The healing of Regent Park, Toronto's most notorious address for at least a century -- long before the late 1940s, when its 70 blighted acres were first bulldozed and rebuilt as the country's largest public-housing project -- begins with a rebranding.
"How about South Rosedale?" asks David Zimmer, chairman of the Toronto Community Housing Corp., the big new municipal agency that is undertaking the task.
Olde Cabbagetowne might be better, since Regent Park was the original site of that neighbourhood, which was then "North America's largest Anglo-Saxon slum," according to homegrown novelist Hugh Garner.
One way or another, the marketers will have to invent some catchy new name if they are ever going to sell the 2,700 new condominiums and townhouses Mr. Zimmer and his colleagues plan to build on this site after the next scheduled bulldozing, perhaps as early as 2005.
And they will have to be especially ingenious concocting the new brand (Brassica Estates?), because the housing company also plans to mix more than 2,000 heavily subsidized units into a new not-Regent neighbourhood -- one new unit for every Regent Park tenant who will be temporarily displaced during the construction.
In terms of local housing initiatives, the TCHC plan to erase Regent Park and begin again is the biggest, most ambitious and complex undertaken since the first bulldozing on the same site more than half a century ago. "Fixing" this often violent, multi-ethnic ghetto, where the average household income hits $14,000 -- significantly lower than that in any other public housing project in Toronto -- has for decades been the fondest dream of local reformers.
And now, to all of their astonishment, it's happening at double time. Or at least something is happening: To judge the current rush of events a success would be to ignore the major risks entailed in the process -- the worst of them being that it could end up recreating the same old Regent Park, only twice as large, with all its well-documented social ills fully entrenched.
But taking risks is an important part of the project, according to Mr. Zimmer, the first chairman of the city-owned housing company that was formed after the province offloaded its massive inventory of Toronto-based public housing. "We're not prepared just to collect the rent, cut the grass and keep a lid on things," he said yesterday.
The housing offload was financially ruinous but otherwise opportune: Unlike the tangled and stagnant bureaucracies that once controlled the social-housing portfolio, the new company has been able to move aggressively to tackle long-standing problems, with Regent Park at the top of the list. It appears that the decades of talk are over.
As per all that talk, the new plan relies heavily on Regent's physical normalization, with all the pre-1940s streets and blocks rebuilt and reintegrated with the surrounding grid, erasing the borders of the currently impenetrable project by physically transforming it into a downtown residential neighbourhood like any other.
Adding a few thousand market units into the mix will further attenuate the ghetto, planners expect, while contributing the cash flow needed to pay for the replacement of Regent's existing subsidized housing.
"Think about the St. Lawrence neighbourhood," says TCHC president Derek Ballantyne, citing the best example of a new mixed-use neighbourhood done right. "In the beginning, it was all social housing, but as the mix happened, people forgot that was there. Now it looks like any other neighbourhood."
The comparison is beguiling, although not quite appropriate. Built in the heyday of government investment in social housing, St. Lawrence is a truly mixed neighbourhood, with about 15 per cent of its residents relying to the heaviest extent permissible on government subsidies. But half the residents of rebranded Regent will be so-called "deep core" tenants, living on less income than any other Torontonians with roofs over their heads.
"To make a dynamic, successful neighbourhood, you need a proper mix," says affordable-housing developer Mike Labbé, who has warned that the TCHC's current ambitious plan risks the retrenchment rather than the removal of the ghetto. He thinks the planners should attempt to dilute the poverty of the new neighbourhood and create more opportunities for affordable home ownership rather than government tenancies.
Naturally enough, the TCHC disagrees. Sociological research has produced no magic numbers to determine the correct income mix for a new neighbourhood, Mr. Ballantyne contends. "There is really nothing that tells you one way or another," he says, adding that "poor neighbourhoods work just as well as rich neighbourhoods and often they're better."
But the point is moot, as far as the planners are concerned. "We do not have a mandate to remove affordable housing," Mr. Ballantyne says, noting that a more normal income mix would probably require the permanent displacement of some of Regent's current tenants. "Morally and legally, we have no option but to rebuild that housing."
Ultimately, the housing company is expecting that it will be long-overdue physical changes -- a wholesale change in urban design -- that determine the success of the new neighbourhood. It will be a front-door, eyes-on-the-street, Jane Jacobs sort of place, company officials contend, unrecognizable as a housing project.
In that, it will be just like old Cabbagetown -- a slum so notorious it was knocked to the ground more than 50 years ago and replaced with the shining modern paradise of Regent Park, a paragon of progressive town planning at the time.
Going back to the old urban design can hardly guarantee success in itself. But whatever comes after the next scheduled bulldozing, it has to be better than Regent Park.