rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] The National Post on the struggles around gentrification in Moss Park (Reply)

The National Post hosts Ashley Csanady's article "Toronto’s rough Moss Park neighbourhood becoming the city’s next gentrification battleground", looking at how this up-and-coming neighbourhood in downtown Toronto is responding to gentrification pressures.

Joan Harvey has lived in Toronto’s Moss Park towers for 35 years, and watched as her neighbourhood was slowly infected by drugs, violence and an increasingly bad reputation.

As the head of her building’s tenants association, she spends every Saturday night staked out in a lobby or ground floor community room keeping the “riff-raff,” as she puts, it out of the building.

The three massive towers lie just a 20 minute walk or so from the Eaton Centre, and even closer to Regent Park, an area to the east that has been spectacularly — and controversially — revitalized in recent years.
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Now Harvey’s neighbourhood is the next gentrification battleground as a proposal to rebuild the nearby John Innes Community Centre winds its way toward city council. On Wednesday night, another community meeting will debate the plan to revive one of the city’s most dilapidated corners, even as a gourmet sandwich shop is set to open and a farmer’s market has already moved in.

Backed by the 519 — an LGBTQ community organization based on Church Street — and a private donor, the plan is to rebuild the crumbling, yellow community centre and its surrounding park with a combination of fundraising and government cash. Right now, the corner of Queen Street East and Sherbourne is notorious for its drug use, sex workers and the nearby shelters keep the sidewalks crowded and the social services overloaded.