How Neighbours Don't Become Friends: Dimensions of Inequality in a Gentrifying Toronto Neighbourhood

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Gentrification

Abstract

This paper takes the close physical proximity of vast social differences that comes with gentrification as an opportunity to outline three factors that undermine positive cross-class interaction in a Toronto neighbourhood (Parkdale). Of particular concern in this paper is the elaboration of the specific social processes that lead to the demographic fact of social mix but diminish the collective experience of ‘social mixing’, and thus serve to legitimate displacement.
Focusing in particular on the discourse around rooming houses and the figure of the rooming house resident, I analyze three distinct, but mutually supporting processes—physical renovation, legal removal and symbolic erasure—that serve to propagate division and mitigate against social mixing. First, I show how the act of physical renovation displaces rooming house residents. Second, I show how municipal policies promote particular kinds of housing and patterns of ownership, and work to remove rooming houses. These two processes simultaneously set in motion the work of the third; symbolically erasing rooming house residents from the area. Drawing on data from interviews conducted with both rooming house residents and homeowners, I show how the ascription of the category ‘neighbour’ to select residents signals an important shift from a period where the rhetoric of social mix (rather than mixing) flourishes and social division is intensified, to one where an entire group, ‘roomers’, are symbolically erased from the social fabric of the neighbourhood, even while they remain physically present, albeit in ever-dwindling numbers

Author

• Mervyn Horgan, University of Guelph