A success story of mediocrity in a city failing to improve its housing situation.
Geedi Bryden, Contributor
Source: Daniels Living (danielsliving.com)
On a quiet afternoon in Regent Park, rows of gleaming glass condominiums rise above the original red-brick low-rises that have long defined one of Toronto’s most stigmatized neighbourhoods. To outsiders, and for a number of current residents, the transformation looks like progress: cleaner streets, a new arts centre, cafés, parks. For residents who’ve called Regent Park home, revitalization has carried a different meaning. Between long periods of displacement and the muffled unraveling of their community, the future has become a source of anxiety.
Toronto is in the grips of a housing crisis. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is set at almost $2,400. Affordable housing waitlists stretch over 10 years in the future (the length of most of the revitalization plan). Meanwhile, new condo developments continue to reshape the skyline but also the supply of affordable housing. Since 2020, 50% of units built have gone to investors, taking control of affordable housing supply out of public hands and leaving it to neoliberal fate. With the initial bidding in the early 2000s which opened up participation in the renewal to private actors, urban planning has evolved on the basis that “built form creates social behavior,” in the words of Stefan Kipfer and Jason Petrunia, York University Professor in Environmental Studies and Toronto Urban Planner. As a result, architecture became the main instrument of change, mattering more than the residents themselves, their lives, and the communities they’ve cultivated.
Revitalization for Who?
For TCHC and Daniels, the main partners of the urban experiment, “revitalization” helps avoid some of the obstacles that come with large metropolitan projects. Among the challenges conveniently left aside is the responsibility to put the residents and their well-being first during the long redevelopment. The Toronto Council’s final report on the project aligns itself with this procedure. Although it promises to rebuild all 2,083 affordable units, only 85 percent will remain on site, with the rest displaced to vaguely defined “East Downtown”. Meanwhile, the far greater number of market-rate units will inevitably transform the area’s social composition, effectively dispersing poverty rather than addressing its causes. The city’s claim that all social housing residents have a “right to return” is contradicted by the simple fact that not enough units are being built to accommodate them. The Council’s justification that some tenants may choose to not return because they’ll be satisfied elsewhere rings hollow. In practice, moving costs, school transfers, and navigating access to a new (and unlike their previous housing) well-maintained unit all act as a deterrent to return. The “mixed” or “diverse” community the project envisions seems to celebrate diversity only when it excludes, or hides those in need. As redevelopment progressed, the stark visual divide between the new glass towers and the remaining low-rises was used to legitimize the project’s continuation, cloaked in the language of combating exclusion while in reality privileging the interests of new, wealthier residents over the original community.
Affordable Housing: When no One Wants to Do it, the Free Market is Always There
From a broader standpoint, the shift in policy can be traced back to external and internal factors in the last decades. Faced with mounting costs and ideological pressure regarding the level of state intervention, federal and provincial governments have steadily withdrawn from their role as housing providers. Instead, responsibility has been downloaded to municipalities and handed off to private developers through public-private partnerships. The result is a city where market logic, not social need, drives development. Developers have successfully rebranded gentrification, tacking the words of diversity and social opportunity onto the urban renewal project more likely known as “revitalization.” The model has been used across neighbourhoods in the region, and typically takes the form of “mixed-income housing,” designating, in simpler terms, people of different socio-economic status living in a same neighbourhood. Unsurprisingly, the involvement of private developers isn’t due to their philanthropic nature but more likely because of the government’s incentive program. In exchange for helping save “blighted” areas and a small share of affordable housing, the City offers tax reductions and payment deferrals. Though higher levels of government have reaffirmed commitments to provide social housing, the momentum has remained with the private sector.
The transformation of Regent Park is emblematic of another trend across Canada’s cities. In place of large-scale public housing projects, the new model of mixed-income redevelopment, built through partnerships with private developers, anchored a set of shaky assumptions in policymaking.
The modern urban planning ideology reflects a distinctly neoliberal orientation in which the city’s approach to redevelopment often amounts to a form of “recolonization.” The term refers to the reappropriation of valued urban spaces legitimized by the existence (and inception) of stigma, affecting mostly racialized and ethnic minorities. The logic behind mixed-income housing is not simply economic, but moral. It assumes that placing low-income people alongside wealthier neighbours will naturally lead to social integration, access to resources, and “positive influences.”
At the heart of mixed-income housing policy are two central and extremely questionable assumptions. The first is that a diversity of incomes and ownership types within a neighbourhood will generate positive spillover effects for low-income residents. That is, by living near wealthier people, they’ll gain access to better information, job networks, and services. The second is the “role model” effect; the idea that wealthier, presumably more stable residents, will influence low-income residents to adopt new behaviors, values, and aspirations.
Both ideas have been widely critiqued by housing scholars. These strategies are often more about destigmatizing space for outsiders than about improving life for those already living there. While new residents have valued the opening of chic new businesses on the renovated strip between Sumach and River, other residents have also viewed the project as contributing to gentrification and not helping with affordability.
Social Engineering—or Just Anti-Poor?
Mixed-income housing then reflects a paternalistic view of poverty, treating low-income residents as problems to be corrected through exposure to “better” exposure. This role-model theory is not only patronizing but also difficult to prove. Asking renters if they view nearby condo owners as role models is not only invasive, it’s insulting.
Not only does this perspective hold original public housing residents for the conditions of their neighbourhood, it also implies they lack the capacity to sustain vibrant and healthy communities, disregarding the city’s coop-housing history. In Toronto, with over forty-four thousand units, the Cooperative Housing Federation of Canada has offered a quality alternative to absurdly priced rental condos. Not only have units managed by co-ops been consistently priced below market rates, they’ve also been properly maintained despite federal and provincial cuts.
Moreover, the second assumption that social capital trickles down through mere proximity also doesn’t hold up in practice. Studies show the negative effects of mixed-housing insofar as tenure-based divisions tend to persist, with homeowners and renters living in the same neighbourhood often maintaining separate social worlds. In mixed-tenure communities, owners may spend less time in the area, use fewer local services, and interact minimally with social housing tenants. The juxtaposition of residents with divergent values and lifestyles can increase neighbourhood tensions, requiring more intensive management by landlords and community organizations. Even accounting for the potential benefits linked to heterogeneity, they are difficult to engineer. One of the few positive documented effects of mixed-income housing relates to the impact of homeowners on the politics of their community. Given they are more financially invested, they tend to voice their concerns better, or rather hold more importance in local decision-making, and as a result obtain more effective management.
When the City of Toronto launched the Regent Park revitalization project in 2005, it framed the redevelopment as a progressive social intervention, an effort to reintegrate a marginalized neighbourhood into the urban fabric. What followed, however, was a complex process of demolition, displacement, and reconstruction that left certain residents feeling excluded from the future that was supposedly being built for them.
The project introduced thousands of new condo units and some affordable rentals, but the number of deeply affordable units rebuilt has not kept pace with growing demand. In 15 years, the original 2083 rent-geared-to-income units have been rebuilt, and 464 more are yet to be added. After a decade and a half, and over a billion dollars in investment, the neighbourhood barely adds to the stock of affordable housing (it even reduces the share of affordable housing in the area) and primarily succeeds in diluting poverty and its illustrations instead of improving the living conditions of the original residents. The city’s affordable housing waitlist has ballooned during the life of the project, and displaced residents were relocated to areas farther from downtown, often losing access to the services, networks, and communities they’ve cultivated.
This visible class divide reinforces territorial stigmatization, or in other words, the symbolic marking of certain places and people as deviant, dangerous, or undesirable. Others have argued that far from reducing stigma, the mixed-income model often entrenches it, as low-income residents become hyper-visible minorities in newly gentrified spaces. The dire landscape in Toronto requires government agencies to distance themselves from private involvement if its aims are sustainability and affordability. More importantly, it needs to find a strategy that places the needs of those they’re supposed to benefit first.
