The neighborhood I live in is, according to the sorts of people who say these sorts of things, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world. Which means: it’s a Pakistani ethnoburb with Afghan and Filipino minorities. There are some white people here (but, mysteriously, not the sort who talk about how great diverse neighborhoods are), most of them Greek and most of them old. When I tell my peers where I live, they get a confused look on their face. I don’t think a single white person I’ve met, except those living in immediately adjacent communities, has ever heard of the neighborhood. (Well no, there’s one exception to that: Latter-day Saint missionaries who served in Toronto.)

There are no pride flags in June in this neighborhood, except at the city’s imperial outposts. There are no Raptors jerseys either, for that matter. These aren’t “diverse people of color”, the kind who might write op-eds in the Toronto Star–these are immigrants. They speak Urdu, eat Halal fried chicken and line up down the block on Fridays at one of the three (four?) mosques. One of Toronto’s most accomplished mass shooters of the last decade lived here and worked at the local drug store.

The buildings are bursting at the seams, with two or three families frequently living in a one- or two-bedroom unit. Apparently, we have heard from the Filipinos, there are Muslim families who take turns in apartments. That is, they rotate twelve hour shifts in and out, sleeping and eating when the apartment is theirs. This supposedly explains why the park, the mall and the Tim Hortons are always packed with people.

But things seem to be changing. Up until this summer, my wife and I had never seen another young white couple in the neighborhood. Now we’ve seen three! Three! In the space of a few weeks! Plus, the streets and paths are cleaner than they were last year. There have been noticeably fewer sirens at night.

What seems to be the cause is a major retailer beloved by white people moving in last year on a spot of prime real estate. Around the same time, a Starbucks opened, along with a handful of other brand names. The local Wendy’s got renovated. Apparently … that’s enough. The process of gentrification is underway.

The way the neighborhood had been protected from the process up until this point was, I think, its closed rental market. The neighborhood doesn’t show up when you search for rentals on Craigslist. Free units are snatched up immediately by relatives of people already living there (we got into the neighborhood by a fluke).

I don’t know how I feel about the transformation, which will, no doubt, continue apace. On the one hand–yes, brand name stores, cleaner streets, fewer sirens, and maybe the pool will no longer be de facto male-only. But on the other, the local school might stop protesting sex ed, there will be fewer buses and, when white people hit critical mass, the pride flags might even come out. And, of course, our rent will go up.

I’d say we’ve only got ourselves to blame, but we haven’t. We’re not gentrifiers! We scrimp like the Pakistanis. We’re pushing up against our building’s occupancy limits with kids the way they do. We shop at their shops and eat their halal meat. Like them, we don’t patronize the local liquor store.

But we don’t belong, and still won’t once the white liberals take over. What do you do when you’re caught between the city’s two major religions?