Challenging the Rhetoric of Stigmatization: The Benefits of Concentrated Poverty in Toronto's Regent Park

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impacts of territorial stigmatization on the experiences and life strategies of residents of Regent Park, Canada's first and largest public housing estate. It centers on how discourses of isolation, disorganization, and danger (based on imported theories and depictions of life in social housing developed in a very different time and place than the Canadian inner city) have served to justify the state-driven gentrification of public housing via ‘socially mixed’ redevelopment. Drawing on semistructured, in-depth interviews with over thirty tenants, this paper offers a counternarrative documenting the many benefits and advantages of living in an area of ‘concentrated poverty’. It reveals that tenants have deep attachments to Regent Park despite its reputation, and enjoy a strong sense of community; they have access to dense networks of friendship and support, local amenities and convenience, and services and agencies that suit their needs. While these benefits are real, they are counteracted by the impacts of coping with a neglected physical environment resulting from welfare state retrenchment (particularly on the housing front); and coping with safety issues and drug-related activities. Socially mixed redevelopment holds questionable promise for meaningfully addressing these problems and may even diminish some of the benefits of community life.