And from the Star:
Regent Park still a place to call home
Sense of community strong
Many families want to return
Aug. 14, 2006. 06:36 AM
DONOVAN VINCENT
CITY HALL BUREAU
For many, Regent Park conjures up images of drugs, gun violence and decaying buildings. So you'd think that anyone living there who had a chance to leave would do so in a heartbeat and never look back.
Not necessarily so.
Ayor Cep and her six children were among thousands of residents uprooted last year between May and December. But given the option of moving out of the troubled project, she decided to stay, moving her family into another unit there.
She's not alone.
During the first of six phases in a massive 12-year, $1 billion overhaul currently underway, six Regent Park buildings near Parliament St. and Dundas St. E. started coming down in February.
Before the demolition started, 370 affected households — 1,160 of Regent Park's 7,500-plus tenants — had four choices: They could move to another unit in Regent Park, a public housing unit very close by, a unit in a community far removed, or leave subsidized housing completely.
The majority — 62 per cent — chose to move to another unit in Regent Park, or a unit very close by, according to the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, which owns and manages the housing project.
Just more than 25 per cent moved to units around the city. A mere 8 per cent moved outside the downtown core to places like Etobicoke, while 4 per cent left rent-geared-to-income housing altogether.
Community and familiarity are powerful forces it seems — even in Regent Park, which has seen a number of slayings, drugs, and gang-related activity over several years.
Among the victims: Marco Anthony Ruscetta, a 19-year-old man from Mississauga who was shot there in 2003, and Sidney Hemmans, 18, who was gunned down in 2001.
Despite mixed feelings about the area, Cep, who came to Canada from southern Sudan with her children in 2001, moved her family out of their five-bedroom unit and into a similar one last June, near Dundas St. E. and Sackville St.
No stranger to the issues in Regent Park after living there for three years, Cep became alarmed this summer when a problem cropped up just outside her front door. "I don't like the children outside. Very noisy,'' she says in her broken English.
Her 17-year-old son Awer provides a more direct explanation.
"Young kids are selling drugs outside. They make a lot of noise,'' he says.
The family will soon be moving to yet another unit in Regent Park to get away from that problem.
Cep, 45, left a widow after her husband died in Kenya in 1998 of a heart ailment and typhoid, works in the kitchen of a downtown Salvation Army centre to support her family.
Her youngest daughter attends a nearby school and Cep doesn't want to uproot her, a key reason behind the decision to stay.
Cep isn't the only one in the family feeling ties to the area. Her son Awer, who attends Jarvis Collegiate, says despite its problems he likes the fact Regent Park is "right in the middle of downtown.''
"I'm just used to the environment,'' he says.
He also takes advantage of a program for young residents called Pathways, run by the Regent Park community health centre.
It offers tutoring, mentoring, bus tickets and partial payment of tuition fees for college and university studies and has helped reduce school dropout rates among residents.
Awer's younger brother Majok, 14, is also in Pathways, one of a number of key resources in the area.
All this while the nearly 60-year-old housing project undergoes a massive transformation.
New buildings proposed for Phase 1 include two residential towers, one of them for seniors, 87 townhouses, and four eight-storey buildings.
Construction is due to begin in the fall and completion is expected in two years. About 64 per cent of the new units in Phase 1 will be rent-geared-to-income, as opposed to the previous 100 per cent.
The revitalization is being undertaken largely to stem the crime and poverty problems there. When the makeover is finished, the over-all concentration of social housing on the entire 28-hectare site will have been slashed from 100 per cent to 30 per cent, says Derek Ballantyne, president and CEO of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC).
The site will feature a mixture of subsidized housing, market-rate rentals, condos and homes for sale, as well as businesses and shops.
Breaking up the concentration of social housing is deliberate. Looking at the most successful models of healthy communities in other jurisdictions, none are homogeneously low income, Ballantyne says.
But no social housing units will be lost when the entire revitalization project is complete.
Aside from the new units that will be built within Regent Park's boundaries, additional units will be constructed near the area, and in the eastern downtown area bounded roughly by King St., Yonge St., Bloor St.. and the Don River.
Everyone uprooted during each phase will, if they still qualify, have the right to return to one of the new rent-geared-to income units.
Cep wants to move into one of the new units when the first phase is complete. In fact, about 60 per cent of those who were recently relocated indicated they want to return to the new units once they've been built.
Abokar Mohammed Abokor, was one of the few exceptions.
He decided to pack up his wife and three children and leave Regent Park behind for good, after living there since 2000.
Though neither he nor any of his family members were directly affected by Regent Park's crime problems, he says he still feels safer in his new TCHC home at Kipling Ave. and Albion Rd.
"I don't want to go back. I didn't have any bad experiences. I just like where I am better. I'm glad to be out of Regent Park,'' he says.
But the majority of the relocated don't share Abokor's sentiments.
Les Klein, a former adjunct professor at the faculty of architecture, landscape and design at the University of Toronto, says he understands why people want to stay in Regent Park, despite its warts.
"A basic aspect of human existence is attachment to a place of belonging ... finding like-minded people to share our experiences with,'' says Klein, an expert in multi-family housing who is well-acquainted with Regent Park's revitalization.
"The familiar is a very important aspect of that. The notion of being in familiar surroundings, people we know, our community, however we determine community, is the essence of feeling like a human being," he adds.
Many residents know their neighbours and there is a sense of community spirit, says Mandy Swinamer, a community outreach worker with the Regent Park Neighbourhood Initiative, an organization based in the housing project she grew up in.
"There are stereotypes about the area, some are true," she said.
"Ugly things can happen at 3 a.m. in dark corners.''
But outside perceptions of the area are worse than the day-to-day reality of life there, Swinamer argues.
And clearly a lot of people want to stay.
AoD
