A few nights before Christmas, 2016, the ceiling of the Walmer Road Baptist Church caved in. Staff members arrived the next day to find a hole in the plaster above them and bits of debris that had scattered, like snow flurries, across the pews. Debie Mealey, the director of administration, had been bracing herself for a disaster like this one, but she didn’t have a plan because plans cost money. “We’d looked into having the ceiling reinforced, proactively,” she says. “We couldn’t even afford the scaffolding.”
Times hadn’t always been so tight. When the church was founded in the late 1880s, the Baptist denomination was among the most successful religious orders in Canada. The building—a play of arches, trusses, and quatrefoil windows—had been designed by Edmund Burke, the architect behind the Bloor Street Viaduct, and it was located in the Annex, a greenfield neighbourhood with a few stately mansions belonging to captains of industry.

According to its motto, the church was a place where “rich and poor gather together.” There were no pew rentals or reserved seats. Walmer offered free health care throughout the Spanish flu pandemic, sent food and clothing westward during the Dust Bowl, and became, in the 1940s, a refuge for Latvian migrants who’d fled the Red Army.
It also maintained its unique income mix, aided by the class diversity of the surrounding area. In the ’40s and ’50s, many Annex mansions were converted into rooming houses, attracting itinerant men to a neighbourhood of homeowners. In the ’60s, to accommodate waves of immigrants from eastern Europe, the architect Uno Prii designed his iconic Annex apartment blocks, modelled on the flashy modernism of Miami Beach. Many locals hated the towers, but they brought vitality to the region. Services at Walmer overflowed into the aisles.
When Mealey began working for the church in 2012, those boom years were ancient history. Low- and middle-income residents were being priced out of the Annex, which was now home to the city’s intellectual elites—people more likely to attend the Massey Lectures than an Easter Sunday church service. Walmer’s rich patrons had all disappeared, and its membership rolls, which had once numbered in the thousands, were down to about 40 people, most of them poor. Almost none resided nearby. Mealey, who lives with her family near Wellesley and Yonge, had considered moving to the neighbourhood, but even the tiniest Annex apartments were too pricey for her budget.

After the ceiling fell at Walmer, she relocated the services to a small auditorium on the west side of the building and helped the various non-profits that used the church—a food bank, a seniors’ theatre company—to find permanent homes elsewhere. “They needed a place they could depend on,” she explains, “not one on the verge of shutting its doors.”
For a while, that worst-case scenario seemed imminent. The church members couldn’t pay to restore the sanctuary, and no bank would approve a loan. But despite the terrible financials, Walmer had one valuable asset: the land on which it stood. And so, with the help of TAS, a local developer, the church leaders came up with a plan. Walmer would allow a 20-storey residential tower to be built on a parking lot adjacent to the building, and it would use the resulting windfall to restore the property.
The economics were sound, but the politics were dicey. In the last three decades, towers have sprung up on the thoroughfares that run through or alongside the Annex. But the interior Annex and surrounding communities, like Casa Loma and Harbord Village, have retained much of their low-rise charm, in part because the neighbours wanted it that way. People have fought seemingly every kind of development: homeless shelters, office-to-apartment conversions, even garden suites. In 2017, Margaret Atwood joined forces with heiress Cleophee Eaton and Loblaw president Galen Weston Jr. to protest the construction of an 8-storey, 16-unit condo building on a commercial property.
Would the Walmer tower suffer a similar fate? The very question puzzled Mealey. “Where I live, we’ve had eight huge buildings go up over the last three years,” she says. “Nobody asked me if it’s okay to build there.” Toronto, she has discovered, is divided into two kinds of people: those who act and those who are acted upon.
Increasingly, these people also live in two kinds of places: horizontal neighbourhoods, where the homes are gracious and gabled, and vertical neighbourhoods, where they’re stacked high. In a meaningful way, the story of Toronto—a city in the midst of a housing emergency—is the story of how these two neighbourhoods interact. People in the horizontal city often fiercely oppose signs of verticality in their midst. And so towers—the kind that bring necessary density—are built mainly where they already exist, or they aren’t built at all. By seeking to bring a tower into the heart of the Annex, Walmer was violating a sacred Toronto taboo. Would the neighbours allow it to happen?

The story of Zinnat Jahan, an immigrant from Dhaka, Bangladesh, has almost nothing to do with the story of Debie Mealey. Except Jahan and Mealey both live in Toronto, and because cities are ecosystems, their life circumstances are connected in ways that can be initially hard to see.
When Jahan moved to Toronto in 2017, she was immediately disappointed by her new home, which didn’t resemble the land of opportunity she’d imagined it to be. Her husband, Refayetul Islam, an engineer, had arrived years earlier and found the family an apartment in Crescent Town, a suite of high rises near Victoria Park station, which had become a landing pad for Bangladeshi newcomers. Jahan took one look at her drab surroundings and recoiled. “I thought, ‘This is Canada? Really?’” she recalls. “I asked my husband, ‘Why did you bring me here?’”

The neighbourhood had been born of grand ambitions. When, in the late ’60s, the developer Belmont Construction bought up the Crescent School—an all-boys academy on a forested property near the Taylor-Massey Creek—the company’s general manager envisioned himself building a community of the future. The towers, then among the tallest in Toronto, would be outfitted with the best amenities, from squash courts to wading pools to elevated walkways connecting to the newly opened subway station. But Crescent Town didn’t become the fashionable enclave it was intended to be. It seems that affluent Torontonains weren’t too keen on living in concrete slabs far removed from the downtown core.
And yet, to savvy landlords, the neighbourhood still offered a business opportunity, albeit of a different kind. In the late ’90s, a new model of “financialized” home ownership began sweeping across Canada, as a rising class of private equity funds, investment trusts, and property management companies began buying up buildings. These entities treated their properties less like homes and more like assets. The goal was to acquire them at scale, wring profits out of them in any possible way, and pass the spoils along to investors or shareholders. Sometimes, these entities made money by upgrading buildings, evicting the existing occupants, and flipping the units to wealthier tenants. Sometimes, they turned a profit by “economising” on expenses, allowing buildings to fall into disrepair even as the market drove rental prices up. The business model quickly caught on. Soon, even old-school landlords were imitating the tactics of their financialized peers.
Those tactics were predicated on scarcity. Investors sought residential buildings because they viewed these assets as “safe.” In an economy where the number of homes is limited, the population is large and growing, and demand is reliably outstripping supply, there will always be ways for real estate holders to milk their assets for cash. Research by Martine August, an urban planning professor at the University of Waterloo, shows that investors have been shockingly candid about this fact. In an article for the Journal of Urban Affairs, August quotes Daniel Drimmer, CEO of the asset management company Starlight Investments, speaking at a seminar for real estate executives: “There is a definite housing shortage, or almost a crisis level in Canada … and the good news for investors is there is no easy solution in sight. This is not good news for consumers.”

By the time Jahan arrived in Crescent Town, Belmont, the company that had constructed the three main towers, was now calling itself Pinedale Properties. It was still a family run shop, but it spoke the language of finance: the Pinedale website brags about the company’s “extensive portfolio” of Toronto-area apartments. For a supposedly cheap neighbourhood, Crescent Town was punishingly expensive. The couple’s 22nd-floor flat cost $1,430 per month (the equivalent of $1,770 today), and yet, to Jahan, it felt like Pinedale did little to maintain the building. According to tenants, the common spaces were dirty, the lobby was poorly furnished, and units were infested with cockroaches. Although the neighbourhood was packed with people—over 16,000 in a single square kilometre—Jahan felt more lonely in Crescent Town than she’d ever been.
In late 2018, she began working at McDonald’s to make money for her daughters who were finishing schooling in Dhaka. In July, her husband was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and in November, he went in for emergency surgery. When he passed away in January of 2020, Jahan was devastated. “We’d known each other since childhood,” she says. “He was the most fun-loving man I’d ever met.” Islam was buried in a Muslim cemetery near Pickering. Jahan vowed to stay in Toronto to be close to him.
After a month of bereavement leave, she returned to McDonald’s—this time as a night worker—to pay the bills. But then COVID hit, and she found herself laid off and dependent on CERB, which gave her barely enough money to buy necessities and send remittances home. A few days before the April rent was due, she visited the Pinedale office in her building. “I said, ‘I’ve just lost my husband, and I have no savings,’” she recalls. The management was unmoved. “They told me, ‘None of this matters. We have to run our business, and you have to pay.’” On April 1, she did something she never thought she’d do: she skipped a rent payment.
She suspected she wasn’t the only one. From her window, Jahan could see her fellow residents going to the rental office in unusually high numbers. When Pinedale sent a representative to her door to pressure her into paying up, Jahan noticed that the woman hadn’t just come for her: when the representative left, she went down the hall to visit other units. Jahan started asking around, and she quickly learned that many other tenants were in the same predicament she was in. (The Local repeatedly reached out to Pinedale, by phone and email, to request an interview or a comment but received no response.)
Could the management really evict all of them? Jahan and her neighbours decided to find out. Over several days, they systematically knocked on every door in the three buildings, adding as many people as possible to a WhatsApp group. “We thought, ‘If we all speak together, maybe this time they will listen,’” Jahan explains. Without quite realizing it, they’d started up a tenants’ union.

Mealey and Jahan have never met. There’s no reason for their paths to cross. The Annex, where Mealey works, is a storied downtown neighbourhood, whereas Crescent Town lies near the eastern reaches of the subway line, near the Scarborough border. And yet the Crescent Town neighbourhood is, in key respects, a product of places like the Annex. The point here isn’t simply that some Toronto communities have elegant Victorian homes while others have drab towers. It is, rather, that the drab towers exist because of the elegant homes. The hardships that Crescent Town residents endure enable the luxuries that people enjoy elsewhere.
The Greater Toronto Area has grown immensely, from 2.7 million residents in 1971 to 6.2 million in 2021, an average influx of 70,000 people per year. And yet, during this same period, according to decades of census data analyzed by Jens von Bergmann of CensusMapper, many Toronto neighbourhoods have de-densified. Zoom in on a random segment of, say, Roncesvalles, Cabbagetown, Leslieville, the Beach, or most other affluent downtown precincts, and you’ll see, almost always, that there are fewer people living there today than there were five decades ago.
In the Annex, of the 20 census blocks analyzed by von Bergmann, just five have densified, four have remained stable, and the remaining 11 have seen a net reduction of between 10 and 120 people per hectare—all during a period in which the city itself has more than doubled. Remarkably, Toronto’s west side — a massive swath of land bounded by Bathurst Street, Eglinton Avenue, Lansdowne Avenue, and Queen Street—had fewer residents in 2021 than it did fifty years earlier. This phenomenon is particularly galling because the de-densifying blocks are, by most metrics, ideally suited for density. They are serviced better than virtually anywhere else, with schools, community centres, shops, and transit lines.
Densification, meanwhile, is happening in select places: the outer suburbs of the Peel, York, and Durham Regions; a few high-rise nodes, like City Place or Regent Park, located immediately east or south of downtown; and many scattered, geographically small patches of land, like Crescent Town, which are often adjacent to urban thoroughfares. It would be simplistic to say that these regions are taking on 100 percent of Toronto’s densification. Really, they’re doing more. Statistically speaking, they’re absorbing both the inflows to Toronto from elsewhere in the world and the internal migration from the city’s shrinking residential blocks.
The resulting urban geography is one of extremes. Quaint residential communities, like the Annex and Summerhill, are amply served by the subway system, while high rise nodes, like Weston and Lawrence or Jane and Finch, rely on the impossibly slow-moving Jane Street bus. Public schools in the tony Harbord Village–Little Italy region are woefully under-enrolled, but those near the Shephard and Yonge tower cluster are packed to the breaking point. Some communities are in a constant state of flux; others seem frozen in time. “There has been massive change in certain parts of the city,” says Matti Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto. “Others feel the same as they did twenty years ago.”

Siemiatycki says that there are four main reasons why things have gone this way. One is history. Toronto, as the legendary urbanist (and Annex resident) Jane Jacobs liked to say, is defined by its neighbourhoods. While New York has tenements and Montreal has triplexes, Toronto has detached and semi-detached homes, many with striking architectural features, from polychromatic brickwork to pitched roofs adorned with vergeboard. One can admire the beauty of these homes while also wishing that the early city planners had built with greater density in mind. “Built forms get locked in,” says Zachary Hyde, an urban geographer and sociologist at the University of Toronto. “In urban planning, decisions that are made at one point in time will have these incredibly long run-on effects.”
A related factor is zoning policy. The city has sought to preserve the distinctive character of its low-rise (or so-called “yellow belt”) neighbourhoods by putting limits on the kinds of developments that can happen there. Some of these limits amount to outright bans: you can’t build an apartment block on a street zoned for houses. But burdensome regulations—from parking minimums to setback requirements, which are hard to comply with on small residential properties—have amounted to de facto bans too.
A third factor is NIMBYism. Until this year, any citizen could file a complaint against a proposed development for a measly $400. The city would then need to respond. These complaints didn’t have to be credible to be effective. By bombarding developers with frivolous grievances—thereby eating into their time and budget—NIMBYs could send a message: you’d be better off taking your work elsewhere. Critically, NIMBYism derived its power from its alignment with zoning rules. “For the longest time, the policy for so-called established neighbourhoods was to basically leave them alone,” says Siemiatycki. “The flip side is that, on any site that can take intensification, the intensification has been immense.” Some downtown communities resemble garden suburbs; others are thickets of high rises.
All of these factors help explain why the yellow belt has failed to densify, but they don’t explain why it has also shrunk. The fourth factor, however, is demographic change. In the ’90s, yellow belt houses were often home to boomer parents and millennial children. But the children have left, and because many have been priced out of downtown, they haven’t moved back nearby. And so dwellings that once housed families of four or five are now home to one or two. Exacerbating this problem is the phenomenon of “reno-ductions,” whereby old Victorian triplexes and fourplexes get bought up and converted into palatial single-family homes.

All of this is terrible for civic culture. If you own property in one of Toronto’s yellow belt communities, you’re sitting on a gold mine. But your neighbourhood is at risk of losing the dynamism it once had. The Annex used to be a hotbed of arts and culture. Today, if you’re under the age of, say, 60, and you have arty interests, you probably find it underwhelming. If your passion is contemporary art, you surely feel pulled westward to the Junction Triangle. If you enjoy theatre, you’ve likely noticed that the most interesting shows are happening east of Yonge. The last great Annex record store relocated in 2011, the last great first-hand book store shuttered in 2014, and the last great magazine shop will close this fall. As for the Annex food scene, it’s noteworthy only for how unnoteworthy it is. Even Halloween is dying. “We put out pumpkins each year,” one Annex resident told me, recently, “but few children show up.”
If the Annex is on a slow decline toward sterility, the problems the Crescent Town area faces are starker. To state the obvious: the region is packed. Some 1-hectare parcels have seen hundreds of new residents in the last fifty years, mostly because people have been crowding into existing towers. Social services are inundated. When, in 2022, the local Ontario Health Team opened Health Access Taylor-Massey—a free clinic, offering everything from family doctors to mental health supports to urgent care—it was immediately deluged. Today, HATM has the equivalent of thirteen full-time staff members, and in the last two years it has offered care to 3,000 different individuals.
Housing is strained too. Twenty-nine percent of dwellings in Taylor-Massey, the official city neighbourhood that includes Crescent Town, are deemed “unsuitable”—meaning they have insufficient bedrooms for the number of residents. In the city at large, that figure is 12.5 percent; in the Annex it’s 5.5. A one-bedroom unit in Crescent Town costs roughly as much as a luxury apartment in Ottawa—hardly a cheap city—but without the same amenities or upkeep. Landlords are offering basic services for luxury-rental prices because they think they can get away with it. And they’re right.

There are many problems with housing in Toronto, but the biggest is that there isn’t enough. The Smart Prosperity Institute at the University of Ottawa estimates that, to close the gap between supply and demand, the Greater Toronto Area would need to add 750,000 new homes by 2031. In such an under-supplied market, low-income renters are desperate to hang on to whatever they’ve got. And so they will put up with price gouging and mistreatment that would be unacceptable in a healthy market.
Ryan Endoh is a licensed paralegal and a tenant at 500 Dawes Rd., a building near Crescent Town, which, in October 2022, was cited by the city for 84 property standards violations. “We’ve been downgraded from three to two elevators, because there’s water penetrating one of the shafts,” Endoh says. “We have frequent breakdowns, where we’re further downgraded to one elevator. The laundry room is disgusting; the ceiling is collapsing in on itself. The parking garage is inaccessible, because building specialists determined that it has foundational issues and isn’t safe. There’s trash piled high in the alley behind the building.” (The Local was unable to reach Havcare Investment, the company that manages 500 Dawes, for comment).
One would imagine that, given the terrible state of 500 Dawes, renters would be abandoning it in droves. In fact, the building is in high demand, because all Toronto buildings are. And it isn’t only destitute people who are moving in. “We’re seeing an influx of young professionals,” says Endoh. “We have nurses, skilled trades people, and law clerks. 500 Dawes is the only place they can afford.” A one-bedroom unit rents for $1,800—a total rip-off and the best deal in town.
In late April, Pinedale served eviction notices across the three Crescent Town buildings to people who’d fallen behind on rent. Jahan and members of the WhatsApp group—who were now calling themselves the Crescent Town Tenants Union—sent a counter letter, informing the management that, going forward, they would be negotiating collectively. “Until you commit to attempting this process in earnest,” the letter added, “and until you lift any and all threats of eviction against tenants for April rent arrears, all of us will be withholding our May rent as our only currently available bargaining tool.” On May 1, more than 300 households declined to pay.
Jahan and her neighbours had begun what is an increasingly familiar form of protest in Toronto—a rent strike. What followed was a series of moves and countermoves by corporate landlords and unified tenants. Pinedale referred eviction notices to the Landlord and Tenant Board, a tribunal with enforcement powers. But the company also said it would negotiate with individual tenants, if they came unaccompanied to the management office. Those who did were handed a contract, which included a repayment schedule and an agreement to temporarily call off the individual’s eviction hearing. The contract stipulated, however, that if the signee was so much as a dollar short or a day late on their repayments, the eviction proceedings would immediately recommence, this time without a hearing.

The union kept pushing a repayment plan of their own, a more gradual one than what the management was offering. To present their case, Jahan and roughly 30 other members showed up at the office, but management fled out the back door. The union also acquired a legal representative, Sima Atri, co-founder of the Community Justice Collective, a non-profit that offers free advocacy to grassroots organizations. In late November, the night before the eviction cases—fifty in total—were due to be heard, the union held a rally at Dentonia Park, adjacent to Crescent Town. Jahan, visibly buoyed by the display of solidarity, took the mic and addressed the crowd. “We love ourselves. We love our community,” she said to rounds of cheers. She didn’t know how much longer she’d be allowed to live there.
If Toronto had a healthier housing market—in which supply was in line with demand—would the crisis in Crescent Town have happened at all? There’s a plausible case to be made that the answer is yes: even in a balanced market, property owners would still be profit-seeking operations. But the dynamics of the conflict would’ve been different. Rent would’ve been cheaper, and landlords would’ve had greater incentives to negotiate. Tenants like Jahan—people who would never think of missing a rent payment except in the direst possible circumstances—should be the kind that landlords are desperate to keep. And yet the market has become so lopsided that, even in the midst of a pandemic, with many people out of work and others fearful of crowded apartment towers, landlords knew they could mass evict tenants and immediately find replacements.
Nobody thinks the situation is healthy. In the past, though, debates over housing access have broken down along familiar partisan lines. Conservatives have tended to favour market fixes. If developers have an easier time getting their projects approved, the logic goes, they could build out the supply our city so desperately needs. Progressives tended to favour technocratic solutions, like rent controls, government-subsidized developments, or non-profit housing cooperatives that rent out units at cost.
But Siemiatycki has noticed a realignment over the past decade, whereby progressives are coming around to market logic. These people aren’t abandoning their previous commitments—they still support government regulation and alternative forms of housing tenure—but they understand that there’s no real way to skirt the laws of supply and demand. A scarce resource will always be a valuable one, and landlords will always find ways to leverage scarcity for money. To make housing less scarce, therefore, we have no choice but to build. “Developers are no longer considered automatically suspect,” Siemiatycki says. “People understand that there are different kinds of developers and that some do thoughtful work.”
When seeking a developer for the Walmer tower in the Annex, the church board members chose TAS because of its reputation for sensitivity. Rather than trying to get the project approved by duking it out at City Council or the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT), Mark Chemij, director of development at the company, says that he and his colleagues preferred a conciliatory approach. They publicly shared early designs of the tower before they were legally obligated to do so. “We didn’t want to take anybody by surprise,” Chemij says. “Our approach is to engage first.”

The TAS team also opted for a non-confrontational approvals process—a series of mediation sessions run by the OLT. Residents were invited to register as participants, and the final decision would be ratified once the group had reached a consensus. Because the sessions were confidential, Chemij cannot comment on the details. But he acknowledges that, during the negotiating process, the design of the tower has changed dramatically. “The building isn’t anything like it was,” he says.
To understand the challenges that Chemij and his team likely faced, I decided to learn more about a similar Annex-area battle that had been playing out in public. A few years ago, a local family commissioned the firm Gabriel Fain Architects to build an 11-storey, 64-unit building on a pair of adjacent lots. Like the Walmer tower, this one, to be situated at the corner of Lowther Avenue and Dalton Road, would be in the interior Annex, in an area zoned for houses. Residents fear that, if the project moves forward, it will set a precedent, leading, ultimately, to the abolishment of height restrictions in the community. Signs around the Annex exhort neighbours to fight the so-called “Dalton Road domino effect.”
When, last spring, the matter went before the Toronto and East York Community Council—a local body, which could reject or approve the development or refer it to City Hall—the conversation quickly got heated. With one exception, the Annex residents who gave depositions were all fervently opposed to the project. A few spoke calmly; others were seething. “This is a decision that is going to affect every single one of you in your neighbourhood, not just the Annex,” said Susan Teskey, a producer at CBC Television. She seemed to believe that the granting of a building permit is like a brushfire or a nuclear chain reaction—a totalizing force, impossible to contain. “It’ll stop when there are no more houses to convert,” she predicted.
Two or three years ago, people like Teskey might well have prevailed. But the City is now facing immense pressure from the provincial and federal governments to approve new builds quickly. The Ford Government has also made it more difficult for City Council to refuse approval. And so, rather than cancelling the tower, the Community Council referred the matter to City Hall, which greenlit the build. The Area Residents’ Association (ARA)—a volunteer group that represents Annex tenants and homeowners—immediately appealed the decision. But then the provincial government passed Bill 185, the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act, curtailing private citizens’ appeal rights.
“Year after year, block after block, community after community, Toronto has deferred to property owners and declined opportunities to build.”
A few weeks ago, I met with three ARA members over Zoom—Henry Wiercinski, a business lawyer, Elizabeth Sisam, a city planner, and her husband, David Sisam, an architect. (David Sisam’s firm, Montgomery Sisam, is currently redesigning the Innis College building at the University of Toronto, where I teach. They also designed my favourite house in the world—the one I grew up in.) The meeting went on for an intense 90 minutes, during which the group presented a range of arguments, some stronger than others. The members I spoke to were at pains to tell me that they weren’t NIMBYs and they weren’t opposed to density, per se. They’d lent their support to many new builds, they said, including medium-rise complexes in the interior Annex and towers on the big external roads.
When I asked why they opposed the Lowther-Dalton project, they mentioned the strain it would put on neighbourhood amenities, from parks to community centres to transit . The argument seemed odd, given that a big development on a nearby thoroughfare—the kind of project the ARA claims to champion—would surely put as much pressure on nearby infrastructure as one in the heart of the community. The ARA also criticized the Lowther-Dalton project for its lack of affordable units, a fair argument, until you consider that their proposed remedy—nixing the tower—would also contribute zero new affordable dwellings to the area.
Clearly, high-minded rhetoric was being used to channel parochial grievances. When our conversation turned to those grievances, the ARA’s arguments snapped into focus. The proposed building, with its white metal finishes and sharp vertical fins, really is at odds with the genteel mood of the surrounding neighbourhood. The tower really does lack setbacks, which means it’s not just out-of-place but conspicuously so. The developer really did undermine neighbourly goodwill by promising residents a medium-rise building and then switching course and announcing a tower. And if the building goes through, it really will set a precedent. When city planners approve new projects, they base their decisions on whatever else is nearby. Tall buildings beget other tall buildings.
Siemiatycki says that, when neighbours oppose a local development, they often do so on reasonable grounds. Residents’ associations aren’t deluded; they’re just looking out for themselves. And when an individual development gets kiboshed, the citywide effect on housing supply is negligible. Judged on a case-by-case basis, NIMBYism is a victimless crime.
But the aggregate effect on civic health is astonishing. Year after year, block after block, community after community, Toronto has deferred to property owners and declined opportunities to build. Many of those decisions were individually defensible, but cumulatively they’ve resulted in the polarized city we have today, a place where some people fight with everything they’ve got just to remain in their homes—and other people fight just as hard to prevent homes from getting built in the first place.
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On a Sunday morning this September, I went to a service at the Walmer Road Baptist Church. Roughly thirty worshippers gathered in a windowless room, which had clearly seen better days. The pastor, Elaine Poproski, gave a sermon about the difficulties of translating the psalms from ancient Hebrew to contemporary English. Meaning, she explained, can whither over time, leaving us with a reduced version of the richness we once possessed. Mealey gave the benediction. She asked God to heal a community member who was recovering from surgery and expressed her gratitude on behalf of a congregant whose sister had moved from a contract job to a permanent position: “We thank you, God, for those you have provided employment to.”

After the service, Mealey and I went downstairs to the sanctuary. We couldn’t enter without a hardhat, so we looked out at the space from the baptistry. I’ve visited my share of grand cathedrals, but I’ve never been in a church that bowled me over the way this one did. The angular gothic features, like the arched windows, were offset by graceful Romanesque flourishes, including an elegantly curved balcony. Hefty geometric trusses tied the ceilings together; they looked like they’d been made of old-growth Canadian lumber. The best feature was the sunlight, which had a subdued, dusty quality. I could smell the plaster dispersed across the sanctuary floor.
Mealey couldn’t have known this, but weeks after my visit, participants in the OLT mediations would reach a consensus, pushing the Walmer tower one step closer to approval. The passing of the Cutting Red Tape Act had likely given the church a negotiating edge. Annex residents surely knew that, if they declined to bargain in good faith—if the talks failed to reach a consensus and went instead to a contested hearing—the church would likely win, enabled by the new law. Power, it seems, is belatedly shifting toward the people who build and away from the people who oppose buildings. The change will surely lead to a great deal of thoughtless or ugly developments—and also a necessary infusion of density. Walmer might survive after all.
I asked Mealy if, during her workday, she sometimes visits the sanctuary. “I don’t,” she responded. “There’s a sadness in it.” She added that, as a Baptist, she needs to temper her affection, lest her reverence stray into idolatry: “Baptists don’t think space is sacred. God does not live here. He’s with us, as people.”

Later that day, I rode the subway to Crescent Town. There were people everywhere—lone wanderers, clusters of teenagers, big extended families. On the central quad, a soccer tournament was underway, with multiple games happening simultaneously. Jahan met me at Dhaka Kebab, a storefront restaurant with a few picnic tables in the parking lot. “This is a place where you can buy tea for $1,” she told me, “and stay as long as you’d like.” Near us, a young Bangladeshi woman was talking loudly to her friends about the perils and pleasures of dating white boys.
Jahan told me that the original court date, in November 2020, had been merely the beginning of a long, tangled litigation process. After the first of the fifty Landlord and Tenant Board hearings went many, many hours overtime, the tribunal granted the lawyer, Atri’s, request to hear all of the cases as one at a new hearing in early 2021. There, Atri zeroed in on how Pinedale had offered to negotiate one-on-one with tenants while refusing to negotiate collectively with the union. This tactic, she argued, amounted to retaliation against union members, which is prohibited under Ontario law. Over the next two and a half years, Atri’s claims would be contested via appeals and counter appeals. It would take until the spring of 2024 for the tribunal to permanently nullify the eviction orders.
The rent strike, Jahan told me, had created a sense of community that hadn’t existed before. “When I moved here, we never said hello to our neighbours,” she explained. “I didn’t even know the people next door. Today, when I step out of my building, there are people I can talk to, who give me a smile or invite me over.” The union’s WhatsApp group has become an all-purpose message board. People exchange household goods or offer to cook each other hot meals for a nominal fee.
In the narrowest possible sense, the tenants’ union had won its case. But the reward for winning? They get to continue living in a shabby building and paying rent to a landlord who regards their need for housing as an exploitable resource. The union is now trying to force Pinedale to take better care of the property. “Often, only two out of four elevators work,” said Jahan, “the laundry machines swallow your money without doing laundry, and there’s not enough lighting in the parking lot, so cars get broken into.” She has considered moving, but there’s nowhere in the city where she can afford to live. There won’t be, until somebody builds it.