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House-flippers had been afoot for years, but in 2020, the charming, unkempt house two doors down was sold for a million dollars. Then, without a permit, the new owner blew it up with dynamite, killing a century lilac tree in the process.

I then knew my days were numbered. I also saw renovations running amok: across the street, a house was flipped four times. Occasionally a sleek black car whispers along the glistening drive, obscured by spotlit magnolia blossoms and beyond it loom the condos, also built this decade and reminiscent 鈥� in their sameness and virulence 鈥� of invasive weeds.

My house, which was a home to Sergeant Alfred Polden, a war hero at Dieppe, was built in 1899, when this neighbourhood still had access to the lake, and, at night took family constitutionals to the spotless beach.

It was purchased in 2003 for a very low price which has since inflated by approximately 100 per cent, and it will soon, I am sure, be the proud bearer of shiny new innards and a typical real estate profile boasting that it is 鈥淪teps from the Drake Hotel and thriving Queen West scene!鈥�

And steps from a shirtless, sweating man pacing the same length of sidewalk and screaming like his body was newly snatched. Steps from people sleeping on cardboard pallets until they are roughly rousted away.

Parkdale used to be a good old-fashioned lousy neighbourhood. When I moved here, I walked around looking for basics, like a photocopier (this would require a Sherpa,) cat food (Ole MacDonald鈥檚 pet store seemed to feature only bales of hay and rusty can openers) and a local diner 鈥� The Skyline, a maroon-vinyl boothed oasis.

The neighbourhood was vibrant with sex workers and, at night, so alive with drug activity that the pay phones were sealed shut at sundown.

Violence was rampant; the dive bars were terrifying and being verbally assaulted was just another facet of one鈥檚 day.

Newcomers remain horrified. 鈥淪ome man called me names and cursed at me!鈥� someone wrote recently on a Parkdale group page, then tried to form a posse to catch him. Other newcomers were amused, even enchanted. The sadly-defunct Instagram page Parkdale Life was a splendid example of the latter: every day, the mysterious poster put up pictures of everything from, if memory serves, old pantless men playing hacky-sack to raccoons riding streetcars spaghetti to shocking objets d鈥檃rt like forlorn, headless carnival toys.

This neighbourhood was home to pensioners, artists, striving families and addicts for decades upon decades. And while these people still remain, they do so under constant threat of being renovicted from their apartments in old houses and the odd gesture to affordable housing, buildings that look like pieces of grey Lego, filled with bedbugs and arsonist co-inhabitants.

When the money began pouring in, more people began pouring out.

And there are fewer and fewer places to go. The Parkdale CHC lent its grounds for decades to unhoused people and addicts able to use safely inside. They sat on the flat rocks outside, friends and allies, until recently they too were swept away, and the clinic was gated.

As I look for alternate housing, I feel myself pulled to stay. This pull homeward is powerful, atavistic even.

A friend鈥檚 partner works with the unhoused, and found an apartment for a man who had been sleeping on the streets. He was grateful, yet he brought a cardboard box inside and proceeded to crawl into it every night, to sleep.

Home is what we know; home is what once brought us safety from fear.

This is why pigeons will never leave your windowsill if you are kind to them. You have offered them that feeling, safety in the storm of human cruelty and intolerance, and how sweetly they sing their gratitude.

The flippers and renovators, some of whom are remodelling apartments the moment a tenant leaves or dies, are still unable to take over this area. Our city councilman, Gord Perks, works hard to negotiate safe, lower-rent places to land, and there are innumerable activists who fight like the Jets versus every underhanded move by the property Sharks.

It is still very hard, however, to regroup once you鈥檝e lost your pigeon coop. The housing co-ops no longer have waiting lists and rent-geared-to-income housing involves a wait-list of 7 to 12 years. This is not good news when you are sleeping like a horse in the Milky Way, the filthy painted alley that runs like the river Styx through Parkdale.

When I first moved here, the police knocked on every door in Parkdale, politely seeking the whereabouts of a severed head; my neighbour鈥檚 home had shiny aluminum siding and a toilet in the middle of the basement.

Recently one of the wealthy neighbours who have taken over an old guard home remarked to me, 鈥淭hese days you need three mil to retire.鈥�

All I need is a home, free of human remains and loud with the unconquerable spirit of the neighbourhood where so many of us, long ago, came to live and to die among the violence, danger, and bold human spirit that has shaped this always-changing, never-changing place.