DIANA MCNALLY

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Diana McNally is a Toronto-based DJ and Coordinator of The Meeting Place, a drop-in centre at St Christopher House's Queen and Bathurst location. Back in June, we spoke to her about getting evicted, DIY dance parties and the trouble with Toronto landlords. 

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How did you come to live in Parkdale?

 

I had been living in Montreal while doing my undergrad, and moved back here to start a Masters at UofT. The original plan was to live with my mom and dad in Rexdale, which is sort of a difficult commute and not a particularly nice neighbourhood. But I started seeing a guy who was living in an apartment just opposite the former Beer Store on Brock St.

 

I never formerly signed a lease or anything, but it was kind of a given that, as his girlfriend, I would always be there. And although, I didn’t quite consider Parkdale home yet, I was pretty comfortable.

I mean, it was opposite the Beer Store, so oftentimes we’d have people drinking on our lawn, or passed out. But really, I didn’t have a major problem with it either. As long as people were safe and okay, it was like, sure, fine, be on the lawn. It’s no big deal. And in a sense, it was a real introduction to the neighbourhood. That was the community I engaged with first, the Beer Store clients.

 

This was also around the time when the Drake Hotel suddenly became this big music hub, and I was hitting parties downstairs and DJing in the lounge. My boyfriend was pretty involved in the bar scene, and so we got to know about a lot of semi-legal, super-fun parties going on in the neighbourhood. That was my other intersection with Parkdale in those days, and it certainly gave me a deeper sense of the neighbourhood. 

 

 

What caused you to move away?

 

Well, the landlords approached my boyfriend one day and essentially told him to leave. The story they gave was that their children needed our apartment, and their grandparents needed the unit directly above us. The whole idea sounded pretty iffy to begin with, but it’s perfectly legal to ask people to leave if you’re getting a family member to take their place. That loophole has been exploited so many times to kick people out of their homes.

 

We were only given about a month to find something else, so both of us kind of went into emergency mode. My boyfriend found a place near Type, on Queen Street—a very tiny, unliveable space, quite frankly—while I found a place of my own on Huron street, which was also small.

 

After I moved, I didn’t really give the apartment much thought. Then, one day, passing through Parkdale, I noticed that there were a bunch of new mailboxes outside. Obviously, the landlords hadn’t moved their family in, instead they had renovated the house from 3 apartments into about 6 or 8, and then moved in more tenants.

 

But you know, what can you do? At this point, there’s no recourse…

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Based on the fact that you recently chaired the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust’s Communications and Community Engagement Committee, is it safe to say that you’ve kept up ties with the neighbourhood, despite the eviction?

 

Oh, yeah, Parkdale’s still my home base. It’s where I started out in this city, and it’s been one of the few neighbourhoods where people who are creative—DJs, artists, whoever—can actually live somewhat comfortably.

 

And actually, I think my real sense of Parkdale came later, after I’d moved away, when I worked at PARC, and really got to know folks who use the drop-in, and all the people who work there. As far as drop-ins go—and I’ve worked at a few now—PARC is by far the most cohesive. People  actually engage in activities together there, as opposed to the more common experience, which is, “enter, eat a meal, leave.” The neighbourhood as a whole has a special sort of cohesion, where you can start to build bonds between people from all different walks of life.

 

You currently supervise the Meeting Place, a St. Christopher House community development program; before that, you worked as a drop-in supervisor at Christie-Ossington. Has this informed your own personal understanding of housing insecurity? 

 

Absolutely. I have a definite investment in the communities I work with, which includes a lot of folks who live in rooming houses or are homeless. So I’m very aware of how precarious housing can be in this city—as well as how difficult it can be to transition someone back into housing after they’ve lived on the streets. The longer someone stays out, the more difficult it is to get them back into the system.

 

And the longer you’ve gone without housing, the more you start to think that you don’t deserve it. I see that a lot. So it’s not enough to ask, “is there enough so housing?” We need to create supports for people who get tossed out for long periods of time.

 

From a personal angle, I’m just so grateful for the housing I have. It’s secure, I have a great relationship with my landlord, and this work has shown me just how uncommon that is. 

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What, if anything, do you think needs to be done to address the housing precarity you witness?

 

Well, for a start, landlords have way too much authority while tenants, often vulnerable ones, don’t know their rights or are scared to exercise them. In Parkdale, I can at least refer people to the legal clinic [Parkdale Community Legal Services [1266 Queen St W.], which can offer support when there’s a dispute. But in other neighbourhoods, the East End, for example, it’s way more difficult for folks to get any kind of legal help, even just with understanding what their rights are.

 

In my own line of work, I’ve found myself doing a lot of outreach to    landlords. With big corporate landlords, like Akelius or Metcap, the problem is a bit different, they’re trying to actively circumvent their responsibilities to tenants. But in cases where it’s just some guy who owns a particular property, he often doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing. He doesn’t understand it’s his responsibility to do things like pay for extermination, or replace things that get broken. And a lot of my work, as a housing worker, is actually about getting to know these people; trying to get housing for vulnerable people requires that you first build personal relationships with people who can house them. It seems so bizarre to me, that the work actually revolves around interpersonal dynamics, but that’s actually how it is. And so if you want to persuade someone to lease their units to folks who need a lot of support, what does that mean in practice? What support can social workers or social agencies provide to these private housing situations, so that our people don’t get to a point where they’re in a completely unliveable housing situation?

 

Obviously, that’s a pretty small-scale solution to what is essentially a systemic problem. We live in a society where, basically, everything is predicated on property having a capitalist value, and how do you even start to address such a huge problem? Because property is not just to make money off of. Or it shouldn’t be. But the way things are, I don’t know where that kind of lasting change is going to come from.

 

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