Hume: Regent Park brings new life to Toronto

As Toronto’s most successful city-building effort in more than 30 years, the Regent Park remake is one of few projects in which we can all take pride.

Not since the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood of the 1970s has local officialdom managed to pull off such a bold and innovative scheme. When done, it will have improved the lives of thousands of low-income tenants and made the city a better place.

So the attack on Regent Park launched this week by Mayor Rob Ford’s media doppelgangers at the Toronto Sun, as lamentable as it was, comes as no surprise. In the politics of resentment, no success must be allowed to go unpunished, especially one that involves public agencies and the poor.

Still, the bitterness of the attack was disturbing. Where does this sort of anger come from? And what’s it really about? Facts weren’t just twisted beyond recognition, but organized to bolster a foregone conclusion.

The starting point was the usual rightist cant about public agencies such as the Toronto Community Housing Corp. The TCHC was formed when senior governments dumped their social housing stock on the city a decade ago. It’s one of the largest landlords in North America. Among its holdings is Regent Park, a failed post-war social housing experiment that had outlived its theory.

The solution, simple but brilliant, was formulated by former TCHC CEO Derek Ballantyne. He wanted to rebuild the neighbourhood on a mixed-income, mixed-use basis. The idea was to get rid of the physical barriers, build amenities, create street animation and add middle-class housing. The intention was to make Regent Park look and act like any other neighbourhood in Toronto, not a ghetto.

Getting residents to agree to move out, even temporarily, was no mean feat. Neither was finding a developer, Daniels Corp. The TCHC managed both.

From the start, the hard part was to attract those middle-class buyers who would ultimately pay for the improvements. After all, would anyone who had a choice opt to live at Dundas and Parliament, one of the city’s most depressed corners?

Those early buyers, including TCHC and Daniels employees, deserve credit for putting their money where their mouths are. As the former city integrity commissioner noted, the caveat was that they played, and paid, by the same rules as the public. This they did.

So did Councillor Pam McConnell, who represents Regent Park and bought a unit. According to the Sun, this qualifies as conflict of interest. Quite the opposite; McConnell deserves credit for paying full market value for the pleasure of being an urban guinea pig down with the drug dealers.

In the absence of anything real, participating media have now taken to tut-tutting about the appearance of wrongdoing. Their sanctimony is laughable. Have any of them looked in a mirror lately?

The more serious issue concerns the integration of new arrivals with Regent Park returnees. Given that the rebuilding will take a further 10 to 15 years, much remains undone. Some former residents won’t return; others already have and more will. Those we have spoken to are thrilled with their new family-friendly apartments, some of which have as many as three bedrooms — hard to find in Toronto.

But none of this matters to those who made up their minds long ago that progress is little more than a socialist conspiracy. So little progress. So few socialists. No wonder they’re so angry.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1154047–hume-regent-park-brings-new-life-to-toronto