Film tells story of families’ upheaval
Housing relocation project focus of Hot Docs premiere
Before moving, Francine Valentine wrote a poem, placed it in a container and buried it in her backyard for the construction workers to find.
The 12-year-old and her family were not leaving by choice, but rather, were relocated as part of the Toronto Community Housing Leslie Nymark revitalization project.
Unarmed Verses, a new documentary that premiered this week at the Hot Docs festival, tells the story of a community facing relocation, and highlights the voices of the children as they record original songs with the help of the Toronto-wide social change organization Arts Starts.
Charles Officer, the film’s director and writer, was approached by the National Film Board to make Unarmed Verses. Officer has previously directed Nurse. Fighter. Boy and documentary Mighty Jerome, about Canadian trail-blazing track and field star Harry Jerome.
Residents of the Villaways, Toronto community housing in the city’s north-east end, faced relocation at the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, said Leslie Gash, vice-president of development for Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC).
Now TCHC is waiting for Toronto Hydro to disconnect the utilities before they begin demolition. Construction will begin next year, Gash said, and is projected to be completed by 2021. Like Regent Park and Don Mount Court (now Rivertowne) before it, the Villaways is in transition.
The rental townhouse complex will be replaced with a new mixed-income neighbourhood. Construction will result in 540 market units, which have all been sold to private homeowners, and 121 rent-geared-to-income (RGI) rental units for former residents of the area. Six of the RGI units will be off-site at Allenbury Gardens.
Officer said the documentary poses the question of what revitalization is doing and “the positives and the negatives.”
It focuses on community members — and Valentine in particular — who are faced with leaving their homes.
“It’s this interesting cycle of where do we put people, where do they go?” Officer said. “What will happen to them? And that’s the question I’m trying to pose. What will happen to these kids?”
Officer said he chose to focus the film on Valentine because “she’s the one that’s easily missed.”
“She’s very shy and she’s not the kind of person that people will most likely offer an opportunity to,” he said. “But she has the insight and the most soul. She sees the world in a really specific way and if she can break out of her shyness she can contribute to change, so she was an inspiration to follow.”
The film highlights the confusion the relocation brought to the community and its residents, and the everyday life of residents the public might not normally see.
“People didn’t know what was happening,” Officer said. “They were told this was going to happen but it was confusing.”
Gash said TCHC has a “complete community engagement program” that they launch at the beginning of any revitalization project.
“There were lots of opportunities for people to learn about the revitalization,” Gash said.
At the Villaways, about 21 community meetings were held, Gash said, and there was a drop-in centre for tenants to ask questions about the project set up for a few months in 2011. TCHC also selected people in the community to be “animators,” who they met with on a regular basis and provided information to in order to distribute information to other residents.
Gash said revitalizations like this one help “to correct some of the planning design flaws of the past where there are isolated, insular communities.”
“Revitalizations give us opportunities to reconnect with the city again,” she said.
“A lot of our housing is in poor condition. We have a big capital repair backlog and this is just one of the ways we are able to fix our housing but, in this case, we’re replacing it.”
Normally, with revitalization projects in Toronto, “at least 50 per cent (of residents) come back and usually closer to 75 per cent,” Gash said.
But Officer said the film will help people really understand “what it’s like when you don’t have a lot of money and do come from a place of poverty.”
“We talk like we know what it’s like. Councillors and developers, we don’t actually take all that into consideration,” Officer said. “People are kind of treated like cattle.”