Alexandra Park: Dynamics of Redevelopment

Mixed-income planning has become the common-sense approach to public housing redevelopment in Toronto. Based on the premise of physical design dictating behaviour, social mix theory hinges on the idea that diluting the proportion of rental tenure via the supply of privately-owned units will break apart pathologies commonly accepted as being produced by concentrations of poverty. Interestingly, both the perceived benefits of social mix theory and the pathologies assumed to be produced by concentrations of poor people are empirically unfounded. However, by exercising place-making strategies that focus predominantly on the negative social and physical attributes of low-income neighbourhoods, change appears necessary and to the benefit of all involved. In this Major Paper, I will introduce the proposed Alexandra Park redevelopment as a case study of municipally-managed gentrification and mixed-income planning. The idea of a redeveloped Alexandra Park has been sparked by a progressive councillor and an involved group of residents accustomed to transformations in the governance structure of their neighbourhood. However, without the high exchange value of its prime downtown location, private investment in this economically underutilized neighbourhood would be unlikely. Aided by the territorial stigmatization of the neighbourhood and the racialization of its residents, place-making has enabled the common-sense approach to redevelopment in Alexandra Park legitimized by the concentrations of poverty thesis. It is my position that the existing residents of Alexandra Park will not reap the assumed, yet unwarranted, benefits commonly associated with socially mixing economically polarized groups of citizens. Redevelopment, instead, will lead to revalorized land that generates revenue in the form of property taxes, and a micro-segregated neighbourhood threatened by long-term gentrification processes related to increasing property values and consequent service transformations. Federal government shifts from redistributive and protective public policies to neo-liberal policies supporting growth and privatization that have occurred over the past three decades, have enabled the downloading of public housing provision from higher orders of government to fiscally austere municipalities, forcing housing providers such as Toronto Community Housing to rely upon private investment to cover operational costs. Consequently for the current residents, however, private investment in Alexandra Park will reduce their proportional composition to half of what it is today. Its current composition comprised predominantly of visible minorities, new immigrants, and low-income households in general, combined with a high exchange value of the neighbourhood, renders Alexandra Park highly vulnerable to municipally-managed gentrification. To borrow Jim Silver’s (2011) perspective regarding redevelopment, the razing of public housing neighbourhoods is less a response to the problems within them and more a project to valorize land and implement the agenda of neo-liberal governments, which are prepared to rearrange the lives of public housing tenants in the interest of more affluent soon-to-be residents.