From the Star:
Don Mount rebounds from ruin
Jul 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Donovan Vincent
City Hall Bureau
Residents moving into rebuilt units in Don Mount Court in Toronto's east end are doing something few, if any, in this country have ever done – returning to public housing reborn.
Their neighbourhood, in the Don Valley Parkway and Dundas St. E. area, was once isolated from the surrounding community, with no streets cutting through the centre.
It was dilapidated, and prone to crime.
But like nearby Regent Park, Don Mount is transforming into a mixed-income community.
It's part of a new direction the city is taking in public housing. Rather than cramming low-income people together in homogenous housing, which breeds crime, low expectations and poverty, better to have mixed income neighbourhoods, the thinking goes.
Today, there will be an opening ceremony for the Don Mount Project. Scheduled guests include Mayor David Miller, the area councillor, Toronto Community Housing officials, and the developers involved.
Aside from the 232 rent-geared-to-income units at Don Mount – the same number that existed before – when the $60 million project is completed two years from now, there'll also be 187 new market condo units.
Those condos, 99 per cent sold out, are under construction.
All of the Don Mount housing will be contained in four blocks of stacked townhouses and one apartment building.
Because it's a much smaller scale undertaking and started earlier than Regent Park, some Don Mount residents — uprooted when construction began in October 2004 — have recently returned to dozens of finished public housing units in the renamed "Don Mount/Rivertowne" development, operated by TCH.
Those residents are returning from subsidized housing they'd found elsewhere in the city, or from the section of Don Mount slated for the second phase of construction.
Reviews from them are mixed.
While most were happy to be back, some expressed disappointment with the changes.
A woman who would only give her name as Joan complained that due to design and construction issues a wading pool in the complex has been closed, and play areas are gone. Some of the units are smaller, there are no backyards, and some storage space has been lost, she adds.
"People have had to downsize," says Nichole Morgan, who is staying with her parents, who returned to the community about three weeks ago.
Her parents were forced to rent a storage unit off-site for belongings.
Linda Chapman, a long-time resident who sits on the redevelopment committee that is helping to steer the project, says residents had a choice of lower or upper-level units, the lower ones equipped with storage.
"It's beautiful inside these places," said Chapman, who lives in a three-bedroom with her daughter and son.
Danielle Fauvelle, another recent returnee, says she "loves" the brand new unit she shares with her two young children, a welcome change from the one she lived in on the Danforth where hydro bills were too expensive.
She says she's looking forward to the new neighbours she'll get when the market condo units are occupied.
"It'll be good to mix with both (low and middle income) communities together.
"Kids can see both sides and strive for a better life," Fauvelle says.
The condo units are key to the redevelopment, where money from that side of the project was used to finance the rebuilt social housing. Regent Park is using a similar model, and though the redevelopment of Lawrence Heights, another TCH project, hasn't begun, the same approach is being eyed.
Paula Fletcher, the city councillor whose ward takes in Don Mount, says there will be some growing pains in the new community.
For instance, residents will have to wait for a new two-acre park that will be built after Phase 2 construction begins next year.
But there are many positives, Fletcher insists.
A new thoroughfare gives the community a "normal streetscape" she says. And residents have received upgraded housing.
Before the work got under way, reports showed damage from water penetration alone would have cost in the range of $35 million to fix.
"The thought initially was tear the whole thing down because it's too expensive to repair," Fletcher says.
But that thought wasn't carried through with, and now Don Mount is no longer on the "critical condition list," she says.
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/455438
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