Queen West: How a Street Changes Hands

Walk west along Queen Street from downtown and the street changes character every few blocks. Chain stores give way to independent shops, then to bars and galleries, then to blocks where the old hardware stores and corner diners are still holding on. It can look like a random mix. Urban scholars would say it is a pattern, and Queen West is one of the clearest places in Canada to see it.

A word with a history

The British sociologist Ruth Glass gave the pattern its name in 1964, in London: Aspects of Change. She wrote "gentrification" to describe middle-class buyers moving into working-class districts of London and the tenants who were pushed out.

Later writers explained how it works. Sharon Zukin's Loft Living (1982), a study of SoHo in New York, traced how artists moved into cheap industrial space, how their presence made the district fashionable, and how rising rents then priced many of them out. The geographer Neil Smith, in The New Urban Frontier (1996), put the economics at the centre: the gap between the rent a building earns now and what it could earn if reinvested is what draws money in. Neither describes villains. They describe incentives.

Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) encouraged cities to attract artists and creative workers as an engine of growth. Florida later moved to the University of Toronto, and in The New Urban Crisis (2017) he argued that the same clustering had helped make the most successful neighbourhoods unaffordable.

The stages, read on the street

Put simply, the pattern runs in stages that you can learn to spot:

• Cheap space. Older commercial buildings with low rents, often above small shops. This is what draws artists, musicians and small businesses in the first place.
• A reputation. Venues, artist-run galleries and bars give the street a name. People start to come from elsewhere.
• A landmark. A hotel, a restaurant group or a showpiece renovation tells visitors and investors that the street has arrived. On West Queen West, the Drake Hotel, reopened as a boutique hotel in 2004, is the building most often named.
• New building. Condominiums and new retail follow, rents rise, and the people who made the reputation move further along the street.

On Queen Street the line has moved steadily west, out past Dufferin Street into Parkdale. That is where the arguments are loudest now, over rooming houses, rents and who gets to stay, and where tenant groups and community organizations have pushed back hardest.

Toronto's divided city

The University of Toronto researcher J. David Hulchanski gave the bigger picture in The Three Cities Within Toronto (2010). Tracking incomes by neighbourhood from 1970 to 2005, he found the city pulling apart into three: a growing number of high-income areas, a shrinking middle, and a growing number of low-income areas, many of them pushed out to the suburbs. Streets like Queen West are where that pulling apart is easiest to see up close.

How this connects to a Roamer walk

No Roamer tour walks the length of Queen Street West, but the Trinity Bellwoods walk starts at the old college gates on Queen Street: a natural-history walk of ten stops over about 1.3 kilometres, around an hour, through the park and over the creek buried beneath it. For a neighbourhood changing hands, the nearest is the Kensington Market and Chinatown walk, a short way north and east, eleven stops over about 1.8 kilometres from the Kiever Synagogue to the Art Gallery of Ontario, about 85 minutes at an easy pace. Kensington tells an older version of a neighbourhood changing hands: house-front shops built by one community and taken over by the next, and a market that survived a 1960s redevelopment plan because people fought for it. For that story, read Kensington Market: How the Houses Became Shops.