MoveIn Status
Praying for a team.

Firsthand
Youth are playing cricket with a cricket bat and a tennis ball on an area of grass just outside the apartment building at 40 Stevenson Rd. Many who live in this building are from the Gujarat province in India. They arrive in Canada with professional training in fields like biotechnology. As you walk the halls of this 13-storey building, you see a red swastika on the thresholds of most doors. Contrary to common misconceptions, it’s a Hindu good luck symbol that appears on many temples in India (the black version of which was adopted as a symbol by one of the dictators in the 20th Century).

The Landscape
There are five apartment buildings in this patch, including market-rent buildings at 40 and 60 Stevenson. Highfield Junior School, a beer store and Division 23 police station are all within a three-minute walk of this patch.

Highfield Junior School is a public elementary school (JK to Grade 5) that had an astounding 968 students in 2008! Founded in 1845, Highfield began as a log schoolhouse.¹ In September 2006, the school earned the National Quality Institute’s Blue Leaf Award for excellence in education.²

The People
In the wider neighbourhood that the Stevenson Road patch belongs to:³

• Population density is 8,597 people per square kilometre compared with the 866/km² Toronto average
• In 2006, 27% of the population was age 14 or under, compared with the Toronto average of 16%
• 76% of residents have a mother tongue other than English or French
• 74% of residents are immigrants – 51% arrived in Canada between 2001 and 2006
• Only 38% of the population lived at the same address five years ago, indicating a fairly transient population
• The 2006 unemployment rate was 10.9% as compared with 6.7% for the rest of Toronto
• 88% of residents are visible minorities – 63% are South Asian, the next largest group is black
• In 2006, 34% of residents were considered to have low, before-tax incomes as compared with 18% in the rest of Toronto

The History
The Stevenson Road patch is located in Rexdale, which was still farmland in the 1950s when developer Rex Heslop began buying land to create the community. Heslop anticipated that the completion of Highway 401 and the need for employees at the nearby Toronto International Airport would create demand for houses in Rexdale. He was right and houses in the subdivision sold out quickly between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. At the request of what was then the City of Etobicoke, Heslop also developed the farmland along the south edge of the subdivision into what is now one of the city’s largest industrial corridors.⁴

The Challenge
A Christian couple already has a presence in this patch as they meet weekly in a family’s living room to help them practice English. Would you consider joining God in what he is already doing in the Stevenson Road patch? Would you consider moving in?

Sources
¹www.tdsb.on.ca
²en.wikipedia.org
³All statistics in the section taken from Census tract profile for 0249.05 (CT), Toronto (CMA) and Ontario www12.statcan.ca
⁴www.torontorealestateguide.com