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Map of parkdale mall10/30/2023 ![]() In a city famous as a landing pad for immigrants, many recently-arrived residents, often without either English or an understanding of Canadian legal protections around tenancy, simply pack up and leave. Those protesting, however, are the lucky ones. Photograph: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images So too have tenant protests and rent strikes, where slick corporate offices find themselves occupied by hundreds of angry tenants demanding redress.Ī proposal for a new 19-storey condo development, which prompted resident concern. Residents claim that threats, intimidation, rampant eviction notices and strategic neglect have become common. Huge international real estate investment firms have embedded themselves in Parkdale’s urban fabric, buying dozens of apartment towers and thousands of rental units. Outside, Queen Street bustled with an almost fairy-tale version of multicultural Toronto: Tibetan monks in flowing orange robes slipping into a flow of South Asian, Caribbean and African immigrants a mom-and-pop grocer sells roasted barley, a favourite Tibetan snack other restaurants offer roti, a Jamaican/Indian wrap that fuses the spicy flavours of both cultures.īut the lively streetscape here masks a threat to what could very well be the last island of diversity in a city swamped by the flood waters of global capital. As Nguyen spoke, runny-nosed toddlers fiddled with coloured blocks, while their parents, all recent immigrants, tried to focus on an English as a second language class. ![]() Parkdale, however, an inner-city neighbourhood just six kilometres west of downtown along Lake Ontario’s shore, has long been an outlier. Property values have soared beyond the most fevered speculators’ imagination, mostly relegating those representing Toronto’s vast swaths of difference to the suburbs. Toronto’s much-vaunted international brand – the poster-child for extreme diversity, a global social experiment done right – has become a faded myth in many of its inner-city neighbourhoods.
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