Kingston’s charm endures, but the story we tell about it no longer does.
When I first arrived for my undergrad, people called Kingston a small town. They said it with love, as if they could protect the city from the noise and nonsense of places like my hometown, Vancouver. For someone who grew up in a big city, the idea was reassuring: a humane place, intact and legible, where people still smiled at you on the street.
But Kingston faces some very real big-city problems.
Small towns don’t have $54-million police budgets or bidding wars over aging houses, and they don’t watch luxury glass towers from anonymous developers sprout beside century-old limestone houses or wrestle with the difficulties of disharmonious growth that leaves residents unsure of who the city is meant to serve.
The myth of smallness persists because it’s comforting. It flatters the city’s best qualities: its sense of neighbourliness, its affection for community, its self-image as a place of civility. For students from Toronto and Vancouver, it provides refuge from urban chaos; for long-time residents, it keeps alive a memory of a simpler place. But nostalgia, however well-intentioned, makes denial easy.
Today’s Kingston faces the same urban challenges as any Canadian city: housing that’s increasingly out of reach, a transit system that strains under demand, and “emergency levels” of food insecurity. The lake and the limestone remain lovely as ever, but charm alone doesn’t make a city livable.
Nowhere is this more visible than in housing. A handful of rental companies control swaths of the city’s housing stock, managing purpose-built student complexes that’ve largely replaced casually rented basement suites. The market, naturally, serves profit, not citizens. Kingston’s now the fourth least affordable city in the country for students—an impressive feat for a place still called “small.”
Transit tells a similar story. Across a city of some 170,000, buses arrive sporadically, and in winter, crowds spill onto icy curbs. Routes change with little warning, leaving seniors and people with mobility challenges unsafe. Cyclists ride beside speeding cars on roads with nonexistent bike lanes. Along Brock Street, the sidewalk sits level with the road, poorly lit and perilous in the dark. Yet Kingston continues to advertise itself as “Ontario’s most walkable city.”
Kingston also doesn’t run on small-town industry anymore. It runs on institutions: higher education, healthcare, the military, and the prison system. Bureaucracies largely replaced the butcher, the baker, and the corner grocer. Tourism still sells the Kingston of yesterday, but the Kingston of today is a city for the knowledge economy and the public sector.
Politicians and residents may buy into the small-town imagery because it makes the city’s problems feel temporary. If only Kingston were small and quaint, then its inequities would be exceptions, not enduring truths caused by policy failures.
Urbanist James Howard Kunstler wrote in The Geography of Nowhere (1994) that tradition adapts with time, but nostalgia clings to old forms. Kingston’s nostalgia is understandable, even endearing—but it keeps us looking backward, toward a version of the city that no longer exists. Seeing Kingston clearly means acknowledging what it is: a city, with all the responsibility that comes with it.
To call Kingston as such isn’t to take away what makes it so beloved. Its warmth, heritage, and sense of community don’t depend on nostalgia—it depends on attention, planning, and the collective belief that livability should extend to everyone who calls it home.
Katarina is a fourth-year Life Sciences student and one of The Journal’s Business, Science, and Technology Editors
Tags
development, housing, Kingston, small town, Student Housing, Urbanization
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.
R Mason
Bravo!!