Community Building

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Liz Root, the project director for the Regent Park revitalization in Toronto, talks details with CondoBusiness.

How did residents initially respond to the proposal to build such expensive condos in Regent Park?

When we started the consultation back in 2003, residents fed into the process between small meetings big meetings and everything in between. Through that process residents identified twelve community planning principals. It was they themselves who identified wanting to create a successful neighbourhood.

What does that mean? It means creating a diverse neighbourhood with a mixture of uses, a mixture of different types of buildings, high-rise, low-rise, mid-rise. It also meant creating different types of tenure: owners, renters. So it really just mixes together into a regular neighbourhood.

We created a vision together through a series of meeting and working through what it means to be a successful neighbourhood. Once you distill it down there was general agreement that it means creating a diversity of incomes and peoples who may live in the neighbourhood.

When they understand that means people will be buying a condominium and living in a condominium, you know, do I think that there’s different views through the community? Does everybody have the same view? It wouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a kind of fear of a neighbourhood in transition and what does that mean for a particular household with particular views but in general, there’s largely a consensus that this is part of the ingredients that create a successful neighbourhood.

Is there a concern that this will negatively affect their sense of community? The community is going to evolve over time and how that plays out over time we’re all going to find out together but the idea of the social development plan is to really create a plan that will address the challenges of social cohesion in the community that will have lower income households, medium income households and potentially some higher income households. And the idea of that is so how do people meet, interact, where do they take their kids for swimming lessons, are they walking their dog in the park and chatting in the morning? What are the kinds of relationships that are being created to bring down some of those barriers. And again it’s like any neighbourhood. One of the ideas of doing that is setting up a neighbourhood association that would have representation from both the condominium buildings, the rental buildings and you have a broad spectrum of interests under one single association rather than having condo board and a tenants’ association. We wanted to create a place where a mixture of interests will come together. So we recognize there’s going to be differences so we want to create those vehicles where people can come together to create community, solve problems and deal with differences. This is a community that’s going to evolve over 15 years. It’s not like everyone’s going to be thrown together on the first day. It’s a community that’s going to grow together and learn together. So you’re not necessarily going to get that shock factor? Which, you know, if something comes together quickly, it’s hard for people to sort out those things. We definitely want to break down and create a bridge where people can talk. Daniels is the developer who has partnered with Toronto Community Housing for this project. How have they been involved in creating a bridge? Their commitment to the local employment program starts that. There are people who live in the community that are working to rebuild the community and working with their contractors to tell them contractually to hire as part of their commitment. But they’re also opening up themselves to be part of the community. For example, the presentations at the sales centre – every last Friday the focus media youth art centre use it for their music, poetry and invite all sorts of people to come. Daniels lets them use it for an event they have been holding in not so great circumstances so they’re opening that up, opening up the presentation centre for information centres so the community sees everything before we go out – before we opened the doors to the presentation centre we had a community meeting in there, we had an open house, we had several of them. And just kind of welcoming and embracing them. All sorts of small ways since it’s been important for Daniels to stand and be part of the community. It helps people who are purchasing as well. How many units of low income housing will there be? By the time we’re finished, there will be about 2000 and that will be a range of what we call affordable rental, which is a little bit below Canada Mortgage and Housing average rental rate and rent geared to income. On the market side, there will be about 3300 plus or minus of condominiums. How many people have been moved in and out of the community? We started occupancy of the first building right on Regent Park and that’s almost fully occupied and that building has 64 units. And attached to it is the seniors’ tower. Then we have another building that will be ready for occupancy in spring and that’s right on Regent Park. And we have some townhouses. We also have buildings in the East downtown which are part of the revitalization as well. We had 100s of units for folks to choose from. What percentage of residents decided to move back to the community? 360 households were moved out in phase one and 77 per cent of those folks reengaged back in the process. We sent out registered letters and we made follow-up phone calls so about 23 per cent either had left TCHC housing or didn’t respond to our efforts. 77 per cent had reengaged in our process which is pretty much what we had expected because our tenants are rental so we have about ten per cent turnover a year so essentially we got back about the same amount of people to reengage in the process and of that 77 per cent, 73 per cent ended up renting a unit. Those who didn’t either waived their right to return or they deferred to the next phase. Did they give their reasons? There’s nothing I like or I don’t feel like moving right now, I’ll wait three years until the next phase. People give what they give. Or they don’t want to waive their right to return, they want to think about it and look for the next phase. We had a handful of people who did that. What was the response? The people who moved into our first building are super happy. They’re living in a brand new building and the important part is that TCHC kept to their commitment to get them back into a unit and worked with them through the process. Have you been able to find a way to create low income ownership options? Yup. We’re actually doing that right now. When TCHC, through the planning process, said they wanted to create ownership opportunities in the community, the reason we wanted to do that is around the mixed income notion as well. We said that we wanted to do that and we’ve been working with that over the past couple of years and we were able to be approved for funding from other levels of government to support that. So there are people in the community who have signed the purchase agreement at One Cole. No one will know who they are. Essentially they really got down payment assistance which will be a second mortgage. They picked a unit, just like everybody picked a unit and they’ll be carrying their first mortgage just like anybody. And away they go. What happens with their second mortgage? In the future, the down payment assistance will come back to the funds that are supporting it so it will be money that will go back into the community for future purchases. So that money will come back. Did the condominiums sell well? They were 85 per cent sold in less than a month. It’s a whole range of different people who bought: women, single women, families made long term commitment to live there so they must understand what’s going on.




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