Panamá-Canadá

 Standing beside whizzing traffic near Jarvis and Dundas, Gaétan Héroux propped his arms up on construction scaffolding, furrowing his brows at a glossy image of a condo tower against a glittering skyline — a developer’s vision for what this corner of Toronto could be.“This is what the developers are selling — it’s the lifestyle, close to downtown, close to restaurants,” said Héroux, a grey-haired community worker and anti-poverty advocate in the area since the ’80s. “This is what’s coming to Dundas and Sherbourne.”In a neighbourhood like this, he means it as a warning. Just east of Jarvis, nestled in the heart of Moss Park, Dundas and Sherbourne has historically been a refuge for those with few places to turn. It has offered cheap rooming houses and smaller rentals, public housing complexes, drop-in programs, street health clinics, and a cluster of homeless shelters.But today, development notices and for sale signs are tacked onto local haunts, while properties that once sold for modest sums are commanding eye-popping price tags. Take the Filmores Hotel and strip joint: in 2000, property records show it sold for $659,000. Twenty years later, it was snapped up by a developer for $31.5 million, with plans to replace it and adjacent properties with a 42-storey tower.It’s a reality that’s left Héroux and others nervous. In a rapidly growing city, development and gentrification have threatened lower-income communities across the map — from rooming houses and multi-family properties being renovated into single-family homes in Parkdale, to mom-and-pop retailers in Little Jamaica struggling to keep their businesses afloat amid Eglinton LRT construction, to longtime tenants in Kensington Market feeling pushed out by lucrative short-term rentals. Moss Park is the kind of neighbourhood some officials and experts see as prime for intensification — a transit-accessible area with a downtown location — in a city facing a serious shortage of housing as the population booms. But Héroux and other local community workers, church leaders and longtime residents fear the kind of development taking place near Dundas and Sherbourne is squeezing one of Toronto’s last viable pockets for those living in deep poverty.It poses a fundamental question about urban growth — can a neighbourhood change without pushing people out?“Listen, change happens,” Héroux said. “But here, the change is displacing people.”A neighbourhood in flux“We’re right on the edge right now of what we used to call Skid Row,” Héroux said, starting his walk down Dundas where it crosses Church Street. The nickname is one of desperation — of a rundown segment of the city where in bygone years, he said temp agencies would thrust open their doors to sprawling lineups of people who’d fallen on hard times. Today, it’s where many of the failures and challenges facing the city still cluster. Many residents live in precarious set-ups while weathering deep poverty. Others have fallen onto life on its streets — a symptom of any number of other citywide issues, from inadequate access to mental health care to the ravages of the opioid crisis. But for some, it also offers comfort, community and the kind of services that are sparse elsewhere.Frank Coburn, 79, has lived near Dundas and Sherbourne for the better part of three decades. For many years he dealt with homelessness, but he now lives in a public housing complex for seniors.“A lot of the things I needed were here,” he said, pointing to shelters and community centres that offered services and camaraderie. These days, he says the area feels more desperate than ever, with more people on the streets or visibly struggling.“The people that are from (the neighbourhood) haven’t really benefitted from all the fancy development that’s taken place,” Coburn said.That development, by Héroux’s telling, ramped up at the turn of the millennium.Not long after the overhauled Yonge and Dundas Square to the west of Moss Park was unveiled in 2002, a sweeping revitalization plan was unveiled for Regent Park, the community on Moss Park’s eastern edge, which would replace old public housing complexes with a mixed-income neighbourhood.In the ensuing years, Héroux noticed interest in the Dundas corridor picking up steam. First, there were the developments along Dundas Street East near Church Street. Steadily, they’ve been migrating east to Jarvis, and beyond towards Sherbourne, he said.Nowadays, development notices are a common sight. Outside a local dance school, one block east of the main intersection, there is a proposal to build a 49-storey tower — with eight replacement rental units and 670 condos. A nearby car wash is proposed to become 101 condos, and the parking lot beside Filmores bears a sign for the forthcoming Elektra Condominiums. “Live electric, in the heartbeat of Toronto,” it lures.Steve Keyzer, an executive with real estate agency Colliers Canada who has handled the sale of several large parcels of land nearby — including Filmores — believes the area has drawn developer interest primarily due to its downtown location and proximity to public transit routes, including the forthcoming Ontario Line’s Moss Park stop.It’s a piece of the city where municipal policies allow for taller buildings, Keyzer said. “A lot of it is just driven by the density potential of the area that has slowly been creeping over from Jarvis,” he said. “And that brings along gentrification, and higher land values, and the ability to create mixed-use projects.”Keyzer believes locals will see benefits from new growth — more retail at the base of towers, for example, or more foot traffic to local establishments. When a property has gone up for sale, he said, interest has come from private, institutional and public players alike.Private vs. publicIndeed, interest in giving Dundas and Sherbourne a facelift isn’t coming solely from developers — it has come, too, from city hall. On George Street, for example, a row of boarded-up homes are part of a city vision to replace Seaton House — a large men’s emergency shelter opened in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression — with a smaller emergency shelter, as well as a transitional facility and long-term care beds, among other amenities. A neighbourhood master plan is meanwhile in the works. But for some of its plans, the city has found itself pitted against developers.For example, city staff have been looking into revitalizing Toronto Community Housing Corp.’s Dan Harrison Community Complex — a site city staff have described as home to many residents who face “disproportionately high rates of poverty, violence, crime and poor housing conditions.” To avoid displacing its residents to other parts of the city during the renovation, the city has discussed creating alternate housing near Dan Harrison, eyeing property at 214-230 Sherbourne — several lots of overgrown grass with a vacant heritage house.Local advocates have long decried such an expansive property sitting unused in the midst of a housing crisis. Its history was heavy — in the mid-80s, a woman named Drina Joubert froze to death in an abandoned truck behind the property after trying, and failing, to access help from the city’s social services. Her death became a flashpoint, still pointed to by advocates pressing the city to take bolder action on housing.In 2020, the city started trying to negotiate a purchase, and by 2021, also began considering funding for an expropriation — something advocates had long pushed for. Then, in spring of 2022, the properties hit the market. The city put together a bid, but was outmuscled by a numbered corporation. Eventually, city hall received an application to build a 47-storey tower with 619 condos on the site.The proposal, for many, struck a nerve — spurring rallies against its progression.A spokesperson for developer KingSett Capital, in an email, said the company recognized “the historic importance of this property to the local community,” and noted its proposal would preserve the “heritage characteristics” of the large house on-site.However, the company said it is now “considering a range of options for the property,” including reselling the lots, but declined to provide further detail.It’s an evolution that’s left the long-idle site’s fate, once again, up in the air. A community struggles to fill the gapsAs development has inched closer, community players say it feels like the city’s vulnerable are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller footprint, while other crises from opioid poisonings to homelessness surge.Across the road from 214-230 Sherbourne, at All Saints Church — a neighbourhood fixture since the 1870s that operates a drop-in program — Rev. Alison Falby says she’s watched the sidewalks become increasingly packed with people facing homelessness. “It does feel like the gentrification of the city is encroaching on both sides — and everything is coming to a head at this corner of Dundas and Sherbourne,” she said.In its vulnerability, she sees neighbours who learn to truly lean on one another. “I walk around the streets, and I see people I know, and we greet each other by name. There are very few neighbourhoods where that actually happens,” Falby said. “If you need people, you’re forced to reach out. You can’t live in your splendid isolation.” The church aimed to foster that sense of community, she said, but some days, it felt more like they were filling the gaps of government failures “related to subsidized housing, related to the use of drugs and treatment of addiction, not to mention income — the people on ODSP and Ontario Works. We are much busier from the middle of the month to the end … as people run out of money for food.”There was a lack of public washroom access, she said, so people relieved themselves outside. She worries that reality only fuels tensions. “The challenging part is I know the residents — the homeowners — would say they feel unsafe in the neighbourhood, but I would also say that people experiencing homelessness feel unsafe.”She understands there are individuals and families for whom the new condos will offer housing, but worries about low-income residents losing their foothold as expensive homes stack up. While there are some affordable housing projects in the area — such as a proposal from St. Jude Community Homes to build 12 affordable rental units — she’s seen first-hand how hard that is to accomplish.She said the church would love to reinvigorate a former affordable housing site on its property that’s sat empty since the 2000s due to the cost of repairs, but so far the numbers hadn’t worked out. “Deeply affordable housing is very hard to build, let alone maintain.”Across from All Saints, at the social service agency Street Health, community health worker Maurice Adongo has also seen people in the area living in increasingly desperate situations. Standing outside, he waves a man inside who has come for help getting identification cards — a critical step to get on Toronto’s 84,749-household-long subsidized housing wait-list. While the wait for such homes can take decades, it’s gotten harder and harder to find affordable options in the private market, Adongo says, as options like local rooming houses have been disappearing.Emergency shelter beds, too, are increasingly out of reach. “You can call the whole day — in fact, you can call for days and days and days for the same person — and there is nowhere to go,” he said.To him, there’s a chasm between local need and what’s being built, which he believes underpins the pushback to yet another condo being built. “We’re not going anywhere, and these people are not going anywhere. This is their home, and this is their city.”Can the city grow without pushing people out?Matti Siemiatycki, an expert in large-scale infrastructure projects, housing and city planning at the University of Toronto, sees the questions now facing Dundas and Sherbourne as an echo of those asked in other neighbourhoods — not only in Toronto, but in cities around the world.“This is the eternal question about development without displacement. Can a city grow and evolve without putting pressure and forcing out the people who are already there?”He believes it has to evolve, arguing cities shouldn’t simply freeze in time. “If we’re not growing in places that are already built up, we’re going to be growing around the periphery of our region, and that has its own sets of challenges around the Greenbelt, around congestion, around climate change and environmental emissions and around quality of life,” he said.“So, we have to figure out how we grow and change without pushing people out, and putting pressure on services they rely on.”But how does that happen? Siemiatycki believes collaboration — involving existing residents — needs to be the starting point. “I think that’s often missed,” he said, noting it was harder to do in environments like Moss Park where real estate transactions were occurring property-by-property in the open market, versus a neighbourhood like Regent Park that was planned as a larger and more comprehensive city-building endeavour.There were some existing protections, such as Toronto’s rental replacement policy, which requires developers to rebuild any lost rental units, and offer them at similar rents to the old tenants, though it only applies in buildings with six or more units.In places like Moss Park, he sees broader city policies such as secondary plans as critical. “It’s something that has to be planned for in advance. If it’s left until after the fact, it will be too late, you will start to see real conflicts between neighbours and between different types of services.”There are creative ways for old and new to exist in harmony, Siemiatycki said. He points, as one example, to Toronto’s Red Door family shelter. The old shelter building was purchased by a developer who wanted to build a condo. But the shelter was not eliminated — its operations were included in the condo plan, and seen as one of the city’s most dramatic examples of mixing civic and private-use development.“That idea of collaboration and colocation is one of the real bulwarks against gentrification and displacement,” Siemiatycki said.Chris Moise, city councillor for both Moss Park and Regent Park, said boosting density in Moss Park is a fair goal given its central location. “We’re in a housing crisis in the city, and we need to look at our existing property and try to maximize use,” he said.He is wary that any city-led overhauls at Dundas and Sherbourne bring a risk of displacement. There were people forced out of Regent Park by the revitalization process there who ultimately did not return, he said. In Moss Park, he’s open to replicating some aspects of the Regent revitalization, from partnerships with the private sector to embracing a mixed-income community. He stressed that any major overhauls needed to think beyond buildings. The area needed services — from mental health care and addiction programs to affordable homes with supports on-site.His hope, he said, was to hold more conversations within the community about what residents wanted to see. “There is so much potential, and I think you have to go in with intention,” Moise said.But Héroux sees change already underway.Standing on the sidewalk, he pointed above the brick facade of what he called the “old neighbourhood” to where glass and metal glint in the sun. “You can see the wall of condos,” he said, before sighing. “This is going to be gone. You’re watching it all disappear.”Victoria Gibson is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering affordable housing. Reach her via email: victoriagibson@thestar.ca 

Standing beside whizzing traffic near Jarvis and Dundas, Gaétan Héroux propped his arms up on construction scaffolding, furrowing his brows at a glossy image of a condo tower against a glittering skyline — a developer’s vision for what this corner of Toronto could be.

“This is what the developers are selling — it’s the lifestyle, close to downtown, close to restaurants,” said Héroux, a grey-haired community worker and anti-poverty advocate in the area since the ’80s. “This is what’s coming to Dundas and Sherbourne.”

In a neighbourhood like this, he means it as a warning. Just east of Jarvis, nestled in the heart of Moss Park, Dundas and Sherbourne has historically been a refuge for those with few places to turn. It has offered cheap rooming houses and smaller rentals, public housing complexes, drop-in programs, street health clinics, and a cluster of homeless shelters.

But today, development notices and for sale signs are tacked onto local haunts, while properties that once sold for modest sums are commanding eye-popping price tags. Take the Filmores Hotel and strip joint: in 2000, property records show it sold for $659,000. Twenty years later, it was snapped up by a developer for $31.5 million, with plans to replace it and adjacent properties with a 42-storey tower.

It’s a reality that’s left Héroux and others nervous. In a rapidly growing city, development and gentrification have threatened lower-income communities across the map — from rooming houses and multi-family properties being renovated into single-family homes in Parkdale, to mom-and-pop retailers in Little Jamaica struggling to keep their businesses afloat amid Eglinton LRT construction, to longtime tenants in Kensington Market feeling pushed out by lucrative short-term rentals.

Moss Park is the kind of neighbourhood some officials and experts see as prime for intensification — a transit-accessible area with a downtown location — in a city facing a serious shortage of housing as the population booms.

But Héroux and other local community workers, church leaders and longtime residents fear the kind of development taking place near Dundas and Sherbourne is squeezing one of Toronto’s last viable pockets for those living in deep poverty.

It poses a fundamental question about urban growth — can a neighbourhood change without pushing people out?

“Listen, change happens,” Héroux said. “But here, the change is displacing people.”

A neighbourhood in flux

“We’re right on the edge right now of what we used to call Skid Row,” Héroux said, starting his walk down Dundas where it crosses Church Street. The nickname is one of desperation — of a rundown segment of the city where in bygone years, he said temp agencies would thrust open their doors to sprawling lineups of people who’d fallen on hard times.

Today, it’s where many of the failures and challenges facing the city still cluster. Many residents live in precarious set-ups while weathering deep poverty. Others have fallen onto life on its streets — a symptom of any number of other citywide issues, from inadequate access to mental health care to the ravages of the opioid crisis.

But for some, it also offers comfort, community and the kind of services that are sparse elsewhere.

Frank Coburn, 79, has lived near Dundas and Sherbourne for the better part of three decades. For many years he dealt with homelessness, but he now lives in a public housing complex for seniors.

“A lot of the things I needed were here,” he said, pointing to shelters and community centres that offered services and camaraderie. These days, he says the area feels more desperate than ever, with more people on the streets or visibly struggling.

“The people that are from (the neighbourhood) haven’t really benefitted from all the fancy development that’s taken place,” Coburn said.

That development, by Héroux’s telling, ramped up at the turn of the millennium.

Not long after the overhauled Yonge and Dundas Square to the west of Moss Park was unveiled in 2002, a sweeping revitalization plan was unveiled for Regent Park, the community on Moss Park’s eastern edge, which would replace old public housing complexes with a mixed-income neighbourhood.

In the ensuing years, Héroux noticed interest in the Dundas corridor picking up steam. First, there were the developments along Dundas Street East near Church Street. Steadily, they’ve been migrating east to Jarvis, and beyond towards Sherbourne, he said.

Nowadays, development notices are a common sight. Outside a local dance school, one block east of the main intersection, there is a proposal to build a 49-storey tower — with eight replacement rental units and 670 condos. A nearby car wash is proposed to become 101 condos, and the parking lot beside Filmores bears a sign for the forthcoming Elektra Condominiums. “Live electric, in the heartbeat of Toronto,” it lures.

Steve Keyzer, an executive with real estate agency Colliers Canada who has handled the sale of several large parcels of land nearby — including Filmores — believes the area has drawn developer interest primarily due to its downtown location and proximity to public transit routes, including the forthcoming Ontario Line’s Moss Park stop.

It’s a piece of the city where municipal policies allow for taller buildings, Keyzer said. “A lot of it is just driven by the density potential of the area that has slowly been creeping over from Jarvis,” he said. “And that brings along gentrification, and higher land values, and the ability to create mixed-use projects.”

Keyzer believes locals will see benefits from new growth — more retail at the base of towers, for example, or more foot traffic to local establishments. When a property has gone up for sale, he said, interest has come from private, institutional and public players alike.

Private vs. public

Indeed, interest in giving Dundas and Sherbourne a facelift isn’t coming solely from developers — it has come, too, from city hall.

On George Street, for example, a row of boarded-up homes are part of a city vision to replace Seaton House — a large men’s emergency shelter opened in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression — with a smaller emergency shelter, as well as a transitional facility and long-term care beds, among other amenities. A neighbourhood master plan is meanwhile in the works.

But for some of its plans, the city has found itself pitted against developers.

For example, city staff have been looking into revitalizing Toronto Community Housing Corp.’s Dan Harrison Community Complex — a site city staff have described as home to many residents who face “disproportionately high rates of poverty, violence, crime and poor housing conditions.”

To avoid displacing its residents to other parts of the city during the renovation, the city has discussed creating alternate housing near Dan Harrison, eyeing property at 214-230 Sherbourne — several lots of overgrown grass with a vacant heritage house.

Local advocates have long decried such an expansive property sitting unused in the midst of a housing crisis. Its history was heavy — in the mid-80s, a woman named Drina Joubert froze to death in an abandoned truck behind the property after trying, and failing, to access help from the city’s social services. Her death became a flashpoint, still pointed to by advocates pressing the city to take bolder action on housing.

In 2020, the city started trying to negotiate a purchase, and by 2021, also began considering funding for an expropriation — something advocates had long pushed for. Then, in spring of 2022, the properties hit the market. The city put together a bid, but was outmuscled by a numbered corporation. Eventually, city hall received an application to build a 47-storey tower with 619 condos on the site.

The proposal, for many, struck a nerve — spurring rallies against its progression.

A spokesperson for developer KingSett Capital, in an email, said the company recognized “the historic importance of this property to the local community,” and noted its proposal would preserve the “heritage characteristics” of the large house on-site.

However, the company said it is now “considering a range of options for the property,” including reselling the lots, but declined to provide further detail.

It’s an evolution that’s left the long-idle site’s fate, once again, up in the air.

A community struggles to fill the gaps

As development has inched closer, community players say it feels like the city’s vulnerable are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller footprint, while other crises from opioid poisonings to homelessness surge.

Across the road from 214-230 Sherbourne, at All Saints Church — a neighbourhood fixture since the 1870s that operates a drop-in program — Rev. Alison Falby says she’s watched the sidewalks become increasingly packed with people facing homelessness.

“It does feel like the gentrification of the city is encroaching on both sides — and everything is coming to a head at this corner of Dundas and Sherbourne,” she said.

In its vulnerability, she sees neighbours who learn to truly lean on one another. “I walk around the streets, and I see people I know, and we greet each other by name. There are very few neighbourhoods where that actually happens,” Falby said. “If you need people, you’re forced to reach out. You can’t live in your splendid isolation.”

The church aimed to foster that sense of community, she said, but some days, it felt more like they were filling the gaps of government failures “related to subsidized housing, related to the use of drugs and treatment of addiction, not to mention income — the people on ODSP and Ontario Works. We are much busier from the middle of the month to the end … as people run out of money for food.”

There was a lack of public washroom access, she said, so people relieved themselves outside. She worries that reality only fuels tensions. “The challenging part is I know the residents — the homeowners — would say they feel unsafe in the neighbourhood, but I would also say that people experiencing homelessness feel unsafe.”

She understands there are individuals and families for whom the new condos will offer housing, but worries about low-income residents losing their foothold as expensive homes stack up. While there are some affordable housing projects in the area — such as a proposal from St. Jude Community Homes to build 12 affordable rental units — she’s seen first-hand how hard that is to accomplish.

She said the church would love to reinvigorate a former affordable housing site on its property that’s sat empty since the 2000s due to the cost of repairs, but so far the numbers hadn’t worked out. “Deeply affordable housing is very hard to build, let alone maintain.”

Across from All Saints, at the social service agency Street Health, community health worker Maurice Adongo has also seen people in the area living in increasingly desperate situations. Standing outside, he waves a man inside who has come for help getting identification cards — a critical step to get on Toronto’s 84,749-household-long subsidized housing wait-list. While the wait for such homes can take decades, it’s gotten harder and harder to find affordable options in the private market, Adongo says, as options like local rooming houses have been disappearing.

Emergency shelter beds, too, are increasingly out of reach.

“You can call the whole day — in fact, you can call for days and days and days for the same person — and there is nowhere to go,” he said.

To him, there’s a chasm between local need and what’s being built, which he believes underpins the pushback to yet another condo being built. “We’re not going anywhere, and these people are not going anywhere. This is their home, and this is their city.”

Can the city grow without pushing people out?

Matti Siemiatycki, an expert in large-scale infrastructure projects, housing and city planning at the University of Toronto, sees the questions now facing Dundas and Sherbourne as an echo of those asked in other neighbourhoods — not only in Toronto, but in cities around the world.

“This is the eternal question about development without displacement. Can a city grow and evolve without putting pressure and forcing out the people who are already there?”

He believes it has to evolve, arguing cities shouldn’t simply freeze in time. “If we’re not growing in places that are already built up, we’re going to be growing around the periphery of our region, and that has its own sets of challenges around the Greenbelt, around congestion, around climate change and environmental emissions and around quality of life,” he said.

“So, we have to figure out how we grow and change without pushing people out, and putting pressure on services they rely on.”

But how does that happen? Siemiatycki believes collaboration — involving existing residents — needs to be the starting point. “I think that’s often missed,” he said, noting it was harder to do in environments like Moss Park where real estate transactions were occurring property-by-property in the open market, versus a neighbourhood like Regent Park that was planned as a larger and more comprehensive city-building endeavour.

There were some existing protections, such as Toronto’s rental replacement policy, which requires developers to rebuild any lost rental units, and offer them at similar rents to the old tenants, though it only applies in buildings with six or more units.

In places like Moss Park, he sees broader city policies such as secondary plans as critical. “It’s something that has to be planned for in advance. If it’s left until after the fact, it will be too late, you will start to see real conflicts between neighbours and between different types of services.”

There are creative ways for old and new to exist in harmony, Siemiatycki said. He points, as one example, to Toronto’s Red Door family shelter. The old shelter building was purchased by a developer who wanted to build a condo. But the shelter was not eliminated — its operations were included in the condo plan, and seen as one of the city’s most dramatic examples of mixing civic and private-use development.

“That idea of collaboration and colocation is one of the real bulwarks against gentrification and displacement,” Siemiatycki said.

Chris Moise, city councillor for both Moss Park and Regent Park, said boosting density in Moss Park is a fair goal given its central location. “We’re in a housing crisis in the city, and we need to look at our existing property and try to maximize use,” he said.

He is wary that any city-led overhauls at Dundas and Sherbourne bring a risk of displacement. There were people forced out of Regent Park by the revitalization process there who ultimately did not return, he said.

In Moss Park, he’s open to replicating some aspects of the Regent revitalization, from partnerships with the private sector to embracing a mixed-income community. He stressed that any major overhauls needed to think beyond buildings. The area needed services — from mental health care and addiction programs to affordable homes with supports on-site.

His hope, he said, was to hold more conversations within the community about what residents wanted to see. “There is so much potential, and I think you have to go in with intention,” Moise said.

But Héroux sees change already underway.

Standing on the sidewalk, he pointed above the brick facade of what he called the “old neighbourhood” to where glass and metal glint in the sun.

“You can see the wall of condos,” he said, before sighing. “This is going to be gone. You’re watching it all disappear.”

Victoria Gibson is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering affordable housing. Reach her via email: victoriagibson@thestar.ca