Category Archive

On February 15th 2013, Parkdale’s community land trust, Neighbourhood Land Trust, was invited to a Community Land Trust Workshop at the University of Toronto, organized by Susannah Bunce from UofT and a collaborative researcher, Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz from Boston University. The workshop featured John Emmeus Davis, a CLT consultant from Burlington Associates, while convening practitioners, researchers, and students from various organizations in Toronto who are interested in the … Read More

On January 10th 2013, we hosted a community presentation by a group of students from University of Toronto who conducted a research project to investigate experiences of other Community Land Trusts as well as innovative participatory planning practices from elsewhere. The central question the group tackled is, “how can we structure a CLT to foster democratic decision-making, embody equity and ensure involvement … Read More

A Community Land Trust is an innovative model that establishes community ownership of land and local democratic control over that land for the benefit of local community. As Parkdale has faced a number of local challenges related to land and its use – declining affordability, food insecurity, lack of community space, and limited community control over neighbourhood change, Parkdale People’s … Read More

A while ago, we presented how land is used in South Parkdale. This time is North Parkdale. How land is used in North Parkdale shows a very interesting contract to its South Parkdale. Unlike South Parkdale, property sizes are generally a lot smaller; land use is predominantly low-rise single house. This may not come as a surprise. What is interesting, however, … Read More

In mid-October, the CLT working group organized an information session for potential members for the first ‘transitional’ board of directors of Parkdale Community Land Trust. A Community Land Trust is a membership-based organization, as it represents community diversity through members and board of directors elected by them. Currently, however, we are not there yet to base our organizational development on … Read More

This map is a snapshot of how land is used in South Parkdale, while this is still work-in-progress. As we have seen, South Parkdale has a large concentration of rooming/boarding houses, hence they occupy a quite portion of land in the south. Public land – largely TCH properties – in the south have larger property sizes as they tend to … Read More

Building on the previous entry that documented the change in the number of rooming houses in North Parkdale, let’s also look at South Parkdale (the south of Queen St W). As the maps in the previous entry showed (please click here; the previous entry will open up in a new window), seemingly there is little change between 1997 and 2012. Yet, the … Read More

The second release is the map of “rooming houses and bachelorettes” in Parkdale. These housing types concentrate in Parkdale (there is a long history. Please see for example Tom Slater’s historical review) and they are recognized, both by housing providers, policy makers and academics, as an important affordable housing option for low-income populations. The map below is the excerpt from Tom Slater’s research … Read More

Since the summer 2012, the Parkdale Community Land Trust working group has been conducting a Community Mapping project. The mapping project aims to document spatially 1) trends in neighbourhood change and 2) future opportunities for the Parkdale CLT group. We are looking at a number of characteristics about Parkdale, and planning to release the outcomes of community mapping project, as they get ready (just like Stats Canada releases their census … Read More