suggesting wide-scale gentrification as a solution for urban woes. As I said in my last post, the wholesale replacement of lower income residents with middle-income folks does nothing, in the long run, to revitalize the city. You may have coffee shops in place of laundromats but the fundamental poverty issues are not addressed, and the city, as JH says, ultimatey fails.

Cheers

Ben

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