It is both fantastic and terrible that Tom Thai is scouting locations for a second restaurant.

It’s happy news because Thai is a sensational chef. His restaurant, Foxley, deserves all the praise it gets. And the residents of the Junction, or the Bloor and Lansdowne area, would be fortunate if he were to open up shop there. It’s sad news as it signifies the inevitable, calculable demise of the Ossington Avenue dining renaissance that Thai helped create. People like Thai—the restaurateur trailblazers, imaginative and risk-taking chefs willing to till the fields of previously uncharted territories—are, to these neighbourhoods, as much the harbingers of birth as they are of death.

There is a reason why your great neighbourhood has terrible restaurants. It’s not voodoo. There is no Ojibwa burial ground underneath Bloor Street responsible for cursing the Annex with shameful sushi restaurants. It’s about real estate.

The cycle of the bubble economy is this: exciting restaurants are afforded an opportunity by neighbourhoods with reasonably priced commercial real estate, but those same restaurants' collective success causes an inflation that eliminates the potential for creativity, strangling the neighbourhood’s culture.

In 2007, the commercial strip of Ossington, from Dundas to Queen, was derelict. Bookended by popular bars—The Communist’s Daughter at the north end, Sweaty Betty’s to the south—the street was mostly karaoke clubs, empty storefronts, and two Vietnamese restaurants, Golden Turtle and Pho Tien Thanh (also known as the pho place that’s not Golden Turtle). At night, the street was empty.

With storefront rentals averaging a couple thousand dollars, experienced chef Tom Thai rented a modest space on the strip, at 207 Ossington. “There was no food there,” says the quiet chef, usually seen in his kitchen, face masked by a black toque. With the low overhead for his forty-seat restaurant, Foxley, he gave centre stage to his ceviches—profound bundles of arctic char, wahoo, and mackerel dynamite, ignited by citrus and chili. Chefs took notice, giving rise to a ceviche trend. Bewitched diners, lured by great reviews and word of mouth, headed to the previously unknown street. They walked from Parkdale, took the streetcar from the Beaches, and, cruising the side streets for a parking spot, drove from Rosedale.

After Foxley, the pioneer, came Delux and Pizzeria Libretto, the settlers. “I think Pizzeria Libretto may have been the tipping point,” says Max Rimaldi, its co-owner. It became common at an Ossington bar such as the Crooked Star for a group of six—well-dressed, nursing beers—to spring into action as their cell phone signaled the readiness of their table across the street.

Four years after Foxley’s arrival, a dozen bars have sprouted up, earning Ossington a reputation as Lil’ Clubland. They’re joined by restaurants Union, Bohmer, BQM, Paramour, Salt, Watusi, Goed Eten, and the reopened Lakeview Lounge, a twenty-four-hour diner that absorbs the drinking crowd at 2 a.m. as efficiently as a hamburger, even if it is burnt and served on a stale bun, absorbs a hangover.

The street has gone from an outpost to a destination.

“I’ve seen real estate ads that say, ‘just around the corner from Pizzeria Libretto,’” says Rimaldi. He would have opened his next restaurant, Enoteca Sociale, across the street. But a liquor licence moratorium forced him westward on Dundas, a neighbourhood sure to boom over the next five years.

But as the business prospects tip in one direction, they topple on the other end. Asked if he would open a restaurant like Foxley today, on the Ossington of today, Thai unreservedly says no. “I would go to another place that’s like Ossington was,” he says. Property values continue to soar. Commercial rents have doubled. Unregulated, landlords can raise the rent as much as they like.

With zero rent control for commercial properties, the time bomb in this scenario is the long-term lease. “If you’re going to spend money building out your restaurant,” says Rimaldi, “you want that to be amortized over a long period. You don’t want the landlord to have the option to kick you out in five years.” Foxley has a fifteen-year lease. Libretto’s is at least ten years.

As those long-term leases of the early-adopter restaurants count down, they count down to a neighbourhood’s end. Because when they can’t afford to rent there, there is no opportunity for the young gallery owner or chef.

Pol Cristo-Williams, who owns the bars Sweaty Betty’s, Red Light, and The Unlovable, hopes that a few cool landlords might consider the long-term effect of unreasonable rents in this particular neighbourhood. But he suspects that the greedy ones will screw it up. “When the leases start coming up for renewal, the businesses that are just surviving or getting their shit together,” says Cristo-Williams, “they’re going to jack up the rents. So some of these businesses are going to have to walk away. Then somebody else is going to come in, thinking they can afford it. They’re going to have a bunch of turnover. In five years, it’s just going to end up being like Queen West.”

It seems like false hope that landlords will care more about cultivating a neighbourhood’s culture than collecting rent. On Church Street, the restaurant Zelda’s was paying $28,000 a month. When their landlord asked for even more, they moved.

The lack of City planning, absence of rent control, and the inevitability of a pioneer’s departure all conspire to turn this decade’s hot new neighbourhood into the next decade’s tarnished, hulking outdoor mall. By the time the condos are built, the cool neighbourhood has been all but swallowed up. The only new restaurants that can survive sell cheap sushi or wraps.

“As diversity diminishes, into its place comes a kind of monoculture: incredible repetitions of whatever happens to be most profitable at the time,” said urban planning guru Jane Jacobs in a 2001 speech. “All this is not owing to competition from big boxes, but because success has priced out diversity.”

As the pimping out of Toronto’s idiosyncratic neighbourhoods rushes toward the borders of the already developed suburbs, there are few frontiers left, save ownership. Luckily for Toronto diners, that's Thai’s plan “The interest is pretty low,” he says. “It’s almost like paying your rent. Sometimes it’s even cheaper.” Buying a building would give him a stake in the neighbourhood rather than forcing him to leave after it has built up around him.

Thai, who rode his ceviche wagon to Ossington when it was a ghost town, is scouting new turf. “I hope to find a really cool location, like Ossington, a new frontier.”