Celebrating 50 years of helping Toronto neighbourhoods thrive

Formed to ensure small businesses flourish, Business Improvement Areas have been promoting and supporting our communities and each other for five decades.


BIA 50: The Original BIA Designating Bylaw
August 31, 2020

In the late 1960s the Bloor-Jane-Runnymede Businessmen’s Association concluded that the chief problem it faced was in the raising of funds to carry on its services to the local business community. It developed a scheme whereby the …

READ MORE

Supercoffee’s Cassandra Nicolaou on the Importance of Community in Mount Dennis
July 14, 2020

Cassandra Nicolaou didn’t sleep much last night. Over the next few days, Nicolaou will have to hit a temporary pause on Supercoffee , the Mount Dennis mainstay she opened in 2014. She’s kept it running for the past …

READ MORE

The Bloor Annex BIA’s Brian Burchell on Reinventing Toronto’s Most Liveable Neighbourhood
March 16, 2020

“We don’t have garbage cans,” laments Brian Burchell, chair of the Bloor Annex BIA. “We’ve been without them since construction ended September 23.” The city department responsible for installation could’ve had them in place the very next …

READ MORE

How Bloor West Village Stays Young Fifty Years On
March 16, 2020

It’s impossibly cold out, David Howitt’s just torn up the floor in the basement of Marlborough’s, the 98-year-old stationery and school supply shop he runs alongside his wife Joanne, to fix a pipe situation and yet, the …

READ MORE