Invest in a safer city
Spending money to make public housing more liveable can pay big dividends.
That’s the experience at La Caravelle, a project in Paris’s northern outskirts. When violence swept many of France’s poor suburban housing estates, La Caravelle remained calm despite its own troubled history. As the Star’s Sandro Contenta reported recently, a facelift may have made all the difference. La Caravelle was built in 1968 to house 1,620 families. It was a forbidding, nearly half-kilometre long block of solid concrete cut off from the more prosperous neighbourhood around it. It was a no- go area for police where rioting by alienated youths was not uncommon. But a recently completed 10- year, $ 140 million remodelling made all the difference. Renovators broke up the 400metre long apartment bloc, cutting roads and walkways through it and adding trees and lights. They added stores, a cultural centre, well-lit playgrounds, a soccer field, and a basketball court. They spruced up the apartments.
“ When they saw that all of this had been done for them, everyone calmed down and politeness and courtesy returned to La Caravelle,” said Roland Castro, the urban planner responsible for the renovation. Here at home, the Toronto Community Housing Corp.’s proposed $425 million, 15-year redevelopment of Regent Park may have something to learn from the concepts that transformed La Caravelle. Regent Park has been an island removed from the city, where residents live next door to the more prosperous Cabbagetown area.
In the new, rebuilt Regent Park, public housing will be subsidized by privately owned homes and market rent units, giving people a greater stake in the community.
Yet despite the advantages urban redesign can bring, governments remain slow to fund them.
In the near term, Toronto Community Housing Corp. plans to spend $100 million over four years to refurbish 19 buildings. There’s nowhere near enough cash to bring its entire housing stock — serving 164,000 tenants — up to standard, let alone improve its design. That’s a pity.
In the Jane- Finch neighbourhood, vandalism seems to have decreased following a modest program in which a dozen or so young people worked as carpenters’ helpers, repairing fences and fixing up apartments, says Derek Ballantyne, chief executive of the housing agency. Young people from the neighbourhood also were hired to build a soccer field. This local input invites pride of ownership.
Just imagine how Jane- Finch might be transformed if Queen’s Park and Ottawa were to make more funds available to fully integrate the high-rise buildings into the surrounding neighbourhood by demolishing some facades, building peoplefriendly entrances and lobbies and making public spaces safer. La Caravelle offers a hint.