Chinatown Toronto Homes for sale & Real Estate

What would Sam Ching make of it all? In 1878, the owner of a small laundry on Adelaide Street was the first ethnic Chinese to be listed in the Toronto Directory. In his lifetime, despite the strictures of the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act, Mr. Ching would have seen the beginnings of what was to become one of North America’s largest Chinatowns — established first along Bay and Elizabeth Streets.

By the end of the First World War, Toronto’s Chinese population had grown to over 1000, and Old Chinatown was a thriving community, with numerous Chinese-owned grocery stores, laundries and, of course, restaurants.

For the next 40 years, Chinatown remained largely unchanged — a bustling, colourful and thoroughly authentic pocket of Asian culture, commerce and cuisine in the city’s downtown core. Then, in the late 1950s, change arrived in the form of plans for Toronto’s new City Hall at the intersection of Bay and Queen Street West.

Construction of the new city landmark would displace the larger part of Old Chinatown, with most of the original business locations expropriated or taken over by developers. But Chinatown didn’t disappear beneath the march of progress — it simply migrated a few city blocks to the west and re-established along Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West.

Today, Toronto’s Chinatown is a dynamic neighbourhood, where stores set out their stalls on the sidewalk, the calls of street vendors rise above the buzz of business, street signs are bi-lingual, and a visitor can easily imagine themselves walking a street on the other side of the world.

The area surrounding commercial Chinatown offers widely differing options for home seekers. To the south, in the Alexandra Park neighbourhood, Victorian-style houses from the 1880s and ‘90s mix with social housing from the 1960s... Kensington Market neighbourhood has lofts and condos... the narrow streets of Baldwin Village neighbourhood are lined with row houses from the late Victorian era... Phoebe Street has modern townhomes... and bargain-hunters can find fixer-uppers throughout the area.

For current information on available listings for Chinatown homes for sale and real estate, please see the column at the right of this page. Listings are updated daily, so we recommend that you bookmark this page and check back frequently.