On a windy Saturday morning in mid-September, I step outside Main Street Station onto the intersection of Main and Danforth. The blaring noise of car horns embraces me as I cross the street to Jennie Worden’s campaign office. I ring the bell and Worden, a candidate in the upcoming municipal election, ushers me upstairs where she is hosting a pre-canvas breakfast. The smell of pancakes fills the room. In the corner, 81-year-old Gary Kassbaum plays what he calls a “few improvisations by Andrés Segovia” on the piano.

Born in Plön, Germany, Kassbaum moved to Toronto in 1951, and has spent the last 15 years in Danforth Village—specifically at the Main Square Apartments down the road. Behind his building, a cluster of new towers up to 55 storeys tall are set to be constructed. They will bring 1,649 new residential units to the neighbourhood, part of a planned 7,000 new units coming to Danforth Village in the next few years.

But his concern is not the construction noise or the people coming into the neighbourhood. After all, in the last seven decades, Kassbaum has seen the Greater Toronto Area’s population expand rapidly, from roughly over 1 million people to over 7 million.

“Noise is always there at the beginning of new construction,” he says. “I think we all have to live with that.”

Instead, he’s concerned about the timing. On Danforth Avenue, the City has been conducting major upgrades to watermains, sewers, and catch basins that have been congesting traffic for the past few months. Businesses are suffering. While that project is set to be completed by December, Kassbaum expects further disruption when the towers start going up.

“Change is good, but change too fast, change just for the sake of change is not good,” he says. He believes businesses should be compensated for losses incurred from construction. “While at a snail’s pace, the Danforth is still a viable means to get back and forth. When the construction’s over, it will worsen, because the population will increase.”

A short walk north from Main Street station, Stephen Fountain, the manager of Buy & Sell Kings which specializes in second-hand goods, says sales have plummeted since the City began its upgrades on the Danforth. When crews installed gates outside of his store in September, the situation only worsened.

“It’s been pretty much a ghost town ever since,” he says.

In practical terms, he says the business used to make between three and four thousand dollars in sales on Saturdays, their best day. After the fences went up, they fell to around $900. Fountain chalks this up to the lack of accessible parking.

“How are customers bringing us heavier items if they can’t park?” he says. “No one wants to park at Shoppers World and bring over a 65-inch TV.”

From February through June 2026, the Danforth Avenue upgrades began underground with crews replacing watermains and sewers, while removing old streetcar tracks buried between Dawes Road and Luttrell Avenue. Work shifted above ground from July onward, moving in phases from Main Street toward Victoria Park Avenue to build permanent separated cycle tracks, sidewalks, bioretention planters, and raised TTC bus platforms. Initially set to be completed in September, the City now says the project has a new end date of mid-December.

Fountain hopes the next city councillor pushes the City to support more businesses and navigate changes in the area that unavoidably affect businesses.

“During COVID-19, they didn’t really do much for us when it came to business support,” he says. “I’m hoping with the pressure of the Danforth BIA, they will provide some sort of support to us, like a tax rebate.”

The Danforth Village Business Improvement Area (BIA) is pushing the City to stick to the December completion date, and in September, they released a survey showing that among 96 businesses surveyed, 95.8 percent reported a decrease in foot traffic, and a third reported revenue losses of more than 60 percent.

It’s the same story all the way down the strip. Just a few doors west, John Sapione, the owner of Bike and Forth, says sales have dropped by 50 percent. “There’s not much foot traffic because people can’t park here to drop their bikes off for repairs,” he says. “They just keep on going, and my business is only seasonal business. I only have six good months, and the rest, you pay back what you make for the year.”

Sapione, who has lived in the neighbourhood for a dozen years, and first opened his business 17 years ago, says Brad Bradford hasn’t paid attention to the struggles of local business on the block: “He’s avoiding the issues, he’s not coming by and seeing how people are doing.”

On a sunny afternoon in late September, Eden Ramos drops her 6-year-old daughter off at Secord Elementary School. It’s the first day of fall, and Ramos is wearing light brown boots, skinny jeans, and a black t-shirt with a sheer cardigan.

Ramos was born in Ethiopia, but her family moved to Ottawa when she was five years old. They moved to Danforth Village in 1993, and she has been living here ever since. Before moving close to Secord Elementary School in the fall of 2025, she lived in one of the Main Square buildings for over 17 years.

A member of Secord’s school council, and formerly part of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, Ramos is a mother of four, two of whom are currently enrolled at Secord. One of her children has been attending classes in the school’s decades-old port-a-pack—a collection of 14 portable classrooms sitting outside the building, with plumbing, flooding, and mould issues that have been documented for over 10 years. In September 2024, the TDSB submitted a business case to the Ministry of Education for a new school with space for 940 students. (As of now, it can only accommodate 591, despite already serving nearly 800.) But the ministry has repeatedly left Secord out of its provincial funding allocations—and all schools in Toronto for that matter.

If the business case were to be approved by the ministry, this, in theory, would accommodate nearly 900 students that are expected to be enrolled by 2033, but rebuilding could mean the loss of the attached Secord Community Centre. The business case doesn’t include a plan to build a new community centre, and Ramos is among the parents who have signed a petition for a feasibility study.

It’s only one of two community centres in the neighbourhood, with the other—the Main Square Community Recreation Centre (CRC)— originally proposed for demolition to accommodate the construction of the new rental buildings.

Ramos says this is a prime example of the needs of residents becoming afterthought. “If you move Main Square Community Recreation Centre, and then, if Secord Community Centre no longer exists because we’re rebuilding the school, now we have no community centre in this neighborhood,” she says.

Jennie Worden,  a housing advocate who came second to Bradford in the 2022 municipal election and is running again,  shares Ramos’ frustration.

“We know that moving forward with a replacement community centre, at least studying the feasibility, would bolster the case for a new school,” she says. But, she adds, attempts to work with the Ministry of Education have been met with silence. “We never get feedback from the ministry when they don’t approve our projects, they just don’t approve them.”

Kevin Morrisson, another candidate, says this is a pattern of neglect that feeds into the sense that this pocket of Ward 19 is being ignored. Morrisson is running for council for the first time.

As TCDSB trustee, he says, he represented neighbourhoods including Regent Park and Canoe Landing–both of which have undergone a rapid transformation in the last two decades, as intensification brought with it new and revitalized schools, community centres, and recreation spaces.

“When you look at downtown and you see all the changes that are happening, we don’t get that,” he says. “It’s like we get forgotten about.”