Photo by Vince LaConte

In Toronto’s Chinatown, an average morning goes on as usual, with longtime business owners setting up shop and elderly residents chatting loudly in local bakeries. But underneath the mundanity lies change. When onlookers enter the Chinatown landmark, the famous Dragon City Mall, the sight of its empty shops and corridors with the occasional elderly passersby may be a surprise. Dragon City Mall’s plight is representative of the larger trend that Chinatown is facing: one of demographic decline.

According to the 2021 Neighbourhood Profile, the number of ethnically Chinese people living in Chinatown was the lowest it had been in over a decade, dropping by almost 25 percent since 2011. This means that, after years of being a deeply entrenched and treasured enclave in the city’s downtown, the neighbourhood may be on the verge of a major shift. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Chinatown hasn’t always stood where it is today. It used to be located on York Street before growing larger and spreading north to Elizabeth Street. Later, two thirds of it were razed to make way for Nathan Phillips Square and a new City Hall. Chinese Canadian community leader and restaurateur Jean Lumb campaigned to preserve the remaining third of the neighborhood, which eventually moved to where it is today. Many of the old signs of the Chinatown on Elizabeth Street are still there if you look carefully. Lumb would go on to travel to Vancouver and Calgary to aid in efforts to save Chinatowns there too, the only woman organizer to do so.

And now, after surviving a forced relocation to its current home at Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chinatown’s Chinese population is not a majority in the neighbourhood. While there are a number of reasons for this, the trend is partially due to the decline of new immigrants moving to the area. When many Chinese immigrants moved to Canada in the late 19th century, most were poor workers from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong seeking new opportunities. The picture today is undoubtedly different. Many new immigrants are students or people coming from upper-class backgrounds. The change in demographic wealth also led to more Chinese immigrants favouring suburban towns over downtown enclaves. Although household income is on the rise in Chinatown, some residents see this as a bittersweet outcome.

Donna, the owner of a local salon called Hair Magic Cut located in the ageing Chinatown Centre mall, has operated her shop for 23 years, raising her kids in the neighbourhood. When asked about the statistical change in Chinatown, she said that while she welcomes any new arrivals to the neighbourhood, the hub of Asian culture that the neighbourhood represents is still deeply important to her.

In an herb shop right across from the salon, the owner, Ms. Zhou, gave another perspective on Chinatown’s past and future. “When I first started up shop in Chinatown 20 years ago, the leading population was the Vietnamese. Once they gained wealth they went north to the suburbs. Now it’s the Fujianese population’s turn. The supermarkets you see around here are all owned by them,” she says. The current demographic decline can be seen as a part of Chinatown’s larger story, one of immigration for opportunity before ultimately graduating to what’s often regarded as a higher status in Toronto society. The changing conditions in Chinatown are partially due to the success of the suburban Chinatowns that arose in the ’90s, namely the City of Markham. In contrast to Toronto’s Chinatown, the amount of Markham residents who identified as Chinese in a survey of visible minorities grew by roughly 40 percent throughout the 2010s, while the facilities and restaurants catering to this population are far newer and greater in number.

However, moving from Chinatown to the suburbs has gotten harder. Due to the rising cost of living, and with it, rising rent over the past decade, Ms. Zhou says fewer young people are inclined to run small businesses like hers.

Still, Chinatown is falling behind its suburban counterparts. Although this can be chalked up as the result of the declining Chinese population in the area, the issue runs deeper than a natural pattern of migration. The rising cost of living is making it harder for the neighbourhood to attract young families. Recent threats of gentrification to its long-standing businesses and restaurants worsen the situation.

Community members are still determined to preserve what’s left of Chinatown. Around the same time developers bought and razed the longstanding Chinatown dim sum restaurant Rol San in 2023, a group of organizers formed a land trust to protect the neighbourhood from further gentrification. To improve business and prioritize the neighbourhood’s culture, the Toronto Chinatown Business Improvement Area (CBIA), formed in 2007, hosts many events and festivals. The CBIA’s annual Toronto Chinatown Festival typically draws over 250,000 visitors, according to their website. (CBIA representatives did not respond to This Magazine’s requests for comment.)

It is clear that Chinatown may never return to its previous status as the city’s pre-eminent centre of Chinese culture. Many different groups have come and gone after successfully searching for opportunity and wealth. Still, Chinatown is losing its ability to sustain working-class people seeking opportunity. The decline of the Chinese population is not the cause of the neighbourhood’s decline; it’s a result of gentrification and the rising cost of living. These issues are causing the neighbourhood to lose its accessibility to newcomers.

A common sentiment organizers working to save Chinatown share is their pride and happiness in the neighbourhood; not only for its prime real estate, or convenience, but for its community. Even now, with the emptying malls and a gradual loss of traditional businesses, there is hope that a piece of Chinatown’s unique history and spirit can still be preserved through the change.

Image by RDNE Stock project via Pexels

In 2021, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT) did an astonishing thing. After a protracted renoviction battle over the Toronto neighbourhood’s iconic Mona Lisa building, the KMCLT bought it from the would-be evictors. The rumoured plan to turn it into a cannabis hotel was foiled and the tenants of the 12 residential and five commercial units—including our beloved corner store, barbershop, and hat store—got to stay.

As KMCLT’s co-chair, I helped organize the community around the tenants, and it was satisfying to see the building go into communal hands. For months I’d walk past Kensington Avenue’s vintage shops and fruit stand with a feeling of elation. We bought the building!

KMCLT’s bold move is part of a burgeoning movement of community land trusts (CLTs) across Canada. CLTs are community-led organizations who remove land from the speculative real estate market and keep it affordable forever. They revive the idea of the commons and collective stewardship, and help governments fulfill their responsibility to house their citizens. They’re quickly emerging as one of the only reliable workarounds for people to find affordable housing—and to keep their neighbourhoods alive.

Like most CLT purchases, KMCLT, which is made up of tenants, neighbourhood residents, and other supporters, bought our building with a mix of government funding and a regular mortgage. The mortgage is taken out by the land trust, which uses the rents to pay it off. It’s the government funding that allows us to keep those rents affordable. As we pay off the mortgage, rents can even go down.

Despite attempts at a second acquisition, KMCLT still owns only one building. But the plan is to use equity to purchase other buildings, as fast as we can. The urgency reflects the housing emergency in Canada: for every new unit of affordable housing built, we lose 11. Those lost affordable homes put people on the street.

Still, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (DTES CLT), co-led by Indigenous and Japanese Canadian organizations, to Black-led CLTs in Nova Scotia, people are coming together to find solutions to the housing crisis. They are now bolstered by the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, established in 2017. The group has over 40 member CLTs and four staff to support CLT development across Canada. “Urban, suburban, and rural communities reach out to the network regularly for guidance on developing a land trust,” director Nat Pace says.

The first meeting of Canadian CLTs on Canadian soil took place in Montreal in 2018, at a conference organized by the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee. We toured Milton Parc and heard about the decades-long battle between the community and developers that led to the entire neighbourhood being cooperatively owned under the umbrella of a CLT. The key moment of that conference, however, was when we were challenged by an Indigenous activist to put land back at the core of the movement.

Collective stewardship requires releasing the death-grip private property has on our imaginations. Thinking about land, settlers must necessarily grapple with the fact that it’s stolen. If at that meeting in Montreal we were mainly white settlers talking about CLTs, that is no longer the case. In Northeastern Ontario, the Temiskaming District Community Land Trust is creating an Indigenous women-led CLT to provide Indigenous-designed affordable housing, while in Toronto and B.C., Indigenous land trusts are also taking shape.

The modern CLT movement began with New Communities Inc., an agricultural community formed in Albany, Georgia in 1969 by civil rights activists who believed that secure land tenure was key to Black liberation. Tapping into this idea, African Nova Scotian CLTs, such as Upper Hammonds Plains just outside Halifax and Down the Marsh in Truro, have formed to secure historic land claims. In Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley land trust honours the legacy of Strathcona’s Black community, displaced through racist city planning.

CLTs can encompass so many forms of land use. Cultural land trusts in Toronto and Vancouver have formed to preserve space for artists; The Northern Community Land Trust is creating affordable home ownership in Whitehorse; and, also in Toronto, the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT)—the first of the resurgence of CLTs in Canada, having started in 2012—is saving rooming houses from renoviction. PNLT’s first acquisition in 2017 was the Milky Way Garden, which is stewarded by Tibetan refugees.

I’m inspired by the opportunity to rethink not only our relationship to land, but also the extractive capitalism that mines bonds between people. There’s a deep camaraderie between Canadian CLTs, which come out of neighbourhood battles against gentrification, displacement, and erasure of working-class immigrant communities. We learn about community—both its challenges and opportunities—and in turn we create a community for ourselves.

Governments are starting to listen: the recent federal announcement of a $1.5 billion Rental Protection Fund, designed for the acquisition of at-risk residential buildings, is a recognition that we can’t build our way out of the housing crisis, and that non-market housing is essential to keep housing affordable.

It remains to be seen how the Canadian movement will sustain itself over the long term. For now, CLTs offer communities a rare source of optimism in the ever-deepening housing crisis. It’s exciting to be part of it, and to know that anyone who wants to effect change in our relationship to land and community can be part of it, too.

PHOTO BY TALHAMUJAHID

“You’re from Scarborough!?”

Scarborough rolled off his tongue like a bitter taste he was trying to get rid of, almost as soon as the word left his mouth. This is one of my first memories of someone’s reaction to where I lived. It sounded heavy with the weight of negative stereotypes. I didn’t know I should’ve hated living here until someone told me to. When I moved to Canada almost a decade ago, I knew nothing about my soon-to-be neighbourhood. But as the day disappeared in the rearview mirror and we drove further down the highway towards our apartment, I noticed how the sparkly downtown Toronto skyline slowly transformed into Scarborough’s brown mid- and low-rise apartment buildings. Initially, the sparkle wasn’t alluring. But slowly, I started seeing Scarborough through the eyes of others, both the media and Torontonians’ perspectives. To some (like wealthy, white people) it was a dangerous crime-ridden wasteland, home to mainly BIPOC folks who lived in Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) buildings. I started internalizing the negative messaging about my community. But with the 10-year anniversary of my move to Scarborough approaching, I’ve done years of internal work to examine the racist, classist, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant notions that altered my perception over time.

Scarborough is located in the east end of Toronto, home to over 600,000 people as of 2016, people from places such as the Caribbean, the Philippines, Africa, China, and South Asia. Before Scarborough became part of the City of Toronto in 1998, it was its own municipality. Advocates such as the Free Scarborough movement have argued that its amalgamation into the “megacity” hasn’t improved life for local residents. Over the last decade, I’ve slowly seen a shift in portrayals of the neighbourhood.

Mornelle Court is a small, vibrant community in Scarborough, spanning seven apartment buildings—two of which are owned by TCHC. I lived and attended school in the area. Words like “dangerous” and “crime” were often thrown around when people spoke about the neighbourhood. Curious about where the community’s reputation came from, I found a string of mid- to late-2000s news stories focusing on its history of gun violence. A connection is often made between TCHC buildings and crime without recognizing the ways a historically underfunded housing system and lack of resources, including access to non-precarious work in Scarborough, reinforces this cyclical relationship. Poverty is criminalized. The Toronto Public Service’s 2020 data shows Scarborough is no more likely to have crime than other parts of the city. But the stereotypes say otherwise. Despite these negative portrayals, people have been actively working on taking back the community by creating initiatives like homework clubs and after-school programs for children to reclaim the narrative.

Last year, I noticed a sign during one of my neighbourhood walks. “Condo luxury without the commitment,” read the tagline for a newly painted and remodelled building in Mornelle Court, owned by MetCap, a management company that has gained a reputation for their ill treatment of tenants. The juxtaposition of 110 Mornelle Court, one of the TCHC buildings undergoing external and structural repairs, being a few steps away from the newly rebranded “condo luxury” building was laughable and insulting. The developers were cashing in on the labour of community leaders to reclaim the neighbourhood, using it as an opportunity to reinvent their apartment building. Despite the freshly painted exteriors and shiny new glass buildings in the neighbourhood, these changes haven’t improved the quality of life for existing residents. Attempts to usher in new wealthy, white residents with promises of luxury and affordability do nothing to address the longstanding issues Scarborough residents face. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, Scarborough is facing its own pandemic with a COVID-19 test positivity rate of 24 percent in April 2021, one of the highest in Ontario, as well as vaccine shortages. The new mirrored apartment buildings will only continue to act as reflectors for the community’s issues.

Witnessing “Scarberia,” or “Scarlem,” undergo a rebranding by developers to become The Borough, appealing to middle-class white people seeking luxurious amenities—is infuriating. “This is Scarborough and it’s Yours to Own,” reads the sign of another new development at Lawrence Avenue and Birchmount Road. East Scarborough has the highest concentration of social housing buildings in Ontario. Residents have poor mobility because of transit deserts. In addition, Scarborough has one of the highest rates of working poor people in Toronto. Homeownership is not accessible for them in this space where they’ve been historically marginalized.

I’ve heard “beautification” and “revitalization” thrown around, which just feels like veiled or coded language. Call it what it is: gentrification. It means creating space for privileged white people to “discover” the value of a neighbourhood I loved before it was trendy or cool. Revitalization is code for gentrification because it never involves the residents who live there. It means fixing up the space, so it meets the standards of new, often white, residents.

Malvern is a northeast Scarborough neighbourhood that is often misrepresented as a crime hotspot, while community members struggle to receive more City of Toronto funding to support the area. Reading articles describing Malvern as a “cultural hotspot”—as one in NOW Magazine did, because the proposed Scarborough LRT (a light rail train that will connect communities in Scarborough to Toronto’s downtown core) will stop there, is baffling. Is this the same Malvern that only a couple of years ago was ranked in the top 10 most dangerous neighbourhoods in the city?

The first year Nuit Blanche, an all-night art festival with installations across the city, came to Scarborough, I overheard a few white people on the Scarborough RT talking about it being their first time in the area. They were “shocked” and “surprised” that the expansive wasteland they thought extended after Kennedy Station was in fact a vibrant and fruitful community. They treated Scarborough like an exotic vacation spot that they “discovered,” or a hidden gem they were uncovering. They ignored how decades before their arrival, Scarborough and its racialized communities deemed it worthy.

There’s an abundance of greenery, like Rouge Park, and beauty beyond the limited possibilities developers see here. Every time I walk into Aunt Elsie’s Caribbean Kitchen, the owners always have a kind word while I check out my box of patties and coco bread.

The cooks at Food Kulture Bistro know my family’s usual Friday night order. The grocery clerks at Food Basics are well acquainted with my shopping habits, often commenting when I’ve gotten a good deal on my produce. This is more than a place to live—I’ve been adopted into a community of people who hold me up. And the more white gentrifiers have access to my safe space, the less safe it feels for me.

Living in Scarborough has truly made me a better person, and I am deeply protective of it. I’ve always loved how I could hear and see home in the faces of people in my neighbourhood. No one did a double take when they heard my accent, or asked me to say certain words like a parrot for their entertainment. It was a place I could just be. I didn’t have to perform my Jamaican identity for anyone. It isn’t uncommon to meet people who are familiar with my hometown in Jamaica, rather than introduced to it through appropriation. In my neighbourhood, there is this unspoken bond where I am my neighbours’ keepers, and they are mine. We are bound by so much more than our postal codes. People whose names I don’t even know look out for me. It is a place I’d like to continue to call home, but with the looming threat of increased rent and invitations extended to outsiders, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to take up space here. Outside of Jamaica, Scarborough is the only place I’ve called home because the community here claimed me. Not because I tried to possess it. Scarborough is not yours to own, gentrifiers.

AERIAL VIEW OF HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS NEAR MARKHAM, ONTARIO · PHOTO BY IDUKE

The excavators were a sore sight. Each machine with its little claw dug into the earth, ripping out the vegetation that grew in place of the usual rows of corn. Just like that, another piece of farmland in Markham, Ontario would be turned to houses.

“I’ve had this for eight years,” I tell my boyfriend, dismayed, that I can’t bear losing these fields. They hold an unobstructed view of the brilliant blues of the sky. On some nights the big dipper lays low, just above the clearance of the field, guiding me home. The plot of land is not much more than one kilometre—too short to fill up a whole block, but a little too long for a novice runner.

The field is a glimpse into a world that is more than just semi-detached homes and townhouses, each worth more than the average Canadian can afford. Unionglen is going to be yet another new subdivision, among the list of communities with names but no personalities: Greensborough, Wismer Commons, Upper Cornell. These subdivisions dominated the growth of Markham, a city marked by incessant urban sprawl that had devoured one farmland after another. A city with cookie cutter homes and frustrating public transit, common veins amongst many suburbs. And yet, I found home in this city.

Home is an elusive concept when you’ve lived in more than five cities before the age of 18. It wasn’t until I was on the cusp of adulthood that I finally felt firmly at home. Right here in Markham. A few years after my family relocated here from British Columbia, we moved into a new subdivision at the edge of town, surrounded by farms and other undeveloped land destined to become yet more pockets of houses.
I memorized the streets and landmarks. I knew which buses to take to get from point A to B—A being our house and B being Markville Shopping Centre, the crown jewel of the city for a 17-year-old with nothing better to do with her time. I knew the opening and closing times of all the important stores and the nearby branches of Markham Public Library. I learned that you never want to drive down Markham Road between 14th Avenue and 16th Avenue during rush hour, unless you have an extra 20 minutes to spare. If you want a quiet place to study, you go to the Angus Glen library branch or Cornell—never Miliken Mills. If you want to sit down at the food court at Pacific Mall, instead of waiting ages for a spot to open up, you take a seat at the stage even though the sign clearly says you are not allowed.

Since immigrating to Canada from southern China in 2004, my life has been a frenzy of learning a new language and blending in, so no one can pick me out from a crowd to call me an outsider. When I grew comfortable in Markham, I embraced it with every fibre in my muscles.

“What’s in Markham?” people would ask. They didn’t understand its appeal over a much more vibrant place like Toronto.
“Not much,” I’d say. “But I love it.”
But right when I finally knew what home was, I moved away again.

The next seven years were earmarked by dizzying trips between London and Markham, then Kitchener, then Windsor. I witnessed the aftermath of Markham evolving, growing bigger. Each time I returned, there was something I didn’t recognize. A Whole Foods, a Chatime, a new supermarket. Restaurants opening and closing and more houses built. Subdivisions were sold out before the foundations were even laid. I was the tetherball flying far from the pole, swinging round and round the thing I identified as home, but yet never truly returning.

I spun around the one constant: my favourite stretch of fields from Kennedy to McCowan Road. Each summer, the newly planted corn climbed upward. When I drove westward, the valleys between rows called to me to get lost in them. After a heavy snowfall, a soft blanket of white cast over the harvested field and I wondered what life would be like if I could just lay in the centre of it all.

Just before I turned 25 in 2019, I finally returned home to Markham. Like many people my age, I came back to town to mooch off my parents after my fantasies for my adulthood dissipated. The intersections and major landmarks were the same. I could still drive around without GPS and the store hours hadn’t changed. But I realized that while I was busy growing up, I was also growing apart with a different vision for my future.

My ideals are now vastly different from that of my parents, whom I had never learned to see as people and more than just parents, until a significant amount of distance was put between us. I find myself disagreeing with their views more and more, even in the ways they sometimes parent my sister who is still in high school.

I’ve turned from someone who dreamed of living in a new home in a sparkling new subdivision in a suburb just like Markham, into someone who craves a sense of community, wants to be able to walk to stores instead of drive, and uses the word “amenities” to mean something more than just a gym in a condo.
Between 2001 and 2016, Markham’s population grew by almost 58 percent. In 2016 just over 45 percent of people who call Markham home cited they are Chinese. In Markham, I am not a minority, but a majority. Yet somehow, the feeling of alienation is the same. The fields had made it feel more like home, but now they are changing too.

Unionglen will be replacing open views of the sunset. The houses will be flanked by a golf club, Markham Fairgrounds, and more fields of corn, some listed on the market, if not already sold. Its predecessor is one of my favourite things about this city. Now that it’s vanishing before my eyes, I’m forced to face the truth. I’ve outgrown Markham. While I had happily adopted Markham’s bedroom community characteristics as things to love, I’ve become disenchanted with the way it has transformed over the years.

The realization is just another confirmation of a label I’ve worn for years: a person without roots. To lose home for the umpteenth time will not hurt much more than a sting. A sting similar to the one I feel when I realize that I do not remember what China looks like beyond the apartment I lived in. Or the ping in my chest when I ponder if I will ever find a place where I know for certain that I belong.

I will be 27 soon. I moved out of my parents’ nest this year. When people ask me where I’m from, I reflexively say Markham like I have for the last decade. But each time, my answer is tinged with the heartache that the city has become just another name on the list of places I’ve lived.