This paper analyzes the impacts of territorial stigmatization on the experiences and life strategies o f residents of Regent Park, Canada's first and largest public housing estate. It centers on how discourses o f isolation, disorganization, and danger (based on imported theories and depictions o f 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 o f 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 o f living in an area o f 'concentrated poverty'. It reveals that tenants have deep attachments to Regent Park despite its reputation, and enjoy a strong sense o f community; they have access to dense networks o f friendship and support, localamenities and convenience, and services and agencies that suit their needs. While these benefits are real, they are counteracted by the impacts o f 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 o f the benefits o f community life.
This paper demonstrates the infiltration of finance into increasingly niche real estate sectors, taking the example of the emergent Canadian purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector since 2011. Drawing on a novel database of PBSA, qualitative document analysis, and key informant interviews, we uncover the business strategies and geographic patterns of investment in the sector. We then consider the local impacts of this phenomenon in Waterloo, Ontario, the country’s largest PBSA market, where finance-driven new-build studentification has contributed to higher housing costs and age segregation. This process of financialization has differed from other housing sectors as it depends on the creation of new student housing to provide an avenue for investment therein. At the same time, finance-driven new-build studentification functions as a spatial fix by directing investment to secondary cities. However, this process has been fragile, marked as much by failure as success, pointing to the limits of financialization.
This paper examines the factors that have limited gentrification in two Toronto neighbourhoods which have below-average proportions of public housing and which have traditionally acted as immigrant reception areas. The first failed to gentrify despite the existence of gentrification nearby, whereas gentrification stalled in the second in the early 1980s. Analysis of the historical reasons behind this suggests ways in which policy could intervene to limit the spread of gentrification in the absence of support for local affordable housing. These include the maintenance of areas of working-class employment, different approaches to nuisance uses and environmental externalities, a housing stock not amenable to gentrifiers' tastes and state encouragement of non-market and ethnic sources of housing finance. However, the Toronto experience also highlights the importance of policy in a negative way, as changes in municipal policy which run counter to these prescriptions are now resulting in the gentrification of these two neighbourhoods.
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