Cabbagetown

Do you think this is actually happening, and is it good or bad?

S- so with that question, I'll relate it back to what happened with the greater Toronto area, and how Toronto has North York, Cabbagetown, Jamestown, Liberty Village, and they have all these little areas that were all small towns at one point.

And then now it's just, they're still there, but they're treated as Toronto as a whole.

Now with Scarborough being treated as a whole, and then now you're going to greater Toronto Hamilton area, so you're getting Hamilton into there.

He actually fears that a sudden unmitigated reassessment will absolutely crush storefronts that happen to be situated on pricey transit land.

Ah, I know what you mean, places like Little Italy, Greektown, or Cabbagetown in Toronto.

Yes, exactly.

Areas where the underlying land value has just skyrocketed over the last 10 years because of major transit development and zoning changes.

Thanks, yeah.

I mean, coming out of school, I went to U of T here, and my first job out of school was a route salesperson for Frito-Lay, and I had the whole Regent Park, Cabbage Town area.

And so got to know, you know, that area of the street and for what it's worth, what a magnificent transformation over in Regent Park too.

So I've been there recently.

They started a business right away and their business clicked.

They bought a house in Cabbage Town, which is like 10 minutes away from my apartment.

And they asked me if I can help them decorate their house, their new house.

And I was like, dang, I'm going to do this because this is the property that I wanted to do, like Victorian homes, newly renovated.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I was actually like pre-1999 working in a magazine, woman magazine in Cabbage Town for my, I keep looking at the word Toronto behind your head and getting lost.

You have to focus.

Yeah, right.

Um, and so then I came back to the city, and I was like, "Well, I don't know what I'm gonna find here," but luckily, um, Green Thumbs Growing Kids, which is a nonprofit in the East End, was hiring.

And I live in the East End, in Cabbagetown, and all their gardens are around Cabbagetown.

I was like, "This is ideal." So, um, I applied, and I worked, uh, for their first year as the urban agriculturist, um, at Green Thumbs, so I was working with children in their school gardens, teaching them about bugs and insects and compost and soils and rain and, you know, a bunch of these incredible native or natural features and, um, uh, native-scapes in the city, uh, which again can be quite hard to find and hard to-

Sure

so does it also provide programming to schools? Is that what I'm understanding about what you're saying?

That's exactly right.

So Green Thumbs works in, um, the east end of downtown Toronto in, uh, a couple main neighborhoods, um, St. Jamestown, Cabbagetown, and Regent Park, where our office is.

Um, and so in these neighborhoods, uh, they've developed relationships with three schools, um, that, uh, w- had school gardens that Green Thumbs helped to establish, and then they would come to those schools, uh, once a day every week and run school garden programs with the kids.