On a cool October evening in 1970, Alex Ling locked up his Chinese import store in the west-end of Toronto. Pausing with keys in hand, he sighed as he looked up the Bloor Street sidewalk. All around him were sad indicators of the area's steady commercial decline. “For sale” and “for rent” signs hung on boarded-up windows. Small specialty shops, once bustling centres of a vibrant immigrant community, now desperately clung to a trickle of pedestrian traffic. The Polish delis, Ukrainian bakeries, and small clothing boutiques were closing shop. Anchoring either end of the Bloor West Street strip, new subway stations at Runnymede Road and Jane Street replaced the old electric street-car line siphoning thousands of commuters underground. The freshly minted Dufferin Mall was attracting shoppers from kilometers around and the gigantic Yorkdale Shopping Centre and the CF Toronto Eaton Centre were set to do the same. Bloor Street West was dying a slow death and Ling could stand it no longer.

For the next few years Mr Ling and a small cadre of business owners would toil against heavy odds to establish a beach-head in what would become a global struggle for the survival of city centres, village squares, and mini-Main Streets from Toronto to Tirana. Today, Mr Ling is a feted international elder statesman of what should rightly be regarded as one of the most important political movements of the last half-century. While the fight against the rise of massive corporate retail has become almost ubiquitous, in 1970 the Bloor West Village was unique. It was a lone but promising legislative experiment based on a simple solution to a common problem. While business associations had always existed alongside the rise of urban entrepreneurialism, such groups were invariably voluntary and their funding entirely dependent on the good will of their subscribers. Business owners who did not contribute would still unfairly reap the benefits of their more communal neighbours’ efforts. The Bloor West Village was the first geographic business area to legally force property owners to pay a property tax surcharge collected by the city, authorized by the province, and managed locally by an elected Board of Directors.