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Grange Park

I see this area as a victim of the real estate booms over the years. Skyrocketing prices caused values to increase substancially due its proximity to downtown. Since values here will never decrease substancially due to location, they are destined to become heaps in the ground unless someone with money can save them.

I see their longterm future as one either replaced with business or institutions. It is a shame, this area did have the potential at one point, but I think it is too late. Maybe if our current "bust" can pull down prices enough there may be some hope on the horizon.
 
Archivist said:
I have no idea why, though certainly the Grange area is a bit decrepit. Even in comparison to some of the streets in the near east downtown (Seaton, for instance, is chock-a-block with really nice, well cared for homes, even though the back alley is full of crack pipes).

It's always interesting how neighbourhoods congeal into what they are. For instance, how did Church Street become so very gay? I've heard explanations, but none that seemed truly satisfying.
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That is an interesting question. One explanation I recall hearing was that it was due to the proliferation of apartment buildings with many so bachelor units. While that may be a contributing factor, I'm uncertain that that would be the sole reason.

As for the Grange neighbourhood, it would be difficult to dismiss the influence of the large Chinese underclass immigrant community whose prime concern is perhaps the security of home ownership with little regard to how cute the neighbourhood could be. It is difficult not to imagine that such a prime area, so close to downtown and containing such potential, will not be under siege by the renovators in the near future. I wouldn't mind living there if I could afford to buy and renovate.
 
Yes, given how relentlessly gentrification has marched through most of the old city, Chinatown's almost the last frontier.

An explanation for the development of a Church Street gaybourhood may lie in the increasing openness that took place in the '80s, including the expansion of gay-owned businesses to cater for our community, and a resulting evolution of 'gay space'. The kind of spaces that were once suitable - ill-lit bars tucked away on side streets west of Yonge, mostly windowless and on the second floors - became relics of an earlier warrior society that mattered less and less. Hence the need for street-level gay places with big windows and a sense of openness to the world.
 
Prof. Jon Caulfield on "Southeast Spadina":

A curious thing about Southeast Spadina is that it has not gentrified. The neighbourhood is directly adjacent to downtown on the east and the University of Toronto on the north, locales that provide gentrifiers aplenty to other city neighbourhoods. Its streets are treed and pleasant. Many houses need some work, but no more than those in some other inner-city neighbourhoods before gentrification happened. When location and condition are reckoned together, house prices are not out of line. Yet Southeast Spadina obdurately refuses to go the way of Don Vale, Sussex-Ulster, Riverdale, or any of the city’s other gentrified areas, all more distant from downtown. It remains a somewhat scruffy neighbourhood that looks pretty much as it did thirty-odd years ago when Albert Franck, Toronto’s painter of old houses, plied its streets and lanes making pictures like Backyard on Baldwin Street.

A reason commonly cited for the area’s stability is the presence of Chinatown. Commercial frontage on Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street is almost uniformly East Asian, and many Chinese homeowners and tenants live on the residential sidestreets. The vivid Chinese presence, it is sometimes said, has been a bulwark against gentrification. Maybe. But the Art Gallery of Ontario and Ontario College of Art and Design are also in Southeast Spadina. Picturesque Baldwin Street Village is there. Just south of the neighbourhood is a district of trendy restaurants, boutiques, nightclubs, and theatres. Nor is gentrification typically a bashful process in the face of reasonable property values a few blocks from a central business district. But it has not happened.
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http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/eastwest/113.html
 
jaborandi said:
Nearby public housing didn't prevent anyone from buying into Cabbagetown. With its narrow tree-lined streets and Victorian housing stock, this neighbourhood has the potential to be as attractive as Cabbagetown.
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My guess is that Cabbagetown made it because of upper-middle class renters from Church St with money were the first to gamble on this area. This was followed by other open-minded folks usually without kids. Also, the few kids that live in those beautiful homes certainly don't attend the local public schools.

Back to Chinatown, something will eventually break this neighbourhood in. I would buy an old home in this area if I had the cash.
 
Archivist said:
I have no idea why, though certainly the Grange area is a bit decrepit. Even in comparison to some of the streets in the near east downtown (Seaton, for instance, is chock-a-block with really nice, well cared for homes, even though the back alley is full of crack pipes).

It's always interesting how neighbourhoods congeal into what they are. For instance, how did Church Street become so very gay? I've heard explanations, but none that seemed truly satisfying.
Click to expand...

or how did little italy become little italy or chinatown become chinatown. not sure how it happened but sure glad it has. best part about living in toronto...you can travel around the world with a metropass!
 
^Ha. Well it is true. I have friends that live, and I myself have lived, in the Grange Park neighbourhood. There are "middle class" people gradually moving in, but the majority in the neighbourhood are tenants (many OCAD/UofT students and those who work in those trendy Kensington Market/Queen West boutiques) in slumlord housing and first/second generation Chinese who work/live/hang out downtown--like Kensington Market etc.

An example of slumlord housing? That new Beverly proposal found in Projects and Construction will replace rundown rental housing--I used to know someone that lived in that place: a death trap perhaps?

It's the Chinese/Jewish equivalent of Weston Rd and Davenport Rd area....

Or even like how Queen East used to be/still is-filled by working class English/Irish folk.

Sometimes the truth isn't very PC, but then I detest being PC.:)
 
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As a student, I lived in this area for a few years. I believe that there are two forces that will prevent the area from cleaning up (aesthetically). For one, most of the people that live there are students. They move in one year, and move out the next. This makes it almost impossible to create a sense of community.

Secondly, a huge proportion of the houses are owned by foreign investors that, using students as bait, have turned these houses into money generating assembly lines. Anyone here ever lived in a Victor Ng house? Maximize profit, minimize expenses. Garbage is left on the ground because the tenants think someone else will pick it up and the landlords don't know and don't care. Houses are maintained at the bare minimum to keep them inhabitable. If paint is peeling, wood is rotting, or bricks are spalling, no one is going to take action until it becomes a big enough problem to make the tenants leave. Landscaping? Forget about it.
 
I agree with you Chuck. I knew one landlord finally took a loss on one of his homes when everyone in one house had had enough, and just moved out without giving notice. Illegal perhaps, but the conditions they put up with were unbearable. ($800 for a tiny room for example, rats everywhere, holes in the walls....) I was happy to see that landlord--who incidentally did live in Toronto--lose his ass on that place.:)
 
Zoning could be a reason... This area has some of the most strict zoning criteria which would discourage any reasonable person from investing here. Land values are high enough that single family homes don't really make sense. If there is little demand for $800k rat traps, and developers can't redevelop the area with multi-unit buildings, nobody will invest in the area beyond student accommodation.
 
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