Sean Purdy

"Ripped Off" By the System: Housing Policy, Poverty, and Territorial Stigmatization in Regent Park Housing Project, 1951–1991

Somebody up there has a structured plan to keep the poor poor. You have to have people to do joe jobs. So you never let them get out of poverty.

Janet Ross, Regent Park tenant activist, 1975.

The people of Regent Park are forced to be the way they are because some head of affairs, some big man, is holding the people down.

Ozzie Smith, Regent Park tenant activist, 1975.¹

UNDER THE PROUD STARES of city officials and the invasive cameras of the Toronto media, Alf and Teresa Bluett and their four children walked up freshly-laid concrete steps into their new row house in Regent Park housing project.² The Bluetts were the first family to move into the pioneering Canadian public housing development in 1949. Alf, a car man's helper with the Canadian National Railroad, had served five years overseas in the army. He was the ideal candidate for the new project as housing reform advocates promised that it was a permanent, low-rental housing option for deserving workers, many of them veterans, who were unable to manage in Toronto's despairingly tight housing market.³ As one admiring member of city government said of the project in its first year: "In fact, a sign might well be erected somewhere on that 42-acre site — Good Citizens Dwell Here."⁴ A chorus of powerful opinion setters and policy makers — the urban reform movement, government officials, key sections of the business community, and the media — sang the praises of Regent Park as an outstanding initiative to tackle the low-income housing crisis for the city's burgeoning working class.⁵ Citing prospective tenants and displaying flattering photos of the new dwellings, the Toronto Daily Star described the project as "Heaven."⁶

Barely twenty years later, politicians, reformers, and the media were singing a decidedly different tune. Public housing projects were now regarded as new slums, housing only the rough and rowdy, many of them unruly children and teens, the unemployed, or those on social assistance.⁷ Descriptions of Regent Park in the Toronto Star shifted radically from "Heaven" to "colossal flop" and "hopeless slum."⁸ The report of the 1968 Federal Task Force on Housing blamed housing projects for "breeding disincentive" and a "what's the use" attitude to work and self-improvement.⁹ This negative image intensified considerably in the following two decades. By the 1990s, Canada's largest housing project became virtually synonymous with socio-economic marginalization and behavioural depravity. In June 2002, a Toronto Star reporter characteristically referred to the housing development as a "poster child for poverty."¹⁰ According to one observer in Toronto Life magazine, it had become "thoroughly ghettoized" and had "accumulated a sense of almost mythical ruin."¹¹ Indeed, the broader social identity of Regent Park has become the accumulation and escalation of the stigma of its residents.

As the few existing statistical studies of Canadian public housing have shown, public housing residents have exhibited markedly different characteristics from the ideal working-class tenant promised by 1940s public housing proponents. In 1988, average annual income among public housing households was significantly less than one-half that of the average renter household in Canada. Over 96 per cent of public housing households were at or below core need income thresholds — those people who paid more than 30 per cent of their income in rent or less than this for substandard accommodation. Less than one-fifth counted on employment as their major source of income while one-third relied on social assistance. Among those that were able to work however, almost one-half did.¹² Compared to the general Canadian population, family public housing projects contained significantly more children under 15-years-of-age (over 30 per cent in public housing compared to 20 per cent in the general population) and were composed of many more single-parent households (24.1 per cent compared with 10.2 per cent of average renters).¹³

This bleak portrait of socio-economic disparity is closely mirrored in the Metropolitan Toronto area, which holds the largest concentration of public housing units in the country. In a thorough study of the 1971–91 period, Robert Murdie confirms that there has been a marked shift from two-parent families to single-parent households and seniors, as well as from native to foreign-born residents. In particular, he finds a disproportionate number of Caribbean-born blacks among poor, public housing residents. Furthermore, he details an increasing number of long-term tenants and families on welfare in Toronto's projects. He suggests that this pronounced rise in multifarious inequalities is due to wider economic developments such as the loss of central-city manufacturing opportunities and shifting supply and demand factors within the housing sphere. The latter factors include the changing workplace and familial roles of women, varying immigration trends, outright lack of affordable housing, tenant selection and rental policies favouring the most disadvantaged, and a retrenchment of welfare-state commitments.¹⁴

The powerful stigma attached to public housing projects as "neighbourhoods of exile,"¹⁵ where only the jobless and social assistance recipients live, has also intersected with debates in social science circles about the "underclass." According to this thesis — particularly popular among some segments of the media, social scientists, and conservative commentators in the United States — whole groups of people (in the US case, blacks), especially in large public housing developments, are permanently marginalized due to inter-generational social and labour-market exclusion with dissolute behavioural traits that perpetuate poverty and reinforce dependency on the state.¹⁶ Subscribers to the "underclass" theory highlight the assumed social "pathologies" of poor blacks stemming from substance abuse, crime, high school non-completion, teenage pregnancies, unemployment, single-mother status, and reliance on welfare.¹⁷ The theory has faced trenchant disparagement in critical social science and historical circles on theoretical, empirical, and political grounds, not the least of which is that black inner-city dwellers themselves are blamed for their own socio-economic deprivation, which neglects the devastating impacts of long-standing structural racism, neoliberal state policies, and urban economic restructuring that have forcibly constrained, stigmatized, indicted, and punished ghetto residents.¹⁸

In Canada, there is a paucity of serious research in this vein, although several studies confirm the manifest rise of urban poverty and inequality since the 1970s.¹⁹ The mainstream media and some government researchers in Canada have certainly made ample use of the "underclass" concept generically to brand poor people as social pariahs, while academic researchers have largely rejected it.²⁰ David Ley and Heather Smith, for instance, have shown that major Canadian cities contain numerous areas of deep and concentrated poverty, some of it among recent immigrant groups. They reject the notion that there is an "immigrant underclass" on empirical grounds, finding only small spatial pockets of simultaneous, multiple deprivation such as welfare dependency, high school non-completion, and non-labour force inclusion. They document dispersed areas of socio-economic exclusion that are often located close to middle-class and stable working-class neighbourhoods with far fewer indicators of poverty.²¹

I take my cue in this article from the existing statistical studies on Canadian public housing and the broader literature on the rise of urban inequality in advanced capitalist societies. The first half of this article charts the historical escalation of polarization between Regent Park residents and the Metropolitan Toronto population by comparing a series of broadly illustrative statistical traits over a 40-year period: 1940s to the 1970s. This long-term historical perspective allows us to scrutinize the development of socio-economic marginalization both before and after the boom period of postwar capitalism. Regent Park's resident population underwent a dramatic process of socio-economic divergence in comparison to the general Metropolitan Toronto population, which began in the mid-to-late 1960s, before the onset of outright assaults on the welfare state. I also flesh out the stark statistical portrayal by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, letters to the author by former tenants, rare resident case files, and internal and public documents from the various housing administrations.²² This empirically-grounded combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence helps us to more accurately navigate through the complex social, political, and economic dynamics of work, welfare, and social exclusion.²³

In the second section, I explain the rise of socio-economic inequality. In contrast to the damning "blend of generalizations and stereotyping with little evidential support,"²⁴ which blame tenants themselves for their predicament, I directly point the arrow of responsibility for rising poverty, inequality, and effective "loss of entitlement"²⁵ at state housing policies including wider urban renewal strategies, internal public housing practices, and neoliberal economic restructuring. In the third section I focus, unlike most studies, on the potently deleterious effects of stereotyping Regent Park as an outcast space. The unruliness of public housing residents and their immorality, criminality, and cultural "inbreeding," feature prominently in the narratives of outside commentators on Regent Park. Stigmatizing renderings by external observers were not free-floating ideological representations but real reflections and shapers of spatial and social divisions with concrete economic and social consequences for tenants.²⁶ I briefly discuss, moreover, what residents themselves thought about their homes and how they coped with stigmatization and material deprivation. Sometimes accepting and internalizing negative external representations or projecting these labels onto their neighbours, while at other times resolutely battling against these brutalizing depictions, Regent Park residents were active players in building a meaningful living space.

Data Sources

The statistical analysis that follows is based primarily on two different sources of information. The first data set comprises project-level statistics generated by researchers for Toronto's public housing administrations and other state bodies. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Housing Authority of Toronto, which built and managed the northern section of Regent Park until 1968; the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority, responsible for the southern section of the project under a Federal-Provincial funding agreement until 1964; and the Ontario Housing Corporation, which took over the management of all public housing in Ontario in 1968, carried out numerous statistical studies on the tenants under their auspices. These data sets are valuable since they were based on 100 per cent data collection and not on samples, allowing a precise look at various social indicators. Unfortunately, the archival repositories only contain selective and inconsistent project-level data from the 1950s to the late 1960s. Where possible and appropriate for comparison, I utilize direct project-level data.

The second source of statistical information is the Census of Canada enumeration area (CEA) data from 1951 to 1991. Enumeration areas are the smallest spatial units for which data are available in the census; some of the economic and cultural data that the CEA's contain were based on 20–33 per cent samples, while household and family variables were usually based on 100 per cent data.²⁷ They are imprecise, but do allow for historical comparisons over regular time intervals on a wide range of social, economic, and cultural variables. The 1951 CEA data used for the Regent Park area include data on the tenants in Regent Park North (constructed from 1947 to 1957) as well as other residents living in adjacent private rental housing and owner-occupied units. Some of the latter tenants moved into Regent Park North as it expanded in the 1950s and into Regent Park South during its construction from 1954 to 1959. The Regent Park CEA for 1951 thus allows a broad look at the wider populace from which a sizable proportion of tenants from both sections of the project originated. In 1961, the Regent Park CEA data includes both sections of the project and a small area of private market housing: households in the total project comprised 84 per cent of all households in the Regent Park CEA for this year.²⁸ In 1971, Statistics Canada split the 1951 and 1961 areas into two separate CEA's. One CEA comprises a close match with Regent Park North: 80 per cent of the 1,615 households in the CEA lived in the project. In the Regent Park South CEA, the match is less exact: 72 per cent of the households lived in Regent Park South while 28 per cent lived in adjacent private market housing. There is no absolute test of statistical reliability, yet, as Murdie shows, an approximate comparison between the CEA data and public housing data for the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority as a whole, demonstrates that the census data can be taken as reasonably representative of the public housing population, especially for larger projects such as Regent Park.²⁹ The data presented here offer us sound indications, if not exact measures, of the socio-economic profile of Regent Park residents.

To underscore the differences between those dwelling in Regent Park and other inhabitants of Metropolitan Toronto, census data for the Central Metropolitan Area (CMA) of Toronto, which includes the whole built-up region of the City of Toronto and its suburbs, provides a consistent comparison. Where possible, Murdie's data was also used to formulate comparisons between tenants in Regent Park and in Metropolitan Toronto Public Housing as a whole, and other low-income people living in private market housing represented by the Lower-Status Enumeration Area Subset data.³⁰ The general characteristics of the various spatial units used in the statistical figures, tables, and analysis are included in Appendix 1.

Regent Park and Postwar Social Reconstruction

Public housing in Canada was originally cast within the broader interventionist impulse of governments at all levels during post-World War II social and economic reconstruction. Housing shortages were grave in most cities during the war and for several years afterwards. Veterans' groups, unions, and other social groups pressured the state to provide low-income dwellings for their constituents.³¹ In addition to concern about increased class conflict, there was a wider opinion in policy circles in Canada, as in other Western countries, that the postwar economy would fall back into depression as it had in the 1930s.³² While the vast majority of Canadian government assistance in the housing field after the war was directed to homeowners, financial institutions, and developers, there was a constrained political space in the late 1940s through the 1960s in which limited state investment in low-income housing was considered a viable option.

Photo 1. Two children crossing the street at the Dundas-River Street intersection. Note the apartment towers of Regent Park South and the old "slum" house in the background. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1603B.

Photo 2. First tenants of the brick rowhouses in Regent Park North, April 1949. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 2028, Item 132.

Regent Park was the ground-breaking project in Canadian slum clearance and urban renewal efforts. It was built in a long-standing Anglo-Celtic working-class neighbourhood in downtown Toronto known as Cabbagetown, which had for some time been singled out as a dangerous "slum" by those who Seán Damer aptly calls "slumologists."³³ Regent Park North — composed largely of three-story walk-up apartments, six-story elevator buildings, and some row houses — began accepting low-income families and some senior citizens in 1949 and was completed by 1957.³⁴ Five fourteen-storey apartment buildings and some family townhouses comprise Regent Park South, completed in 1959 to exclusively house families. By 1960, the two sections of the development contained approximately 10,000 people.

Tenant Selection Policy

Since both sections of Regent Park were the result of slum clearance and redevelopment schemes, those on the top of the priority list for rehousing in the 1940s and 1950s were families of low and moderate income who were living in the "slum" areas at the time of clearance. The Housing Authority of Toronto estimated in 1948 that 80 per cent of residents in the area cleared for the northern section would apply for rehousing in the new projecty. By the time the project was fully constructed, however, more than half of the apartments and houses were occupied by families who had not lived in the area before.³⁵ Only 23 per cent of the original 638 families in the southern section of the redevelopment area relocated in the project by completion date.³⁶

Families in need of affordable housing who did not live in the area cleared for redevelopment faced a longer residency requirement in the City of Toronto, a maximum-minimum income cut-off rate, and a point system that was developed to rate eligibility on a number of social and economic factors. For both sections of the housing development, eligible applicants from outside the redevelopment area had to be residents of Metropolitan Toronto for at least one year previous to application. All families, including those who had previously lived in the area, also had to fall below a gross income of $4,200-a-year in 1952 to live in Regent Park North, a figure significantly higher than average earnings in the metropolitan area as a whole,³⁷ theoretically allowing all but the most highly-paid workers access to the project. These figures were periodically readjusted to take into account changing incomes, inflation, and policy objectives. For example, in 1964 the income ceiling was raised to $4,900, the upper level of the lowest one-third income group in central Toronto, demonstrating a clear shift toward targeting low-income families.³⁸ The income thresholds were more restrictive in Regent Park South due to the stricter Federal-Provincial requirements under which the project was built and managed: $4,500 was the maximum annual gross family income figure in 1961, approximately 75 per cent of the average annual family income in Metropolitan Toronto as a whole in that year, suggesting that it was aimed more directly at low-income earners from the outset.³⁹ From its inception, the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority also explicitly attempted to limit the number of families receiving public assistance to 20 per cent expressing "the desirability of developing a balanced community."⁴⁰ There was no formal policy in the Housing Authority of Toronto to curb families relying on social assistance, but officials told the Globe and Mail in 1965 that they attempted to keep them at 10 to 15 per cent.⁴¹

When a family applied for either section of Regent Park who resided within Metropolitan Toronto and did not earn more than the maximum income figures, they received a personal home visit by a staff member of the respective housing authority who inspected their present accommodation and assigned a point rating. The point systems designed for both sections in the 1950s and 1960s were similar with some minor exceptions. Inadequate accommodation (overcrowding, substandard dwellings) accounted for approximately 30 points and scores from 10–15 points were awarded for a total of 100 in the following categories: a disproportionate amount of income spent on rent, number of dependents, unfair eviction, health factors, family separation due to housing, and veteran status.⁴² Applicants to Regent Park North were also subject to a five-point category entitled "Suitability as a Tenant" and a section for personal comments by the home investigator.⁴³ Despite claims to the contrary by housing officials, the archival records reveal clear personal, political, and moral considerations on the part of housing managers with regard to tenant selection.⁴⁴ Finally, extraordinary applicants were submitted to a tenant selection committee presided over by Board members of the respective housing authorities.

This eligibility scheme prevailed from the 1940s until the 1970s when low incomes were accorded more weight. The rent to income ratio now valued 20 points in total, the full amount awarded for those paying more than 50 per cent of their income in rent. The category "Abnormal financial commitments" was added and scored out of fifteen with a graduated scale of points established for years of residence in Metropolitan Toronto and time spent on the waiting list.⁴⁵ By 1987, income accounted for one-half the total points awarded and a number of previously excluded groups were granted access to public housing including people who had a physical or developmental disability, refugees, parents under eighteen, and victims of family violence.⁴⁶ In 1988, the Ontario Housing Corporation shifted its income determination procedure from gross to net income, allowing applicants to claim employment-related expenses such as day care and transportation, thereby providing a greater incentive to the working poor to move into public housing.⁴⁷

The Rent-Geared-to-Income System

The rental scale for Regent Park North was designed by "public housers" Humphrey Carver and Alison Hopwood in 1947 as part of the Toronto Metropolitan Housing Research Project undertaken at the School of Social Work of the University of Toronto.⁴⁸ They studied rental policies in British, Australian, and American public housing and the family incomes of area residents in 1947 before clearance, and worked up a rental scale that was specific to the project's needs. The scale was based principally on the ability of families to pay rent, with variations for different family size and income. From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, rents were supposed to be approximately 20 per cent of total monthly family income; by the early 1970s, they reached a maximum figure of 30 per cent for employed families and up to 50 percent of income for social assistance recipients.⁴⁹ For families receiving social assistance, rents were calculated on a more fixed scale according to the shelter allowance portion of social assistance payments and not on a percentage of income.⁵⁰ In the Carver-Hopwood scheme, total family income was originally based on the full gross wages of the chief breadwinner in addition to a small, fixed charge for each other family member who worked. Special reductions were included for dependents but not employed family members or those receiving pensions. In addition, there were monthly utility service charges and a security deposit required when the lease was signed, which amounted to one-half of one month's rent. The rental scale applied to Regent Park South, designed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, was based on the general principles of the Carver-Hopwood scheme, but was slightly more onerous, reflecting the more penurious attitudes of the federal government regarding the proportion of income to be used to formulate rent.⁵¹ In any case, this system was adopted by housing authorities across the country and remains to this day with modifications in the rates of reductions and allowances due to inflation and provincial peculiarities.⁵² Homer Borland, a top Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation manager, described this rental scheme as "to each according to his need, and from each according to his ability," with no intended humour or apparent knowledge of the source of the quotation.⁵³

Summary of the Research Findings: Children and Families in Regent Park

I am trapped
in a clean bright place
warm
but I can't get out

And all the doors
are prison grey
what was my crime

Only
too much love
on too few dollars
too fruitful, my love

Be warned, my children
Be warned, and
Be sterile

Dorothy O'Connell, "A Modern Sonnet for Public Housing Tenants," 1974⁵⁴

Regent Park North and Regent Park South were intended primarily for families with children even though a small part of the northern section was reserved for elderly couples and singles. Early supporters of public housing repeatedly stressed the benefits of public housing for children.⁵⁵ By the late 1960s, the "delinquent" habits of children in public housing projects themselves became a key object of concern.⁵⁶ Larry Quinto, who grew up in the southern section in the 1960s and 1970s, remembers being "overwhelmed by the presence of so many kids ... seemed like every family had more than three children ... children were everywhere!"⁵⁷

The moral and social health of children figured prominently in the point-rating system. The category with the single highest number of points in the early years was "Family Separated Due to Housing." Families with children of different sexes who slept in the same room were awarded additional points.⁵⁸ The first units in the northern section of the project were occupied by large families — a highly-publicized, symbolic gesture to demonstrate the City's commitment to the younger generation.⁵⁹ Low-income families with children, of course, had higher shelter and general living costs and, in a consistently tight housing market, were also more likely to suffer from overcrowding and dilapidated housing, contributing to the housing hardship deemed sufficient to secure a vacancy in public housing.⁶⁰ It comes as little surprise then that both sections of Regent Park throughout the period had consistently higher numbers of school-age children and children-per-family than the general population, as Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate for 1951–1991.

Compiled from CMA 1951–91 and RPN-RPS 1971–91: DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Population Characteristics by Census Tracts, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1991; 1953 RPN: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 41, File: Tenancy Information, Breakdown of Families, 1 January 1953; 1961 RPS: MTHA, Annual Report 1960–1961 (Toronto 1961); and 1966 RPN figures used the age groups, 0–4, 5–12, 13–16: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 32, File: Housing Authority-Statistics, 1965–1968, HAT, Regent Park (North) Statistics 1966. All adaptations and necessary calculations by the author for all the following figures and tables.

Compiled from 1951–1991 CMA, RP CEA, RPS, RPN: DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Dwelling, Household and Family Characteristics; and 1961 RPS: MTHA, Annual Report 1960–1961.

It is obvious, yet important to emphasize, that given the social stigmatization of young people in public housing projects, family housing projects, by their very definition, would not include people in the full range of life-cycle stages that a private market housing neighbourhood would potentially include. The larger proportion of children emerged as a key issue during the late 1960s and 1970s due to the woefully inadequate level of recreation facilities for young people and the political struggles that it sparked for tenants.⁶¹

One of the most noticeable elements in the defamation of public housing projects has been the spotlight on the high incidence of sole-support parent families. The vast majority of these families were headed by women who were widowed, divorced, separated, or abandoned by their male partners, and were probably at the very lowest rung of the societal ladder in terms of material deprivation and attendant social stigma.⁶² Given the lack of affordable childcare, the difficulties of making ends meet on one income, and the generally larger expenses of families with children, single mothers — a growing phenomenon due to shifts in the socio-economic status of women and less restrictive separation and divorce laws in the postwar period — tended to qualify first for public housing. As Figure 3 demonstrates, in the mid-1960s the percentage of single parents climbed spectacularly in both sections of Regent Park, reaching a peak of more than 50 per cent of all families in 1981. Four to five times higher than the Metropolitan Toronto population and the Lower-Status Enumeration Area Subset data, the rates of single parents were also consistently higher than public housing as a whole in Metropolitan Toronto, which rose from 25.2 per cent in 1971 to 41.5 per cent in 1986.⁶³ Interestingly, there was a slight drop in these numbers for Regent Park in 1991, perhaps due to the incentives provided by the Ontario Housing Corporation for two-parent, working couples in 1988.

Compiled from 1957 RPN: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 41, File: Population/Density, HAT, Statistics Re: Regent Park (North) Housing Project as of 1 May 1 1957; 1959 and 1961 RPS: MTHA, Annual Report 1959 and Annual Report 1960–61 (Toronto 1961), unpaginated; 1966–1968 RPN: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 32, File: Housing Authority-Statistics, 1965–1968, HAT, Regent Park (North) Statistics 1966, 1967, 1968; 1969 RPN and RPS: Provincial Archives of Ontario (PAO), OHC Papers, RG 44-19-1, Box 10, File: B1-20-1, Ontario Housing Corporation Statistics found in Regent Park Community Improvement Association Grant Application, 20 August 1969; and 1971, 1976 CMA and 1976, 1981, 1991, CMA, RPN, and RPS figures in Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto 1976, 1981, 1991.

Formal Schooling

Formal educational achievement is one of the key indicators of life chances in modern capitalist society. Notwithstanding the crucial and neglected sphere of "informal learning" among the working class and poor, it is a truism that there is a strong correlation between the level of formal education, economic attainment, and social mobility.⁶⁴Figures 4 through 7 present data on levels of formal schooling among Regent Park residents and the Metropolitan Toronto population. The schooling of tenants improved overall from the 1950s to the 1990s but was significantly lower than the general population in Metropolitan Toronto. Persons with little or no schooling were over-represented in the project throughout the postwar period. High school graduation rates improved slightly in Regent Park North from 1981 to 1991, but were only approximately one-half of the Metropolitan Toronto level in 1991. Regent Park South residents only reached two-thirds of the Metropolitan Toronto level in the same year. Regent Park tenants attained proportionately better levels of post-secondary education even though in all types — college, university, and technical training — they still achieved considerably less significant rates than the general population throughout the 40-year period.⁶⁵ Formal recognition of the socio-economic and educational difficulties of the neighbourhood prompted the Toronto Board of Education to designate the two elementary schools serving the Regent Park population, Duke of York Public School and Park Public School (recently renamed Nelson Mandela Park Public School), as the first of Toronto's "inner city" schools in the 1960s.⁶⁶ This special status justified the allocation of extra resources and special programmes.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951–91.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, and 1976.

Compiled from Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1981 and 1991.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1976, 1981, and 1991. 1951 figures based on the census variable "13 years and over" education; 1961 figures based on "university"; 1971 figures include "some university" and "university degree"; 1976 figures based on "Post-secondary non-university," "Some university," "With" and "Without post-secondary non-university," and "University Degree"; and 1981 figures include "Trades certificate or diploma," "Other non-university education with" and "without certificate," and "University without degree" and University with degree."

Work, Incomes, and Unemployment

The jobs that Regent Park residents held tended to be in the lower-paying and less stable service and manufacturing industries. Tables 1 and 2 present occupational indexes for men and women, showing the proportional differences between the types of jobs that people had in the project and the Central Metropolitan Area during the postwar period. In the occupational categories "Managerial," "Professional," and "Clerical/Sales," which tend to offer higher wages, salaries, and benefits, the percentage of persons in the Central Metropolitan Area was divided with the percentage of the three separate Regent Park areas in the same job categories to create a simple index. The more an index value exceeds 1.0, the greater the number of Central Metropolitan Area people who worked in these jobs compared to Regent Park area residents.⁶⁷ Conversely, in the categories Manufacturing and Services, the index figure shows the greater number of Regent Park tenants who worked in these categories in comparison with the Metropolitan Toronto population as a whole. While there are some slight anomalies for the Regent Park South data in the later years, probably due to the gentrification of a part of the same census tract, the indexes generally exhibit evidence of substantially lower numbers of better-paying jobs among Regent Park residents as a whole.

Table 1 and 2

Compiled from DBS and Stascan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991.

The census data does not allow an accurate comparison of the particular types of jobs within these categories, which could indicate higher-paying, stable, unionized manufacturing jobs, for example. They do, however, indicate a much greater number of people working in service occupations that are demonstrably more insecure and poorly paid.⁶⁸ It is easy to understand Regent Park resident, Ozzie Smith, who summed up the job opportunities for residents in 1975: "If they want a laborer they know where to get a laborer. They just come down here and pick him up."⁶⁹ The employment and family income statistics in Figures 8, 9, and 10 also illustrate clearly that working people in Regent Park fared noticeably poorer in relation to the Metropolitan Toronto population as the second half of the century progressed. In 1951, median family income and average/median employment income for women and men reveal a small variation between the comparison areas. In 1961, however, and especially from 1970 to 1990, the gap widened radically between public housing residents and the general population in Metropolitan Toronto: family income figures in Regent Park South were less than half that of Metropolitan Toronto from 1970 to 1990 while wage earners in Regent Park North earned less than one-third of Metropolitan Toronto wage earners in 1980–90. Even compared to other low-income earners in private-market housing, Regent Park residents took home significantly less pay.⁷⁰

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. 1951 RPN is actually 1952 average family income figures for the first 333 units of the project: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 41, File: Tenancy Information, Summary of Income and Family Size, 1 May 1952; and 1961 RPS: MTHA, Annual Report 1960–61, unpaginated, 1961 figures for CMA and representative are average family income not median family income.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. 1961 and 1990 figures are average earnings.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. 1961 and 1990 figures are average earnings.

Lower levels of formal education, the more casual and unstable nature of service and unskilled manufacturing employment, as well as the more general economic climate, set the backdrop for high levels of unemployment among residents. In the full-employment context of the 1950s and early 1960s, Figures 11, 12, and 13 reveal relatively low levels of men and women out of work in Regent Park. These figures also reflected public housing selection policies that favoured employed tenants. In the more precarious economic climate of the 1970s to the 1990s, however, unemployment levels jumped to substantial absolute levels in both sections of the housing development. While marginally better than other public housing residents in Metropolitan Toronto, unemployment was higher among Regent Park residents than other low-income earners in the Metropolitan Toronto area as shown by the Lower Status Enumeration Subset data for 1971 and 1986. As in other spheres of economic activity, the situation worsened considerably in the 1980s. Among young people in Regent Park, moreover, unemployment was found in an even more extreme form.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. 1971 and 1986 figures for MTHA and LSEA from Murdie, "Social Polarization," Tables 9.4 and 9.5, 316 and 318.

Compiled from Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1981, and 1991.

Despite extra charges applied to secondary wage earners and the dominant ideology of the role of the male as the chief family breadwinner, it was not uncommon for various members of the household to contribute to the material welfare of the family in Regent Park.⁷¹ In partially completed Regent Park North in 1952 (333 units), 64 per cent of families had secondary wage earners, which included working wives, teenage children, and other members of the household such as in-laws.⁷² A survey by the author of 40 case files of prospective tenant families whose housing was being demolished to build the northern section revealed 32 secondary wage earners.⁷³ These approximate percentages were maintained until the late 1960s.⁷⁴ As Figure 14 demonstrates, a small proportion of married women were members of the formal labour force in the 1950s and 1960s, which soared significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, as in the rest of Metropolitan Toronto. Even within the limits of rent policy, the family economy in the Regent Park area was often comprised of more than the chief male breadwinner. It is important to emphasize, however, that even those women or single mothers who did have work, generally earned considerably lower wages than men and had fewer opportunities for advancement in education and job training.

Compiled from 1958 RPN: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 26, File: Rentals, 1947–61, Questionnaire of the Committee to Study the Federal-Provincial Rental Scale, 1 October 1958; and 1968 RPN: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 32, File: Housing authority Sttatistics, 1965–68, HAT, Regent Park (North) Statistics 1968. All other figures from Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1976 and 1981.

The statistics do not include those tenants who did not officially report their income. We know from evidence of those who were discovered and punished that some families managed to gain extra income "under the table" by learning and using the system. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, some wives worked in retail establishments for short stints during the holiday season; others supplemented or earned incomes through prostitution and the illegal sale of alcohol, drugs, and stolen consumer goods — practices revived by some in the 1980s and 1990s.⁷⁵

We also know from oral testimony that it was common for teenagers in Regent Park, whose parents were unable to afford allowances of spending money, to engage in informal and casual work such as babysitting for relatives and family friends, part-time retail jobs in stores, shining shoes, and selling newspapers on the street.⁷⁶ This was income that was donated to the family or kept, without the knowledge of the authorities.⁷⁷ It is likely that some of these practices were curtailed after the tragic 1977 murder of Emanuel Jacques, a twelve-year-old boy from Regent Park, who shined shoes with his older brother on the nearby Yonge Street "strip" of sex clubs and bars. The two often made $10 a day after school and deposited it directly in their mother's bank account.⁷⁸ Some young people were particularly inventive in raising extra income. Larry Quinto remembers:

Spearing suckers and carp, then selling them to the Italians who were working on the grades. I remember climbing underneath the many bridges and collecting the pigeon chicks out of their nests to sell to the Chinese downtown ... earning extra money was a must, because of our financial situation ... I used to shine shoes on week-ends, outside of the Brown Derby on Yonge and Dundas St. I had to give a cut to the bouncer after each night.⁷⁹

Such practices were supplemented by domestic economic strategies such as using older siblings to babysit younger children, wearing "hand-me-down" clothes, making home-made foods such as pickles and jams, purchasing items from thrift shops, and even growing vegetables in a common allotment on the project grounds.⁸⁰ Chris Reading, who lived in Regent Park in the 1960s and 1970s, remembers that in addition to shopping at the local supermarket, he would go to a damaged goods store to buy inexpensive canned goods and purchase day-old bread at the bakery for a nominal price. He also found a way to shop in several different places using only one streetcar ticket.⁸¹ Residents took advantage of any opportunity to receive free food. In early 1975, a Toronto food distribution company donated five tons of frozen fish that it was unable to sell to project residents. Five hundred Regent Park tenants lined up in freezing January weather to collect the free food.⁸² When tenants suffered tragic deaths in the family, fires, or other calamities, moreover, residents relied on informal networks of neighbours to donate food, clothes, and furniture.⁸³ In the bleak economic situation of the 1990s, tenants also engaged in permanent "yard" sales on the fringes of the projects, adjacent to busy intersections.⁸⁴ In addition, there were a plethora of charitable organizations and churches, and in the 1980s and 1990s, food banks and soup kitchens, which provided various forms of direct and indirect aid.⁸⁵ Duke of York Public School and Nelson Mandela Park Public School are among the minority of schools in Toronto that have had state and community-supported breakfast and lunch programs since the early 1970s. In 1972, volunteers from the Regent Park Services Unit (organized by tenants themselves), began to provide hot lunches for students for a fee of one dollar per week.⁸⁶ Duke of York has also relied on a privately-supported winter milk and soup program.⁸⁷ At least among some tenants, therefore, family economies comprised a diverse combination of formal and informal economic activities complemented by state assistance, support from social agencies, and forms of mutual aid.⁸⁸

Figures 15 and 16, which chart the major source of family income in both sections of the project, point to the same pattern of social schism as in other economic variables. In the late 1960s there was a significant increase in families relying on the state for the major portion of their income — a trend that would increase until the 1990s, as Murdie reveals.⁸⁹ Some recipients of various forms of state assistance such as Mother's Allowances and pensions were eligible to work within strictly-defined limits, resulting in a small portion of families who combined employment and state income. Due to the way the data were collected by the housing authorities, Figure 16 combines employment income with state assistance. Families on full welfare in Regent Park North never exceeded 16 per cent in the period before 1968.⁹⁰ It may suggest, as Margaret Little and Ian Morrison argue, that "movement back and forth between welfare and work is common for sole support mothers," the majority of whom receive social assistance.⁹¹ Nevertheless, the most startling fact is that in Regent Park South, and to a lesser extent in the northern section, there were a soaring number of families whose main source of income was a government transfer of one sort or another.

Compiled from CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, File: Rentals, 1947–61, Statistics Re: Regent Park North Housing Project As of May 1, 1957; 1966–68: CTA, HAT, RG 28, B, Box 32, File: Housing Authority-Statistics, 1965–1968, Housing authority of Toronto, Regent Park (North) Statistics 1966, 1967, and 1968.

Compiled from 1961: MTHA, Annual Report 1960–1961; 1963: CTA, Harold Clark Papers (HCP), SC 61, Box 1, File: Minutes of the MTHA, 1963, MTHA, Welfare and Unemployment Statistics, 1963; 1964: CTA, HCP, Box 2, file: MTHA - Correspondence and Minutes, 1962–64, Welfare and Unemployment Statistics, 1964; 1969: 1969 RPS PAO, OHC, RG 44-19-1, Box 10, File: B1-20-1, Ontario Housing Corporation Statistics found in Regent Park Community Improvement Association Grant Application, 20 August 1969; 1974 figures cited in Donald Drackley, "Public Housing and Related Juvenile Delinquency in the Province of Ontario," BA thesis, Urban Planning, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, 1975.

Ethnic Composition of Regent Park Families

Accompanying the changes in economic and educational status, the ethnic composition of families in Regent Park shifted in the 1970s and 1980s due to the changing origins of immigrants, their socio-economic status, and the importance of the area as a prime "reception area" of recent immigrants to Toronto. Figures 17, 18, 19, and Table 3 demonstrate a clear trend toward disproportionately higher numbers of persons born outside of Canada, families of Asian and African origin, and a decrease in families of "British origin" from the 1960s to the 1990s. The diverse nature of the project population has certainly become a central feature of public discourse. As Don Gillmor writes, the project represents "poverty, crime and a radical experiment in multiculturalism — roughly 10,000 people sharing thirty-five home languages, a Babel defined by ten square blocks."⁹² Bitter relations between police and youth, especially young Black men, and the special educational, employment, and cultural needs of immigrants have been two of the most pressing issues in the Regent Park community in the last two decades.

Table 3

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991.

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. In 1951 and 1961, the census category used was "Asiatic"; in 1971 "Asian"; in 1991, the figure Asian included Chinese, East Indian, and Vietnamese. The latter figures were adapted from Mark Edward Pfeifer, "Community, Adaptation and the Vietnamese in Toronto," PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999, Table 6.2. Available online from the Joint Centre of Excellence on Immigration and Settlement, < http://ceris.metropoli.net/Virtual%20Library/community/pfeifer2/pfeifer2frontchap6a.html >

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991.

Length of Occupancy and Reasons For Leaving Regent Park

The one countervailing element in the statistics is that families in Regent Park did not stay in the project for inordinate amounts of time until the 1980s — a finding that contrasts with the "longitudinal entrapment" suggested by "underclass" theorists.⁹³Figure 20 reveals that the extent of non-movers (those who had not moved in 5 or 6 years) in both sections of Regent Park was roughly similar to the Central Metropolitan Area (from 28 to 44 per cent from 1961–81) until the 1991 census. Other numbers, not included in Figure 20, confirm this: in the 1981 census, median length of occupancy was three and four years in Regent Park South and Regent Park North respectively, which compared favourably to the four year figure in Metropolitan Toronto and the standard assumption that the average tenant moves every three years.⁹⁴ In 1971, non-moving rates were slightly higher than the Lower-Status Enumeration Area Subset figures, approximately 40 per cent in both projects compared to 34 per cent among low-income earners in the private market.⁹⁵

Compiled from DBS and Statscan, Census of Canada, Census Tracts - Toronto, 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991. The figures represent the percentage of people who lived in the same dwelling for six years or more at the time of the 1961 and 1971 censuses and five years or more at the time of the 1981 and 1991 censuses.

Where did people go after leaving the project? Unfortunately, we only have limited and selective data from the early to mid-1960s on this question. In Regent Park South, a thorough study of "voluntary move-outs" in 1960–61 revealed that those most likely to move were higher-than-average income earners with smaller-than-average families, a beneficial combination that increased the chances of finding suitable accommodation in the private market. Almost 33 per cent were able to purchase homes while the remainder re-rented — both groups in "improved" neighbourhoods in terms of physical quality. Forty-five per cent of those who left the housing development moved back to the same area from which they originally applied for public housing. According to the study, families left for a variety of reasons, but it seems that desire to live in a house (whether owned or rented), frustration with the rental scale, and, to a lesser extent dissatisfaction with the "social environment," especially in regards to raising children, were the chief reasons. Nevertheless, three out of four families who left the project would have recommended public housing to those facing housing difficulties.⁹⁶

Albert Rose reported that in the first 8 years of Regent Park North, 100 families left to buy homes.⁹⁷ In the first quarter of 1961, a survey of 54 families who left this section of the project revealed 10 families who bought houses⁹⁸; in 1965 of 142 families surveyed, almost 40 per cent became owner-occupiers; and, only 9 per cent of 188 tenant families who left in 1967 bought their own homes, 75 per cent re-rented in the private market, and 15 per cent transferred to other public housing projects.⁹⁹ It is therefore likely that a small percentage of those who are regarded as "movers" in the census data from 1961 to 1991 moved to other public housing projects.

Explaining Social Polarization in Public Housing

To understand why there was such a remarkable swelling of socio-economic polarity between families in Regent Park and other people in Metropolitan Toronto we need to look at both larger social and economic trends, specific supply and demand factors within private and public housing markets, particularly the role of the state in determining the structures of public housing provision, and the social relations of public housing. It is first crucial to situate social marginalization among public housing tenants within the general economic and political context of state housing in the postwar period. The main decision makers at the federal and provincial levels of government judged public housing to be a temporary political concession within the postwar urban restructuring juggernaut that aimed to revitalize the central-city tax base and support a concomitant service-based economy.¹⁰⁰ The vast majority of state assistance in the housing realm was thus directed to home buying assistance programs, a policy in tune with the widespread ideology of the "ideal" dwelling, not to mention the profits it brought to private builders and developers. As Susan Fish and Michael Dennis famously revealed in 1972, the federal government purposely intended to construct low-quality, unattractive public housing that would not compete with private market units.¹⁰¹ Richard Harris aptly concludes that working-class tenants in Canada have effectively subsidized the rich as a result of the greatly disproportionate monies spent on various home ownership plans by the state since the 1940s.¹⁰²

By the early 1970s, moreover, public housing became an albatross around the pro-private housing market neck of the state. Both the federal and provincial governments were faced with general economic instability, prompting them to start belt tightening with regard to housing policy in general as well as physical and social investments in the existing projects.¹⁰³ After a brief stint of pumping limited monies into recreation facilities and slightly upgrading the physical infrastructure of older projects such as Regent Park North in the early 1970s, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation began to scale back interventions in public housing. The Ontario Housing Corporation, which relied on transfers from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, shifted its discourse of "fairness" in rents for public housing tenants to an economic defence based on amortization, operating costs, municipal taxes, and maintenance charges.¹⁰⁴ Always penurious, half-hearted supporters of public housing, the state housing officialdom was reluctant to concede meaningful improvements in the wealth redistribution of public housing tenants, persistently demanded by social housing activists and public housing residents themselves, since they were effectively beginning to financially, ideologically, and politically question their already limited welfare state commitments. Effective withdrawal from assisted housing mirrored developments in other forms of social assistance and reflected a more general shift in the balance of power "between those claiming a wider distribution of the benefits of economic prosperity and those in dominant positions with the state and the economy resisting such claims."¹⁰⁵ The few amenities and services that Regent Park tenants do enjoy such as the Community Health Centre and recreation facilities and the limited victories in improving the rent scale, maintenance upgrades, and tenant management initiatives were won only through hard-fought struggles by the tenants themselves.¹⁰⁶

As a result of the market-oriented approach of postwar housing policy, there were only 33,000 rent-geared-to-income units in Metropolitan Toronto's public housing system by the end of the century, representing a minuscule 5 per cent of total dwellings in the region. Demand for assisted housing always outstripped the limited supply: from the 1950s to the 1990s, applications for a vacancy in Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority family housing rarely dropped below 10,000 and by January 2003 had reached over 67,000.¹⁰⁷ There was an uninterrupted crisis in affordable housing for low-income families in the period after World War II that was not matched by public housing construction nor private-market dwelling opportunities. The twenty-year period after the war witnessed absolute shortages of rental units, poor quality housing, and outright lack of affordable dwelling space for low-income families caused by the anarchic nature of the private housing market as well as a poorly conceived state urban renewal and rehousing programme that actually exacerbated housing shortages.¹⁰⁸ By the 1960s, working families with rising incomes were able to leave Regent Park and find suitable accommodation in the private market. Indeed, as their incomes increased, rents became progressively higher, providing an incentive to move. The desperate affordability problem, however, endured for low-income families. While there were fluctuations throughout this period, rental unit vacancy rates were constantly low, rents and house prices were high, and by the 1990s, there was an almost complete lack of rental unit construction.¹⁰⁹ From 1964 to 1974, the number of applications for family housing in Metropolitan Toronto saw a precipitous increase of prospective families relying on welfare (30.4 to 48.1 per cent) and a concomitant decrease of working families.¹¹⁰ The constant need for affordable housing, the slum clearance policies that limited cheap dwelling options for low-income families in the downtown area, and the prior decisions by governments not to build adequate numbers of public housing units goes a long way in explaining why only the poorest of the poor were accommodated in public housing by the late 1960s.¹¹¹

Chart adapted from the following figures: 1956, RG 28, Series B, Box 1, File "A, B 1948–1959," Frank Dearlove to Gordon Ames, 10 February 1956; 1959: MTHA, Regent Park South Annual Report (Toronto: MTHA, 1960), unpaginated; 1967 and 1969: MTHA, "Report on Survey of Family Housing Applications on File, (Toronto: MTHA, June 1969), p. 1; 1972 and 1974: MTA, RG 5.1, Box 6, File 2.02, Vol. 9, summary of Family Applications Dec. 72–Jun. 74; 1976: MTA, RG 5.1, Vol. 16, Box 4, File 2, Establishing a Central Registry for MTO, 1976; 1988: John Sewell, "Trapped by Inaction," Now Magazine, number 299 (29 Sept–5 Oct. 1988): 11; and Housing Connections Central Registry Report cited in Jack Lakey, "22-year wait for some low-cost housing," Toronto Star, 13 July 1998, p. B5.

The particular politics, ideologies, and practices of public housing providers themselves also explain why projects became "last resorts" for those in housing hardship. Policy makers were relentlessly apprehensive that public housing tenants would become reliant on the largesse of the state and thus restricted opportunities for tenants to advance while living in public housing. The graduated rental scale in public housing, based on a portion of the salaries of working wives and children as well as the chief breadwinners, including bonuses and overtime, proved a strong disincentive for chief breadwinners to gain extra income or for other family members to find employment. "Initiative," the tenants' political association, the Regent Park Community Improvement Association, argued in 1969, "is killed to earn extra money or improve standard of living."¹¹² Interestingly, after a tenant fight-back campaign to improve the rental scale, Ontario Housing Corporation conceded some improvements to working families but not those on fixed incomes who were still saddled with temporary 30-day leases and a high proportion of their social assistance income going towards shelter costs, thereby impoverishing them further.¹¹³

On the housing demand side, the labour market geography of Toronto also played a role in restricting decent job opportunities for public housing residents in the downtown area. The census data on occupations and work presented earlier is consistent with Kevin Brushett's findings that the central-city area from which many tenants of Regent Park were drawn contained long-standing unskilled and casual labour markets that "drew workers and their families to inner-city neighbourhoods for reasons of both convenience and necessity" such as transportation costs and public transit routes.¹¹⁴ Project-level data for 1949,¹¹⁵ 1953,¹¹⁶ and 1961¹¹⁷ show that numerous Regent Park North residents worked at large industrial establishments, which would be gradually caught up in suburban industrial decentralization and high contraction and plant closure rates from the 1950s to 1980s. As Pierre Filion and Dennis Mock explain, the locational shift and contraction or loss of large, unionized, and relatively well-paid manufacturing industry employment in postwar Toronto limited the possibilities of finding well-paid work close to the downtown Toronto location of Regent Park, especially with the majority of families in the project unable to afford a car.¹¹⁸ The overall high-unemployment context of the late 1970s to the 1990s proved to be another hurdle in the already gruelling employment predicament for those at the bottom of the social ladder.

If the affordability crisis and contraction of decent jobs distressed the working poor during this period, it hit sole-support parents and families on social assistance the hardest.¹¹⁹ Largely the result of continued postwar economic growth and mounting demands from social activists, the Canada Assistance Plan, introduced in 1965, saw the expansion of notions of "deserving" and consequent increases in the number of programs and recipients.¹²⁰ Nevertheless, James Struthers has meticulously demonstrated that welfare benefits were always less than adequate in Toronto even in the 1960s and 1970s during the federal government's US-inspired "War on Poverty." Large numbers of welfare recipients, including those in Regent Park, were paying unusually high proportions of their monthly cheques for shelter since "the actual financial requirements of families, particularly for shelter, were bureaucratically manipulated to fit within preset provincial maximums."¹²¹ Single parents were particularly more likely to require public housing in a context of rising rents and shortage of affordable shelter options. Labour market discrimination against women meant low salaries and an absence of opportunities for job training or career advancement. Moreover, affordable day care was so scarce that many single women with small children had little option but complete dependence on social assistance with few prospects for employment.¹²² Margaret Little's study of single mothers on welfare confirms that this bleak situation prevailed into the 1990s and was aggravated by cutbacks to welfare such as the de-indexing of baby bonuses.¹²³ Put simply, those most needing public housing were mother-led families and those on social assistance, which explains the particular social composition and abysmally low incomes of tenants in the project.

The shift in ethnic composition in Regent Park can similarly be explained by shifting factors of housing demand since the 1960s. Some recent immigrant groups and refugees, such as Afro-Caribbeans, Chinese, and Vietnamese immigrants, generally had larger families and/or lower incomes and, moreover, often coped with racial discrimination in labour and housing markets.¹²⁴ Afro-Caribbean immigrants, for example, with a larger proportion of single-women headed families, suffered a double burden in the housing market: subject to the oppressive racial and gendered positions of landlords (public and private), they also faced "constrained choice" in housing due to their low incomes.¹²⁵ Furthermore, substantial numbers of refugees and immigrants from Vietnam, many of them ethnically Chinese who fled religious and ethnic persecution, faced severe housing difficulties when they arrived in Toronto. In addition to negligible incomes, they faced critical problems of adaptation to a new language and culture. As Mark Edward Pfeifer writes: "Regent Park was attractive as a reception neighbourhood because of the low rents of buildings in the vicinity, and its proximity to settlement agencies and other social services as well as two nearby Chinatowns accessible a short distance away either by walking or streetcar."¹²⁶

"All I know is that I live in Regent Park":Territorial Stigmatization and Tenant Reponses

An everytime yu slam de door
sey no job
discrimination injustice
a feel the whip lick An its
the same boat
the same boat
the same boat
Oh Lawd, Oh Lawd, Oh Lawd, eh ya.

Lillian Allen, "Rub a Dub Inna Regent Park."¹²⁷

Urban geographers and historians have established that "places" are sites of both material and social relations as well as culture, ideology, and "structures of feeling."¹²⁸ Slum representations singling out certain urban working-class and poor neighbourhoods as socially, culturally, and morally inferior have had a tenacious hold on the imaginations and practices of 20th-century urban reformers, the media, and state officials in the Western world.¹²⁹ By the late 1960s, Regent Park would be labelled a new "slum" similar in many respects to the Cabbagetown neighbourhood that was destroyed to build the project. Condemned as too large and badly designed by academics, as a haven of single mothers, welfare families, and deviants by governments and the media, a magnet for crime and drug problems by police and law and order advocates, and the site of potentially explosive "racial" problems by many popular commentators, Regent Park had come full circle in the public mind from the "ordered community" of the 1940s. The media generally framed its coverage of the project in such a way as to stress anything that ran counter to the accepted social, economic, and moral order.¹³⁰ Thus, in both "hard" news stories concerning politics and economic issues and "soft" news exploring "human interest" issues, Regent Park was "tagged" as a site of poverty, behavioural problems, and crime.¹³¹ The wider population, with little or no direct relationship with public housing or its tenants, was only presented with the "bad" and the sensational, which would shape opinions on the project and its tenants. As Jacqueline Leavitt and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris comment:

For most people, the public housing territory falls outside the cocoon of their immediate, familiar space and is foreign to their understanding. As places dominated by other subcultures the developments seem alien and remote to outsiders. In such instances, one uncritically adopts the media's representations and interpretations that rarely go beyond a surface look of the physical and social context. The social meanings often become dematerialized into insubstantial myths and impressions formed by a superficial 'outsiders' look. The effects on the insiders can be substantial.¹³²

Such popular renderings reinforced stigmatization by obscuring the complex realities of what Sudhir Venkatesh calls "project living," downplaying structural explanations for poverty and masking the agency of tenants.¹³³

Residents had a vivid consciousness of the damning stereotypical image of their homes and neighbourhood. Speaking to the Hellyer Task Force in 1969, one young woman regretted: "Just because you're from Regent Park, people think that you are a nobody."¹³⁴ A little girl told the Task Force, "all I know is that I live in Regent Park."¹³⁵ Larry Quinto believes that "we were considered second class by most, and shunned by many. We were labelled as 'no goods' and 'hoodlums'." "When will people realize," Nancy Green lamented in 1971, "that we are not second-class citizens, but human beings who are just trying to make it through life same as everyone else."¹³⁶ Even Nina Corfu, who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and lived in a middle-class family in a housing cooperative across the street from Regent Park North, pointedly remembers being characterized by the parents of school friends as "different" simply since she lived in the general area, pointing up the powerful ideological hold that the housing project had on external observers.¹³⁷ It was all but impossible for residents to avoid stigmatizing attitudes since they pervaded many aspects of daily life — dealings with relatives, friends, and acquaintances outside the project and relationships with social workers, police, teachers, and employers.

The overt economic hardships of the Regent Park population were severely aggravated by territorial stigmatization. By the late 1970s, the dismal reputation of the project and the low incomes of area residents led most of the local supermarkets, banks, and other affordable shops to close, including all but one convenience store within the development itself, adding additional economic burdens to the local population.¹³⁸ One 74-year-old pensioner thought it "criminal" that a growing portion of her fixed budget for food was going towards public transportation costs. Mary Hudson complained: "There used to be all kinds of good markets, also banks, in walking distance. Now I pay for TTC and carrying those bags on the street is not safe for me."¹³⁹ As the larger Cabbagetown area gentrified and became home to an affluent middle-class population, luxury shops crowded out the affordable stores that residents had long relied on.

Even more directly, as Harald Bauder has established in the American context, the pernicious effects of cultural and social stereotyping of poor and ethnic minority neighbourhoods strongly impaired employment success.¹⁴⁰ Loïc Wacquant notes in the case of similarly large and stigmatized French state housing complexes that residential discrimination "hampers the search for jobs and contributes to entrench local unemployment since inhabitants ... encounter additional distrust and reticence among employers as soon as they mention their place of residence."¹⁴¹ As early as 1968, residents related stories of the stigma of Regent Park affecting job chances and social status among friends and relatives.¹⁴² One Regent Park mother stated in 1982: "When you go out to look for a job, I hear a lot of kids say they don't want to put down that they live in Regent Park, not because of what it is, but because of what other people say about it. So many names have been put on the place. They can't be proud of it ... The way they cut it up, you're embarrassed, and there's no need to be embarrassed, but you are."¹⁴³ A 1978 survey of 86 unemployed youth in Regent Par