“I Want to Live in the Metro Neighborhood”: Gentrification, Food Access, and Transitional Neighborhood Identity in Toronto

ABSTRACT

This article builds on scholarship about gentrifying foodscapes by exploring public debates around a grocery store that opened in the Junction Triangle, a predominately white, mixed income neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. Shortly after the completion of a new condominium development, Metro Inc. decided to open their discount chain, Food Basics, instead of their mid‐tier grocery store, Metro, as originally announced. In response, the new condominium owners started a petition demanding the company reverse their decision. This petition led to discussions in the local news and online forums regarding the neighborhood's status. Blending archival and digital ethnographic methods, this article thus conducts a discursive analysis of the petition and its surrounding commentary. I demonstrate how the new, higher‐income residents sought to represent the Junction Triangle as an ‘up‐and‐coming’ neighborhood, separated from its historical associations with industrial pollution, poverty, and crime. They also drew on notions of ‘quality’ to present themselves as the ‘real’ residents to which Metro Inc. should cater. Detractors challenged those articulated identities, often mobilizing satirical tropes of gentrifiers to reject both the rehistoricization of the neighborhood and the gentrifiers' claimed class positions. Through this analysis, I expose how these debates centered around the exclusionary use‐value that the petition supporters understood the Metro to have: a use‐value produced through the store's capacity to make food economically inaccessible for lower‐income residents, therefore hastening their displacement and increasing the newer residents' property values. This case study thereby highlights the contested co‐productions of neighborhood and community identities in transitional neighborhoods.