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.

After the break-up, I walked Yonge St. at night.

I didn’t understand this compulsion, but the circuit remained the same: a few drinks at a village bar and I would wander the corridor between Bloor and Dundas, peering into closed stores or sleepy bars, stopping in at a late-night bookshop to peruse the dusty shelves and eavesdrop on the surly owner’s conversations with customers, habitually thumbing through texts on my phone.

The segment of Yonge I’d chosen was unremarkable—a mishmash of architectural styles, occupied by chain restaurants and convenience stores, seedy enough to attract unsavoury characters and containing a fraction of the nightlife of hipper sections of town. But I liked it—it felt lived-in, like neighbourhoods in Montreal or New York, where converted spaces and faded signage were a source of pride, evidence of civic durability. Nearby businesses like the House of Lords salon had catered to generations of shaggy, misguided teens, while strip clubs Zanzibar and the Brass Rail stood on either end of the street, like neon bookends.

And in the middle of all of this was the decaying clock tower of St. Charles Tavern, one of the city’s earliest and most notorious gay bars, where drag queens paraded on Halloween night in the 1970s, pelted with eggs by jeering crowds. Once a fire hall, it was now a games store with bright yellow signs advertising discount prices on superhero figurines.

I would go as far as my feet would take me, then head home, only to return a few nights later to do it all over again. A comforting cycle. A routine, of sorts.

My ex-partner Mark and I also had routines, when things were working. If the weather was nice, we would climb the steep stairs of his old-but-affordable Chinatown brownstone and take his dog through the university campus, stopping for a quick drink at a pub we liked because it was queer-friendly and staffed mostly by artists. It was there, under the smoky red lanterns, that he had grasped my hands when I received word of my mother’s heart attack, tucking himself into me. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His words buoyed me.

On the weekends, we made our pilgrimage to Honest Ed’s, all labyrinthine stairwells and tacky signage. Filling our baskets with vitamins and tchotchkes, we’d pose for playful photographs in front of the dated theatre posters or mirrored displays, one of them with massive pink text: welcome to yesterday. Mark made obscene gestures I’d only discover later while swiping through my phone. “That was the whole point of the photo,” he’d tease.

At night, when the spirit would take us, we’d head to Zipperz, a gay piano bar with a club tucked behind a velvet curtain. It was like something out of a David Lynch film, with its cheap drinks, show tunes, and a large plaster torso and buttocks on either side of the entrance. The bar attracted a clientele older than us by a generation, but one that was more mixed and less pretentious than at other village haunts. Mark loved it and the owner loved him. There, dancing on a chrome floor that was often slick from beer, we’d tangle together, between the bodies and beneath the lights, three decades of music washing over us.

On our way home, we’d stumble drunkenly past that same clock tower above the old St. Charles, trying to imagine walking the circuit as those brave queens all those years before. I’d threaten to scale the building and climb inside the tower. “One day, I’ll get inside that thing.” He’d laugh, “I look forward to seeing it.”

But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence. Yellowing teeth needlessly tugged from a smile, soon to be replaced with expensive titanium implants, good as new.

There’s something to be said for the challenge of recording memories in a city that rewrites itself, of processing trauma while navigating a backdrop of urban amnesia. In the aftermath of loss, you desperately try to grasp for the concrete, the tangible, to orient you. You retrace your steps, revisit important places, attempt to solidify past experiences or maybe even exorcise them by confronting whatever residue is left behind.

But in the absence of the familiar, there is only the unknown.

All living cities evolve and transform, but our city is different. A metropolis without a guiding mythology, Toronto has been shaped almost entirely by economic whims, political resentments, and slash-and-burn epochs. Sometimes literal fires, as in the Great Fire of 1904, and other times surges of re-development, like the unceremonious destruction of Victorian architecture in the 1970s or the condo craze of the present, with large swaths of the city razed and rebuilt without much thought to history. A city with a comforting blankness, with each successive generation erasing the remnants of the previous one, a civic character defined by willful forgetfulness and in the interest of a certain type of progress.

For some, this progress is a move toward the antiseptic, expensive, and decidedly conservative. A notorious strip club like Jilly’s becomes a boutique hotel, the heritage plaque out front conveniently ignoring the more sordid chapters in the history of the building and the cash-strapped tenants re-homed to less trendy neighbourhoods. Some facades are maintained, but grafted off of historic buildings and then mounted onto glass boxes, the architectural version of a killer wearing their victim’s face. Mark’s old brownstone, populated mostly by queers and artists, is demolished and replaced by an expensive condo marketed on a bohemian brand; an old family-run restaurant is transformed into a hip new brunch spot for new, more monied neighbours.

The city’s edges are sanded down and its darkest corners brightly lit. Organic spaces, sprung from human needs and messy excesses become a marketing tool for real estate agents, but are never an imperative for preservation. Raze and rebuild.

The places we inhabit disappear and the spaces that replace them leave no room for us. The city, a draw for marginalized queer people with an assurance of community and infrastructure, is also increasingly unaffordable, pushing many into outlying suburbs and smaller towns—cheaper places where safety is less certain and visibility is non-existent, and where a lack of density prevents proper community organizing or easy access to progressive workplaces. An economic closeting in a way, where the golden handcuffs that enable you to rent affordably or possibly own property also prevent you from holding your partner’s hand in public.

Memories get written on the margins because there is no space on the page, but soon there is no place in the book.

I think of this during one of my last nights on Yonge, as I climb the clock tower. I’ve gained access to the old St. Charles building as part of a creative project, an attempt to document the space and its history before it is torn down and replaced by an expensive condo. Little remains from that grubby tavern, thirty years on, but I attempt to record it all—the abandoned keg room, the sealed dumbwaiters, even the massive furnace. No drag queens.

Inside, I climb a narrow wooden staircase to the first platform, a filthy room with four windows in each direction. Above me are the cracked iron bell, green from moisture, and a ladder leading to the inner mechanisms of the clock, frozen in time.

Staring up, I feel history wash over me. The firefighters scrambling up and down these wooden stairs, and the queer men on barstools, hunched over cheap beers, desperate for connection, terrified of the world beyond. I feel compelled to contact Mark, to send him a message to let him know that I’ve made it, that I’ve found my way into this hallowed space. That I’m a part of history.

But as I fumble with my phone in gloved hands, I look out onto Yonge, at the strip I’d walked night after night. From this vantage point, I can see the House of Lords and the old bookshop, now both shuttered, large “For Lease” signs looming in empty storefronts. Beyond that, condos and cranes, many rising around the clock tower itself, dwarfing it on the street.

And below me, an uncharacteristic silence.

I put my phone away.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

If you’re a This Magazine reader, you almost surely have an opinion about gentrification—that either it’s good or bad. Otherwise known as neighbourhood renewal, gentrification has come to dominate the discourse around modern urban development. And no wonder. When coupled with the hockey stick-shaped inflation in the housing market, gentrification has made urban living increasingly less affordable for those who don’t command six-figure salaries. These are the same people who do all the essential work that allows cities to function: teachers, nurses, personal support workers, public servants.

The issue I want to raise is how municipalities can become more proactive about the ripple effects of this rapidly accelerating process. Namely, I want to ask: Why should municipal officials go out of their way—as often seems to be the case—to improve neighbourhoods experiencing gentrification? Why don’t they instead pursue a form of negative planning—becoming incrementally less responsive to homeowner concerns, or promoting development projects that conflict with the quality of life in up-and-coming neighbourhoods? Why don’t local governments deliberately seek to make these areas less desirable as an antidote to run-away real estate prices?

Stay with me here. As someone who has been writing about municipal affairs for more than 20 years, I’m keenly aware my foregoing questions are more rhetorical thought experiment than workable policy proposal. But I still think it’s worth pulling this thread if only to explore how the cycles of gentrification, real estate speculation, and municipal re-investment reinforce and amplify one another—thus accelerating the interlinked affordability and housing crises that afflict big cities. The privileging of gentrification is baked into certain types of municipal policies—for example, the cash-for-density-bonus mechanisms, such as Ontario’s Section 37/45 rules. Under them, municipalities allow developers to add density in exchange for money invested in local improvements—new or improved parks, art spaces, public art, daycare spaces, etc. (Other jurisdictions have similar versions of these policies.)

The ostensible justification is that such funds are invested in public amenities that become necessary due to the incremental population growth that comes with increased density. The reality, however, is quite different.

In Toronto, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars in Section 37/45 funds, paid by high-rise condo developers, land in neighbourhoods experiencing intensification. But intensification is often a manifestation of desirability: developers build in sought-after areas that are already seeing an influx of capital and discretionary spending. The residents of these same neighbourhoods then receive additional benefits, in the form of new amenities, which, in turn, make their homes even more desirable, thus attracting other developers. In short, the financial benefits from these developer contributions accrues—in the form of higher property values—to the residents in these communities. It all gets very circular.

I’d argue that for cities facing skyrocketing housing prices (including rents), the only justified use of such funds in gentrifying neighbourhoods is the creation of new affordable housing. I am surprised to find myself agreeing with former Toronto councillor Doug Ford (brother of the late mayor Rob) who argued during the 2014 mayoral race that the millions collected from downtown developers should be spent to improve public amenities citywide, including less affluent communities that see little in the way of new development activity, and thus receive virtually no Section 37/45 money.

The point is that municipalities can, in fact, choose to impose a measure of control over the pace of gentrification and the intensity of the real estate speculation that accompanies it—one that could buttress the resiliency and sustainability of the entire city. A mindful approach would recognize that officially enabled gentrification will eventually become a self-consuming force that produces lovely neighbourhoods in which almost no one will be able to afford to live.