Frills Please

By Elizabeth Haggarty

Entering Cabbage Town you can’t be blamed for thinking that the area is vying for independence. Cabbage flags fly on every block and as you walk past the red brick row houses, reminiscent of an kinder, greener, less tea centred coronation street. The inordinate number of cabbages peaking out from people’s gardens can’t help but be noticed.

At the eastern edge of Cabbagetown a large park offers a serene place to play with its acres of grass slopes and tree dotted trails. But, to the south this greenery is framed by two looming Regent Park high-rises. As I stop to stare at the two jutting eyesores a sticker attached to a park sign caught my attention. “You shouldn’t be rapping,” it read. Is this a declaration of war against that neighbourhood in the background I joke to myself, or just a buffering against the sullied new that was annexed from them?

Old Cabbagetown, its heart at the intersection of Parliament and Carlton, borders the north west corner of Regent Park. For David Fisher, president of the Old Cabbagetown Business Improvement Area, the state of his poorer neighbour is clear; Regent Park is a ghetto. He is also clear why; low income leads to crime. “If there is a concentration of low income there will be a concentration of problems.” He says.

While you may not think that an area defined as a low-income ghetto would excite a BIA Fisher is adamant that it does, in fact, “the people of Regent Park are important and good customers for us,” he says. Walk south from Carlton Street and you can see why, as the economic divide of customers stores cater to is clear. One block south and the number of bargain stores dramatically increases, two blocks and there is a thriving No Thrills on the corner. “At the No Frills there are even more spices and cilantro and bananas for people coming from Regent Park,” says Fisher.

The Old Cabbagetown BIA is excited about the rejuvenation of Regent Park. They actively campaigned for sidewalk level retailers instead of plazas to be built in the hope that shops will be more immersed and become part of their community. They were also vocal in ensuring that new housing built will be divided 70/30, seventy percent market housing and thirty percent subsidized. “Some people wanted it to be 50/50,” says Fisher “But this would lead to the same problems we have now with a high concentration of low income, ghettos.”

In fact looking at the BIA’s campaigns for the rejuvenation of Regent Park their excitement is not for the rejuvenation of the Regent Park Community that is there now, but a hope that a middle class army will invade, pushing the low-income families that lead to crime and No Frills out.

As Fisher explains “Right now we don’t have a large enough of a middle income base [in Cabbagetown] to attract specialty stores like shoe and clothing shops, so people have to travel to Yonge St.” But, with the introduction of a thriving middle class in the new Regent Park specialty stores will spring up providing better services for Cabbagetown. As Fisher notes, “The fist large grocery store in the plans is a Sobeys. They appeal towards a more upscale clientele, they are looking up to Cabbagetown.”

So not war, just business, because who wants cilantro and crime on your doorstep when the rest of the city has hand woven clothes and Sobeys?