With the real estate sector on life-support, council has prime opportunity to boost the missing housing needs of neighbourhoods

When I look out my office window, trying to think up a lede, I find myself staring at the grey-stuccoed side-wall of a house kitty corner to mine, which was owned for a long time by a mobster of some repute. He was a nice enough man. His wife gave us home-grown tomatoes. We never borrowed anything and always gave them Christmas cards.

Eventually, his wife got too old for the stairs and our neighbour put the house on the market. The buyer was a guy who owned a small construction debris container company. As soon as the sale closed, he began turning the house into a triplex. In the middle of the project, said waste management entrepreneur was gunned down in his driveway, in Etobicoke, but his widow soldiered on with the redevelopment. There have been tenants in there ever since she finished, with no evidence of anything… other than people living in a neighbourhood.

Next to this house is a fourplex where Levon Helm apparently once lived. There’s a completely illegal three-storey apartment building down the block, a low-slung two-storey apartment a few doors east, and, around the corner, a couple of out-of-place Montreal-style walk-ups as well as a corner store re-purposed into several apartments.

Oh, and the mansions in Bracondale and Wychwood Park, not to mention all the preposterously over-priced working-class semis. Yet somehow, this community gets from one day to the next without the complete collapse of the social order or, indeed, property values.