Two Things Urbanists Could Learn From The Parkdale Anti-Gentrification Movement
Note to reader: This essay was written in 2018 for a graduate course at the University of Toronto. No doubt that so much has changed in Parkdale, in Toronto, and in cities broadly since that time. I have ideas to return to this subject someday and provide some sort of update. Until then, please keep this context in mind as you read.
While city builders talk housing supply and inclusionary zoning, ordinary people in gentrifying neighbourhoods are hard at work
A large contingent of both specialists and non-specialists engaged public discourse on city planning and urban issues today self-identify as ‘urbanists’. Through the present era of constant public discourse, the label urbanist has expanded from its traditional definition to represent a common philosophy of city development. That philosophy generally goes something like this: urbanists want more people to be able to reside, work, get around, and live in cities [1]. The terms urbanist and urbanism may “imply that there exists some universally accepted ideology of the best way to construct, organize and manage any given urban area,” but no such framework is actually prescribed [2]. Moreover, these words are so ubiquitous that they only serve to reflect an assemblage of generally accepted ideas and theories, for example, Richard Florida’s popular theory of redeveloping urban areas to attract a “creative class” and boost economic prosperity [3].
Insofar as ‘urbanism’ co-opts broad strokes of urban planning scholarship, it has also contracted that scholarship’s “eviction” of critical perspectives [4]. This article uses the case of the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement to illustrate crucial understandings of actually existing gentrification and displacement, which the movement resits, and of the ways grassroot movements build capacity for advocacy, activism and citizen engagement. In doing so, this article hopes to spread awareness of critical perspectives missing from urbanist discourses and the significance of such perspectives to contemporary discussions in urban planning.
This article presents the case study of the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement to open a conversation. Not a conversation about the limits of popular urbanism discourses, but a conversation about what could lie beyond those limits. The case study’s equally important second purpose is to spread awareness of what the anti-gentrification movement in Parkdale, both in terms of the actual pressures and impacts of gentrification and displacement, and the history of direct, innovative efforts to develop in Parkdale a practical capacity to cope, adapt and resist [5].
The Parkdale anti-gentrification movement is a label used in this article to signify the network of formal and informal coalitions between community organizations, service providers, organizers, activists and ordinary residents that together are resisting disruptive forces of actually existing gentrification and displacement in Parkdale. Some of the earliest campaigns for the protection of rooming houses in Parkdale took place during the 1990s [6], though anti-poverty activists and advocacy groups fought have unemployment, weakening social assistance programs, and loss of affordable housing across Toronto since the 1980s [7]. It was during that time that Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC), the flagship organization of the movement if there ever was one, was established to support the large number of people, many survivors of the psychiatric system, in Parkdale living in rooming houses. Today, PARC continues to work closely with people on issues of poverty,mental health, addiction, homelessness and food security, and continues to be a central actor of the anti-gentrification movement [8]. As a collectivity [9] the Parkdale anti-gentrification movement engages in community organizing, activism, policy advocacy, community economic development, community research, and service provision, including affordable housing.
In particular, this article looks at two topics within popular urbanism discourse, gentrification and displacement, and citizen engagement, in an effort to stoke discussion around underrepresented perspectives and to motivate urbanists to explore and engage with critical geography and planning theory.
1. Displacement is violence
Urbanists embrace interpretations of gentrification which attend to market-driven processes of neighbourhood change and attend to the interests and behaviours of the gentrifiers [10] or how gentrification achieves “social integration and uplift,” [11]. Gentrification is seen to have a liberating or emancipatory effect on deprived urban neighbourhoods and people who live in them. Hence gentrification is deemed a solution to poverty and neighbourhood decline, and discourse on gentrification has shift to its causes of gentrification, and away from its effects. Coincidentally, displacement, arguably the most harmful part of gentrification, has faded from conversations on gentrification and affordable housing [12].
But the day-to-day experiences of people most affected by actually existing gentrification and displacement make clear the disruption and distress the is caused [13]. Parkdale is home to diverse communities, and the impacts of gentrification are being felt throughout the neighbourhood. Parkdale is home to a diverse citizenry who “have an unequal access to and varying degree of dependence on community assets,” [14]. Out of all residents in Parkdale, more than 50% are renters and nearly 35% live in poverty [15].
Parkdale was once an upper-middle class neighbourhood on the west end of Toronto’s downtown, but it was thrust into a protracted decline after construction of the multi-lane Gardiner Expressway cut the neighbourhood off from the Lake Ontario waterfront in the late 1950s. The city demolished original Victorian houses and had them replaced with apartment buildings, and over time those who could fled to farther suburbs, selling their homes to landlords or investment firms to be converted into apartments or rooming houses [16]. Through the 1970-80s the Ontario provincial government shifted to a practice known as de-institutionalization which lead to the closing of psychiatric institutions and discharging patients into the community with little to no supports [17]. The practice of de-institutionalization, coupled with the reduction (or elimination) of government provided social services, like welfare and social housing, affected Parkdale deeply. By the 1990s it was already seeing an influx of artists and generally people with higher incomes relative to existing residents, all too familiar signals of the beginnings of gentrification [18]. The process of gentrification and displacement has intensified in recent years with changes to commercial uses and rent increases putting pressure on residents already struggling for stability.
When the Queen Street Mental Health Centre shut its doors and discharged patients into Parkdale, more than 1,000 psychiatric consumers/survivors suddenly to find somewhere to live. Supportive housing was limited, and rental units affordable to someone living on marginal government benefits were disappearing rapidly due to conversion or redevelopment of rental housing and low volume of new purpose-built rental [19]. Most ex-patients found themselves in group homes or rooming houses around Parkdale. Some found a place to live at the Queen’s Hotel. The owner, BSAR Developments, claimed the building to be a hotel, even though it operated as any other rooming house did; “there were no short-term guests, no reception desk, no amenities common to even the cheapest motels,” [20]. In July of 2015, BSAR evicted 27 tenants on a week’s notice. The harassment faced by tenants is in an account of the eviction by former tenant Paul Snider:
“Finally one day, I arrived home to find a notice posted to my door informing us that we were being evicted with six days’ notice. The warning concluded with a promise to toss out any and all personal possessions left behind. Those six days were hellish and chaotic. The company actually went so far as to hire an “enforcer”—in this case, an ex-motorcycle gang thug, whom they paid $500 cash to hang around intimidating us,” [21].
The experience of the Queen’s Hotel evictions us the real impact of actually existing gentrification and displacement starts and ends with the failure of our economic and political system to provide adequate stability to marginalised and vulnerable communities, and private landowners exploiting and abusing tenants in order to increase profits [22] .
Displacement as a social phenomenon is undertheorized and understudied. There is a dire for urbanists need to understand actually existing gentrification and daily lived experiences of people struggling through spatial dislocation, especially marginalised populations who depend on the lower-end of the rental market and the most threatened by gentrification and displacement [23]. Displacement as an urban and social phenomena is also worth focused attention and deliberation from urbanists. Taking a historical view, one can draw a line to histories of forced relocation of urban communities, like the mid-twentieth century practices of urban renewal [24] (for Canadian examples, see Regent Park, in Toronto, and Africville in Halifax, Nova Scotia). Urbanists must recognize the role of urban planner and planners in these histories. As well, urbanism needs to explicitly align its philosophy of “more people in cities” with current city dwellers’ fundamental ‘right to stay put’, [25] or, provide arguments for not doing so.
Continue reading in part 2.
References:
[1] “Why I call myself an urbanist,” The Urbanist (blog), January 19, 2016, https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/01/19/why-i-call-myself-an-urbanist/
[2] “Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014”, CityLab , December, 31, 2013, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/12/urbanist-buzzwords-rethink-2014/7959/
[3] Florida, R. The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
[4] Slater, T., “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 4 (2006): 737-757
[5] Pares, M., Blanco, I. & Fernandez, C., “Facing the Great Recession in Deprived Urban Areas: How Civic Capacity Contributes to Neighbourhood Resilience,” City & Community 17, no.1 (2018): 65-86
[6] Slater, T., “Municipally managed gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto,” The Canadian Geographer 48, no.3 (2004): 303-325
[7] Greene, J. “Urban restructuring, homelessness, and collective action in Toronto, 1980-2003,” Urban History Review 43, no.1 (2014)
[8] “About PARC”, Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre, accessed March 30, 2018. http://parc.on.ca/about/
[9] DeFilippis, J., Fisher, R. & Shragge, E. “‘Neither romance nor regulation: Re-evaluating community”, Community Development Journal 30, no.3 (2006): 673-689.
[10] Slater, 2006
[11] Stabrowski, F., “New-Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” Antipode 46, no.3 (2014):pp.798
[12] Slater, 2006
[13] Mazer, K.M. & Rankin, K.N., “The social space of gentrification: the politics of neighbourhood accessibility in Toronto’s Downtown West,” Environment & Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011):822-839
[14] Kamizaki, K. “Parkdale planning study: Building a foundation for decent work, shared wealth, and equitable development in Parkdale,” Toronto: PARC & PCED Project, 2016) pp.5 ( https://parkdalecommunityeconomies.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/20161121_pced_final.pdf )
[15] Ibid.
[16] Slater, 2006
[17] Greene, 2014
[18] Slater, 2006
[19] Greene, 2014