Why my neighbourhood needs something more, and why an email list can’t hurt

A few months ago, I started mapping where Toronto’s residents’ associations were. The map’s not yet complete, but if you go a little west of downtown, you’ll see there’s a chunk of land sandwiched between the Roncesvalles-Macdonell Residents’ Association, the Parkdale Residents Association, the Queen-Beaconsfield Residents’ Association, the Brockton Triangle Neighbours, the Dufferin Grove Residents’ Association, and the Trinity Bellwoods Community Association. That chunk of land has nothing: certainly no neighbourhood association, but no neighbourhood email list either. That chunk of land—between College, Ossington, Dufferin, and Argyle—is where I live.

It’s a nice neighbourhood. There are lots of old Victorian houses and old Portuguese families and young creative people. According to the 2006 census, the median household income is a little less than the Toronto average, but households are a little smaller. There are plenty of immigrants who got here earlier than 1991, but haven’t been so many since—and yet, the percentage of speakers who speak English as their first language is much smaller than the average. It’s a little less well-educated than average. About the same amount of people drive to work as take transit or who walk or bike. A larger percentage of the population here is older than 15 than they are elsewhere in the city, but the area’s median age is 0.1 years younger. (The boundaries of the area’s census tract, from which this data’s drawn, don’t correspond exactly to the boundaries of the neighbourhood as I see it, but they’re not especially far off.)

I’ve lived here for a year and a bit, and I like it a lot. But I don’t get the sense that there’s a great community here yet—by which I mean one that’s inclusive of both unmarried young journalists and large Portuguese families. We don’t have a common enemy (condos! noise! Rob Ford! the local councillor!), because everything’s mostly okay here, though someone did recently decide to rebrand the area “DUWEST,” which I certainly don’t remember being consulted about, and apparently some people want a stop sign a few blocks away from me.

What it lacks, then, isn’t a menace, but a forum. I don’t know whether we need a residents’ association, but we definitely, definitely need a neighbourhood email list, whether it’s to advertise yard sales or talk about who came up with “DUWEST,” and who we can blame for it. So I made one. For now, it’ll probably mostly be made up of young people who tweet and read blogs and ride bikes and don’t like Giorgio Mammoliti, but eventually, I’m planning to do what I can to make sure the rest of the neighbourhood is well-represented, too.

If you live here, or very near here, you’re invited. If you don’t, and there’s no email list to join in your neighbourhood, you should make one of your own.