Living in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, one of its oldest neighborhoods, also means living in two worlds. It is a focal point for a fast growing city trying to figure its past and future. I moved in about 8 months ago, after a year of looking for a place to call home. I found a thoroughly renovated spacious Victorian just minutes away from the city’s core, and a short 15 minutes drive away from my office.
Cabbagetown boarders on two very large public housing projects. St. Jamestown to its north, and Regent Park to its south. Old Don Vale, as it was called, became Cabbagetown just over 60 years ago and it is lovely to behold. Elegant streets, urban gardens, old restored Victorian houses, lovely parks and a tight community of processionals, artists and academics. This idyll picture frays at its south, north and western edges. This is were two realities meets one another. The street on which I live, at the Southern edges of Cabbagetown (euphemistically called South Cabbagetown by real estate agents), borders on the gritty parts of Dundas street, which stretches east to Regent Park, and west to Jarvis street – where public housing, shelters and charities set up shop. Like oil and vinegar, the two realities mix, but never coalesce. On one side you find a community best described by Richard Florida’s definition of the ’creative class‘. On the other are the urban poor. Some are homeless, drug addicts, and mentally ill. It’s a quiet but persistent clash. The neighborhood itself, even at the fringe, feels safe. It is police patrolled and mostly quiet. But it is by no means a gated community. The rattle of supermarket carts pushed up the street filled with ‘empties’, and the odd back alley ‘action’ is a constant reminder. I would go as far as say that it is here, on the fringe of two realities, that the future of urban progress is determined. Fast growing cities like Toronto are magnet to immigrants, professionals and other aspiring groups, pricing itself out of reach to whole sections of its populations. Liberal tendencies do stretch thin when one considers the value of property in which we’ve invested our life’s savings, and the safety of our children is considered. Social ghettos temperated back in the 50’s and 60’s, meets a new class of city immigration. Aspiring professionals looking to transform sections of the city after their own image of what quality of life means.
And things do evolve. Recent immigrants from East Africa streaming into Regent Park temper its notorious history of crime and dysfunction with aspirations for social and economical ‘climbing’. A massive re-build of complete city blocks is also underway. Mixing open market forces with some allotement to subsidized dwellings.
I am now learning that “living on the fringe” is not just a matter of urban geography. It’s a dialogue between principles of social justice, a desire to be ‘good’ and the often conflicting desire to reshape our urban environment as we imagine it should be. Is there room for those who can’t afford the city to live in this neighborhood?
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