Rebuilding Public Housing in Regent Park: The Shifting Dynamics of Financialized Redevelopment Models

Abstract

This article examines the redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park, a neighborhood formerly comprised exclusively of public housing. Since 2006, it has been undergoing a transformation into a mixed income neighborhood. Through interviews and document analysis, the paper traces the complex and changing development agreements as redevelopment progresses, highlighting the state’s entrepreneurial efforts and the dynamic nature of urban planning and policy. We find that practices of financializing public land are highly fluid, and that efforts to derive public value from public housing redevelopment are tied to shifting community expectations regarding the return of benefits to residents.

Introduction

In 2006, groundbreaking was initiated in Toronto’s Regent Park as the neighborhood’s latest round of redevelopment began. Regent Park, the largest site of public housing in Canada since the 1950s, was undergoing a wholesale redevelopment that—at the outset—was intended to see the neighborhood’s public housing units rebuilt on site, alongside the addition of market units (Brail and Kumar 2017). As minimal public funds were available to support rebuilding the dilapidated units, the project, overseen by Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCH), was designed to take advantage of rising downtown real estate costs by leveraging the land value to cover the expense of physically rebuilding the public housing units. The redevelopment was seen both as an attempt to reinvigorate a physically and socially deteriorating neighborhood in the city’s downtown core (Dunn 2012) and as an example of state-led gentrification which neglected to consider the existing deep community ties and infrastructure that residents relied on for their daily needs (August 2014).

Against this framing, and alongside contested views of Regent Park’s redevelopment, the neighborhood’s physical rebuilding has been ongoing for almost a generation (Lorinc 2021). This time frame is notable in that while it is not uncommon for the building (or rebuilding) of a neighborhood to take place over an extended period of time, the redevelopment of Regent Park has occurred in tandem with pronounced changes related to the provision of social housing in Canada; rising tensions with respect to the financialization of real estate; a growing emphasis on entrepreneurial roles for local governments; and critical efforts to increase the provision of public benefits in an environment skewed toward inequitable distributions, especially in the context of urban regeneration.

In this paper, we contend that the nature of Regent Park’s redevelopment can be understood as part of the entrepreneurial turn (Ward 2003) that local governments have continued to move toward, in part as a response to austerity measures and substantially reduced financial supports from more senior levels of government (Beswick and Penny 2018; Harvey 1989; Robinson and Attuyer 2021; Suttor 2016). Relying on innovation through the financialization of real estate as an asset (Aalbers 2019; Leyshon and Thrift 2007; Weber 2002), Regent Park’s redevelopment represents a somewhat novel approach to leveraging property development in an effort to rebuild public housing units, within an environment in which public investment was not forthcoming.

The paper explores the evolution of plans to reconstruct the neighborhood over the nearly twenty-year duration of redevelopment efforts at the time of writing, by rebuilding 2,083 nonmarket units and adding many thousand new market units, over five formal phases of redevelopment. In the paper, we discuss the redevelopment process in three stages: (1) a period of optimism about a redevelopment formula that hinged on a high degree of political and administrative collaboration between TCH and the City; (2) a period of instability and mutual suspicion between a new municipal administration, TCH, and the developer; and (3) an extended period featuring major overhauls in the City’s social housing policy, steeply rising real estate prices and development costs, and a recognition that the project’s underlying assumptions were not delivering what the city and the community needed. Examining the redevelopment chronologically, through distinct stages, illuminates how Toronto’s entrepreneurial governance efforts evolved to address the financial and political realities faced by the municipal government and its housing agency, concurrently attempting to serve the economic interests of the city alongside the social housing needs of vulnerable residents.

The paper traces the recent history of the neighborhood’s physical rebuilding, with frictions associated with the disruption and rebuilding of community coming to the fore, including continued challenges about ensuring that the much-lauded and promised community benefits materialize. Notably, in the context of large municipal redevelopment schemes, the timeline of Regent Park’s redevelopment is not unique, nor are an array of changes to the development model and plans over time (Robinson et al. 2020). Yet, Regent Park’s redevelopment represents an example of a bespoke, made-in-Toronto model of entrepreneurial, financialized urban redevelopment relying on the city’s unique governance structure and the neighborhood’s specific history, location, and people. We find that on its own, entrepreneurial governance is no panacea to solving the challenge of financing public housing and supporting public housing residents. The case of Regent Park’s redevelopment demonstrates that significant government intervention, the commitment of public funds, and efforts that prioritize community-based needs are all critical. We contend that entrepreneurial models alone both fail to produce the desired funding capacity at sufficient scale and are incapable of effectively addressing a city’s public housing needs in isolation of other supports. Yet, our findings also suggest that urban entrepreneurial governance approaches have value. Developed in response to policy decisions, often originating beyond their authority, urban entrepreneurial governance approaches can contribute to innovation in public housing funding models and redevelopment, while at the same time, benefiting economically marginalized populations.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we examine scholarship regarding the history of social housing production; the evolution of entrepreneurial governance and the emergence of state-led policies relying on market-based models to support the building of social housing; and efforts by grassroots community organizations to share in the prospective benefits of leveraging real estate values for social good. We then present case study findings and analysis, examining two particular conditions: (1) shifting efforts focused on financialization of public housing as a form of entrepreneurial governance and (2) rising community expectations directed at deriving public good through public redevelopment initiatives. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the experience of Regent Park’s redevelopment can inform debates about the role(s) played by municipal governments and agencies; the tensions that arise when pursuing financialized redevelopment models to address economic, commercial, and social priorities; and the challenges that these concerns ultimately pose for urban planning and policymaking.

Public Housing and the State: From Disinvestment to Financialization

Beginning in the post-World War II era, the history of public housing in North America is characterized by rising and falling levels of public funding, engagement moving from national to local governments, and emphasis shifting from nonmarket- to market-based solutions in attempts to provide deeply affordable housing for low-income households (Suttor 2016; Vale and Freemark 2012). There is concern that government disinvestment in public housing has led to the search for market-based solutions to rebuild much needed housing infrastructure and that these solutions use financial tools which are both untested and fraught with challenges (August and Walks 2018; Beswick and Penny 2018; Bruns-Berentelg, Noring, and Grydehøj 2022; Geva and Rosen 2022).

Vale and Freemark (2012) assert that the history of public housing in the United States is one based on a series of social experiments, with the most recent experimental period beginning in the 1990s and focused on the reduction of concentrated poverty in exclusively public housing neighborhoods. The latest experimental period is also infused with an emphasis on the role of the private sector as a developer, landlord, and partner to governments and public housing agencies. Housing policies promoting social mix have formed a key component of public housing policy and public housing regeneration in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere in Europe since the late 1990s (Fraser, Chaskin, and Bazuin 2013).

In Canada, the development of public housing was led by the federal government beginning in the late 1940s as the country urbanized in the postwar period. Nationally, the federal government invested funds both directly and indirectly through tax incentives, in building rental and mixed income co-op housing for households of moderate incomes and low-income renters from the 1940s to the 1980s (Suttor 2016). Suttor (2016) traces the evolution of social housing policy in Canada, identifying a series of turning points over a period of seventy years, highlighting the end of federal government housing policy in the mid-1990s, devolution to provincial governments—some of which in turn downloaded authority to municipal governments—followed by a new turning point in the early 2000s which saw renewed production of affordable rental housing generated through public funds and programs.

Shifts in social housing policies, reductions in direct government spending on housing, physical deterioration, and austerity measures associated with the 2008 global financial crisis further accelerated efforts to treat public housing as a financial asset (Beswick and Penny 2018). In the Canadian context, the impact of government withdrawal from direct funding of social housing contributed to both an affordable housing crisis and a push toward real estate financialization in Toronto (August and Walks 2018).

Public Housing Redevelopment in the Context of Entrepreneurial Governance and Financialization

Entrepreneurial governance is both a feature and a flaw of the efforts to redevelop public housing in cities, absent sufficient public funding, as initially laid out by Harvey (1989), and which continues to be expanded upon (e.g., Phelps and Miao 2020; Ward 2003). The entrepreneurial turn, a term deployed to describe changes in local governance precipitated by recession, deindustrialization, and structural unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, in part addresses how local government actors work to become innovators focused on reshaping urban agendas toward market-oriented activities including land speculation and the promotion of the city within a competitive inter urban network (Harvey 1989). Likewise, there is a direct connection to more contemporary urban policies focused on divestment and austerity, and the search on the part of the state for new sources of revenues and land rents to support urban development (Aalbers 2019; Brill and Robin 2020; Bruns-Berentelg, Noring, and Grydehøj 2022; Phelps and Miao 2020; Sonn, Shin, and Park 2017).

Entrepreneurial governance efforts are understood to be a response to austerity measures that involve divestment from the public provision and funding of goods and services, including public housing. In critiquing the decline of public finance, and the notion of finance as a ubiquitous solution to any challenge, August et al. (2022, 532) suggest that “the engagement between public and private finance is marked by a growing reliance on private financial solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems.” Local governments, in an effort to resolve funding challenges that neglect public investment, seek out new tools to promote economic development (Lauermann 2018). Land value capture is a tool that municipalities use to extract value from urban land by increasing its value, such as through new transit infrastructure development or rezoning that permits added density (Aalbers 2020; Bruns-Berentelg, Noring, and Grydehøj 2022; Robinson and Attuyer 2021). Examples of governments using land value capture as a financialization strategy abound globally (Aalbers 2020), with projects ranging from transportation infrastructure in Copenhagen (Bruns-Berentelg, Noring, and Grydehøj 2022) to smart city development in Songdo (Sonn, Shin, and Park 2017) and housing redevelopment in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa (Geva and Rosen 2022).

Studies of public housing and its redevelopment point to the changing role of public housing agencies. For instance, the largest public housing agency in North America is the New York City Housing Authority which is effectively the largest landlord in New York City and is overseeing a ten-year, $24 billion repair plan (New York City Housing Authority 2021). In 2019, TCH, North America’s second largest public housing agency, was responsible for managing properties valued at $10 billion Canadian (Toronto Community Housing 2019b). According to Vale and Freemark (2012, 397), as U.S. housing authorities “reinvent themselves as property managers,” their primary roles have shifted from one of public service provision toward private property practice.

Government-led real estate financialization efforts are considered to be a form of urban innovation (Lauermann 2018; Leyshon and Thrift 2007; Wu 2020). In the United Kingdom, the Thatcher government introduced a scheme to privatize public housing in 1980 (Aalbers 2019), while other early financialization efforts focused on mega projects such as London’s Canary Wharf in the late 1980s (Sonn, Shin, and Park 2017). By the early 2000s, entrepreneurial city governments adopted models to redevelop land occupied by public housing complexes. Entrepreneurial government efforts focused on financialization strategies are initially justified by the ultimately mistaken claim that substantial public benefits can be realized through private redevelopment at no cost to the state (MacDonald 2019). In cities such as London (Beswick and Penny 2018), Toronto (August 2014; Brail and Kumar 2017), and Chicago (Smith 2013), governments and arm’s-length public agencies attempted to leverage land values as a means of funding the redevelopment of dilapidated public housing units. Examples demonstrate how entrepreneurial governance mechanisms and financialization tools are used to buttress their cities’ social housing stock, within efforts to create new value and assets from property development. Robinson et al. (2020) trace the development of bespoke business models in Johannesburg, Shanghai, and London to cover development costs by leveraging returns associated with land development. Understandably, Weber (2010, 270) concludes that

[c]ities were not just arbitrarily selected for investment as a result of a game played far above their heads; their local government representatives played a critical role in constructing the conditions under which capital could be channeled into locally embedded assets, namely real estate.

Supporting and Building Community

In an environment in which municipalities and state-owned housing agencies are focused on ensuring the financial feasibility of redevelopment projects, responsibility for providing public benefits and supporting community planning needs of public housing residents can become less visible. Yet, as local residents and community organizations adjusted to both the disruption associated with extensive construction and an influx of newcomers to new market housing and other amenities, community needs and expectations shifted. There is also a risk that financialization may threaten to keep community actors out as community groups are not seen to have the same legitimacy as formal organizations and more powerful actors (Fields 2015).

Alongside shifting policies favoring mixed income housing redevelopment on former sites of public housing, there is an evolving understanding that physical infrastructure alone cannot address the deep structural social frictions underlying experiences of urban poverty and exclusion (Chaskin and Joseph 2010; Fraser, Chaskin, and Bazuin 2013). Regardless of the nature of tenure in their neighborhoods, public housing residents need more than stable, subsidized housing to thrive. There has been increasing emphasis on investing in community-based social infrastructure. This includes investment in physical spaces such as parks; athletic, cultural, and community centers; and libraries. Additionally, investment in human resources as a form of social infrastructure can support the creation of employment training programs and services, food and meal provisions, and specialized services and programs for recent immigrants, children, women, youth, and others (Bradford 2007; Lucio, Hand, and Marsiglia 2014).

As financialization efforts in the public housing sphere proceed, scholars suggest that governments must also focus on ensuring public goods, equitable distribution of the “benefits” of redevelopment, and the preservation of access to space for residents who lack power and resources (Fields 2015; Geva and Rosen 2022; MacDonald 2019). To achieve community benefits through redevelopment, concerted action and intent on the part of planners and other municipal workers are required. This may include reliance on traditional contracts such as community benefits agreements (CBAs) that govern the distribution of benefits from the developer directly back to community members, for instance, in the form of jobs, or access to new amenities (Wolf-Powers 2010). Alternatively, efforts can emphasize state-led interventions that aim to address inequities that arise, or are exacerbated, as a result of entrepreneurial governance and financialization efforts focused on housing regeneration (Geva and Rosen 2022). Understanding how governments and state-owned agencies can help to better manage entrepreneurial governance in a way that benefits those who might otherwise be disadvantaged represents an area of inquiry that deserves further attention.

Method

This research was conducted as part of an initiative funded by a Toronto-based philanthropic foundation and guided by an interest in documenting and understanding the twenty-plus-year-long redevelopment of Regent Park. The project leads, one an academic and the other an urban affairs journalist, collaborated on the study between February 2020 and December 2021, with the support of two graduate research assistants.

As part of the larger study, the research team convened a neighborhood advisory group, conducted an extensive literature review, surveyed neighborhood nonprofit organizations, and conducted interviews. A neighborhood advisory group met three times over the course of the research. It comprised residents and agency representatives, and the group assisted with scoping the work and identifying areas of agreement and tension. In the fall 2020, we conducted a survey of neighborhood organizations and received responses from nineteen nonprofit and community organizations. The survey focused primarily on understanding changes in the operating context for Regent Park organizations. One open-ended survey question focused on addressing community needs generated through the redevelopment. Responses to this question inform discussion of the social development plan (SDP) and community benefits in the paper. Interviews were carried out with twenty participants between January and June 2021. Interviews were conducted remotely by videoconference or telephone in response to safety measures in place as a result of COVID-19 and lasted between 30 and 120 minutes. The range of interview participants included the following: Regent Park residents, representatives of the local residents’ association, developers, and senior leaders at TCH and the City of Toronto. A public-facing report on the project was published in December 2021. These interviews inform the case study as it is presented below. In the local context, many of our interviewees would be recognizable through direct quotes. As a result, we primarily embed interviewee input as synthesis in an effort to maintain the confidentiality that was guaranteed to interview participants.

Public Housing, Financialization, Entrepreneurial Governance, and Community in Regent Park

Regent Park in Context

Originally built between 1948 and 1959, Regent Park is the largest site of public housing in Canada and also one of the country’s oldest (Tong 2021). Having been designed with large green spaces in between buildings and no through-streets, the neighborhood’s urban design contributed to the rise of local gang and drug violence. As the buildings aged and the community sought to push back against both gang violence and police harassment, a consensus emerged by the late 1990s that the neighborhood should be redeveloped (Johnson and Johnson 2017). But unlike the 1940s and 1950s, governments were unwilling to provide funding to carry out such a plan.

The local response to the lack of funding from more senior levels of government informs the first stage of Regent Park’s redevelopment. By the early 2000s, with Regent Park residences becoming increasingly dilapidated, plans for revitalizing the neighborhood shifted to a model that relied on the addition of market housing (Johnson and Johnson 2017). The premise was to redevelop Regent Park by leveraging the increasing value of the site’s downtown real estate through increased density and the addition of thousands of new market units. A portion of the profits realized through the development of property and sale of market units would then be used to cover the cost of rebuilding nonmarket units on-site. On the surface, the plan appears to be a relatively simple mechanism to capture increasing land value as density and the number of market units increase. In practice, the complexity of urban development, government responsibility for the provision of public housing, and the political interactions amongst diverse stakeholders with shifting priorities underlie the evolution of plans for Regent Park’s redevelopment and underscore the challenge of assuming that rising property values are sufficient to support the redevelopment of public housing. A second, and generally misunderstood, challenge is the assumption that local governments and municipal government agencies have the necessary expertise to operate using entrepreneurial governance frameworks in the service of achieving public housing goals.

Since 2006, the Regent Park neighborhood has been under construction, as the rebuilding of public housing units proceeds alongside the introduction of market housing, predominantly in the form of condominiums and some market row housing. The neighborhood’s physical transformation is pronounced. Former low-rise townhomes and residential walk-up apartments separated by grassy areas and pathways have been replaced by new taller buildings, with connections to the city’s street grid. To make room for the thousands of new residents, density has increased through changes to zoning bylaws that enabled increased building heights in much of the neighborhood. In the discussion of research findings that follows, we interrogate the processes underlying these dramatic physical changes which include ongoing shifts in the funding models characterized by a continued rebalancing of private and public sector financing of public housing, the politics of entrepreneurial governance, and the rising voices of community and residents—for whom the foundation of Regent Park’s redevelopment is presumably designed to sustain.

Our research highlights interconnected changes that have taken place over the course of redevelopment thus far related to plans for financializing Regent Park’s redevelopment. We note how agreements between TCH and private developers change in tandem with the evolving understanding of the constraints of a financialized model. In conjunction, efforts on the part of the City of Toronto and its public housing agency, TCH, demonstrate innovation in entrepreneurial governance as a means of responding to changing economic, political, and social conditions at local and global scales. The nearly two-decade timeline of redevelopment in Regent Park enables us to see the progression of urban change alongside policy change. As such, we suggest that demonstrations of innovation in entrepreneurial governance as highlighted below in the context of public (and private) pressure for public leadership confront a shifting urban environment. In the case of Regent Park, publicly led efforts to circumvent economic and political constraints through reliance on a financialized model achieved partial success. In this respect, our findings are similar to the conclusions of critical scholars studying financialization (e.g., August and Walks 2018; Beswick and Penny 2018). However, we also contend that the experience of working within a financialized environment acted to embolden public and community actors to push for community benefits that addressed economic vulnerability and social exclusion.

Flaw(s) in the Model: Financializing Public Real Estate, Entrepreneurializing the State

Rebuilding public housing absent government funding in Regent Park was made possible because of the move to deploy an untested funding model in which the profits realized from building and selling market units would pay for the rebuilding of nonmarket units. As with other infrastructure megaprojects that have come in late and over-budget (Flyvbjerg 2007), this initial period featured optimistic projections about the funding model that were embraced by municipal politicians. Regent Park, because of both its downtown location and prominence as the largest public housing development in Canada, was seen as an opportunity to showcase the redevelopment of public housing into mixed income housing, while at the same time ensuring the rebuilding of nearly all public housing units on-site and maintaining the same number of units with deeply subsidized rents as prior to redevelopment.

The plans for redevelopment involved years of discussion and consultation dating back to early efforts in the mid-1990s in which at first a small subsection of the neighborhood’s housing was being explored for redevelopment. Key local stakeholders included the City of Toronto, TCH, local politicians, Regent Park residents, and an assortment of nonprofit organizations with a presence in the neighborhood—and contributed to a “complex web of partnerships” (Brail and Kumar 2017).

When the state involves itself in the financialization of real estate, it often takes on increased elements of risk beyond what is customary to demonstrate and create value on redeveloped land. According to Gray (2022, 90), “In such ‘economically risky neighbourhoods,’ closing the state subsidy gap—the viability gap between currently unprofitable and potentially profitable urban land and property scenarios—is imperative for the initiation, reproduction and potential completion of urban development projects.” We see the same expectations and processes play out in the case of Regent Park.

In initial plans for rezoning that were shared with residents, the number of nonmarket to market housing units in the neighborhood was envisioned to be a ratio of 40:60. Indeed, a report commissioned by TCH cautioned that a concentration of rent-geared-to-income (RGI) units above 20 to 25 percent may prevent private investment in the neighborhood, although there is no consensus on the impact of RGI units on investment attraction (GHK International et al. 2003). However, early on, a change to the zoning was enacted during a secondary rezoning process for later stages that shifted the ratio of nonmarket to market housing to 30:70 (Toronto Community Housing 2019a). This shift in the proportion of nonmarket to market housing is in part a demonstration of the uncertainties regarding financial and risk management involved in calculating the costs that go into land development to build market housing. Financing needed to complete the redevelopment of the nonmarket units was anticipated to be covered by land sales proceeds, savings realized through reductions in the need for capital repairs to the existing dilapidated housing stock, and other finance tools, such as mortgage financing and equity contributions (Spearn 2017).

As plans for redevelopment gained traction in the early 2000s, TCH added capacity as a property developer, in addition to its ongoing roles in tenant and building management. TCH established a group with expertise in real estate development, which included advisors who had worked on earlier provincial social housing initiatives. Despite these efforts at building in-house development capacity, plans for financializing TCHs real estate portfolio remained uncertain because of the inherent risks associated with property development. In the case of Regent Park, this included uncertainty regarding the marketability of market housing in the neighborhood, rising labor and material costs, a financial crisis, political interference, and the long duration of the project.

The redevelopment process and associated funding model presented a learning curve to the housing agency and the City. The first time that TCH awarded the redevelopment contract to a developer, the parties could not come to an agreement on the terms of the contract. A second request for proposals resulted in the selection of The Daniels Corporation as the lead developer for the first phase of redevelopment, which was later extended to include all five phases. Given uncertainty about the precedent for attracting buyers for market priced units within a stigmatized neighborhood, TCH agreed to act as the banker for the first phase. According to a letter written by the chief executive officer (CEO) of the housing agency in 2017,

TCH received little in the way of land value from the development partner but received most of the condominium project’s return from profit, which is only realized at the completion of a building, including all condo unit sales . . . it was felt that TCH had to undertake this risk in order to attract a private-sector partner, given that the market viewed the area as having little value. (Spearn 2017, 2)

To provide sufficient incentive to a developer being asked to take on the risk of market development in an area that previously had none, the housing agency took on additional risk and expense.

The second stage of Regent Park’s revitalization began in or around 2010, with the election of a mayor and municipal council that viewed the project with suspicion. While redevelopment proceeded, the funding model continued to change, together with the anticipated costs of redevelopment. When the redevelopment moved from phase 1 to phase 2 in 2010, the sale of condos from the first stage had successfully demonstrated the marketability of the neighborhood to home buyers, and TCH no longer acted in the role of financier. According to a letter explaining a request for funding from TCH to the City of Toronto (Spearn 2017), the partnership model changed at this point as well, with TCH receiving a financial payout only after construction was completed.

In 2013, by the third phase of redevelopment, TCH again initiated changes in the partnership model with the developer. This time, and purportedly to reduce the financial risk assumed by TCH, a decision was made to sell land outright to the developer. The housing agency reduced its risk, and at the same time, its potential to profit from increasing land value through condominium sales was removed for this phase. While this new arrangement shifted financial risk away from TCH and onto the developer, the decision proved to be more profitable for the developer, and less lucrative for TCH. According to a former TCH executive, “The lesson learned for TCHC has been that in order to leverage its assets (land) to the fullest, it has to take on some of the risk” (Tong 2021,156).

The final stage begins in or around 2014, instigated by an extended city-initiated process to rethink its social housing policy in general and the wisdom of continuing with a sole-source contract for a project as large as Regent Park. Following a contested decision by the TCH Board to retender the final two phases of redevelopment, a new developer was selected to partner with TCH to complete the final two phases of the project. At the time of writing, the business model for redevelopment is anticipated to change yet again. Indeed, the new development team has applied for another rezoning on the site, requesting, among other things, an increase in density and the addition of one thousand more housing units (Merali 2022). According to the TCH board decision approving the new developer, “the recommended proponent’s phasing plan is comprised of sub-phases, which allows TCHC to capitalize on an upswing in the market over time” (TCH 2020, 176). The return to a plan that assumes greater risk on the part of TCH, and also portends greater potential reward, suggests that the city has learned from the experience of phase 3, during which it largely relinquished its ability to earn higher profits from development and condominium sales in exchange for reduced risk.

Acting in the capacity of developer, TCH was presented with a range of external challenges that complicated the redevelopment process. For example, the costs of reconstruction grew over time. In explaining the difference between anticipated costs of redevelopment and actual costs, interviewees indicate that increases in construction costs meant that TCH was required to secure financial support for the redevelopment beyond initial budget plans. Another element of rising costs connected to the increasingly lengthy timeline of redevelopment, and frictions between housing agency plans and city planning processes. According to one interviewee who held a senior role at TCH,

TCH’s objective was to generate as much density as we could to fund the rental replacement and City Planning was wanting to make sure that they were keeping or respecting city planning policies. So, there was always a bit of tension between the two. And of course delays and planning approvals, etc., led to increased costs.

Plans to financialize property in Regent Park were further complicated by the housing agency’s conflicting priorities and goals. On one hand, TCH was tasked with leveraging land value to support rebuilding public housing units with the sale of market units. Yet, as an agency with a social mandate to support vulnerable households, additional funds were needed to help tenants during the rebuilding process, for instance, by either delaying temporary moves to coincide with the school year or avoiding them altogether (Brail and Kumar 2017). As a result, efforts associated with supporting tenants through the redevelopment process extended the redevelopment timelines because of impacts on phasing. Through this example, we see evidence of how a financialized model and a focus on social inclusion are, albeit imperfectly matched, not mutually exclusive.

Ultimately however, the Regent Park business model proved not to be self-financing (Lorinc 2021). Furthermore, continued shortfalls are anticipated for the remaining two phases of redevelopment. As of late 2021, the project cost was $1.58 billion. This includes combined contributions of $494M from municipal, provincial, and federal governments, with a projected shortfall as of 2019 of $182 million (City of Toronto 2019c). While entrepreneurial governance efforts were an enabling factor in the neighborhood’s redevelopment, financialization plans alone remained insufficient as a means to address both economic and social goals.

Much in the same way that Vale and Freemark (2012, 397) describe the transformation and reinvention of public housing providers into “asset managers,” TCH, in collaboration with the City of Toronto, has similarly undergone transformation and reinvention. TCH held multiple responsibilities including building management, tenant engagement, and property development at the outset of Regent Park’s redevelopment. However, TCH’s responsibility for planning and development was essentially rescinded in 2019. Instead, oversight of planning and development was deemed to be the responsibility of the city (City of Toronto 2019a). Furthermore, reinvention is not exclusive to TCH. The City of Toronto, by virtue of its ownership and oversight of TCH, as well as other agencies involved directly or indirectly in real estate development, continues to explore additional mechanisms to increase the supply of a range of affordable housing types, further demonstrating that the city continues to adapt to the role of property developer. In a city where land prices have become such a powerful driver of development, financialization and entrepreneurial governance have become interdependent. City planners, policymakers, and political leaders appear to have concluded that while financialization cannot be drawn on exclusively to fund the building of nonmarket housing, it remains an important lever in supporting the city’s social housing goals.

The case of Regent Park exhibits the power that politicians hold over arm’s-length municipal corporations. Relationships between politicians, such as the mayor and local councilor, and the housing agency can be subject to volatility, especially during shifts in political leadership. The complex web of partnerships underlying the redevelopment ultimately led the municipality to shift responsibility for the project and the broader policy goals away from the housing agency. Furthermore, the funding model for redevelopment continues to evolve. This is a demonstration of both ongoing learning in an effort to more equitably share the risks and benefits of (public) housing development, and at the same time highlights uncertainty, adaptability, and dynamism in the face of shifting economic, political, environmental, and social demands. This dynamism reflects an environment in which there was a need to search for solutions to resolve a range of tensions, from creating a land market to covering unanticipated costs and addressing tenant concerns. In Regent Park, entrepreneurial governance has become synonymous with political leadership focused on managing complexity.

While responsibility for public housing provision has devolved to the municipal level in Ontario, and even with municipal efforts focused on financialization of public real estate assets, the case of Regent Park demonstrates that public housing redevelopment requires multiscalar government support. The initial presumption that a business model which focused on leveraging market forces to rebuild public housing did not work. It is within this evolving, complex environment that municipal-led efforts to leverage entrepreneurial tactics (including, but not limited to financialization of real estate) are being tested to rebuild public housing in Toronto. Determining how to deliver a rebuilt Regent Park, in the context of a financial model that did not fully fund redevelopment, and more recently in the midst of renewed provincial and federal interest in affordable housing provision, provided the city with an opportunity to address devastating funding gaps in support of public housing, in part by combining both financialization and additional government supports.

Financialization and Community Expectations

While the process of redevelopment in Regent Park saw ongoing changes to the financial model, community expectations connected with the neighborhood’s redevelopment also underwent change, as efforts to formalize benefits for residents evolved. As one resident interviewed suggested,

That was the bargain that was made when the original planning for Regent Park was done, and the idea that we can somehow replace the units and fund them through building all these market condominiums and get some of the benefit from that.

Regent Park has a large and active set of community organizations (August 2014). The neighborhood’s history and experience in organizing and advocacy efforts, particularly as they relate to the neighborhood’s redevelopment, provided a pillar for residents to build on as they supported and contested decisions affecting the future of Regent Park.

Two components underlay efforts to provide social infrastructure and community benefits in Regent Park. The first was through the development and redevelopment of an SDP, and the second was through the creation of formalized CBAs with the selected developers.

Social Development Plan(s)

An SDP was highlighted as a prominent feature of the redevelopment in its earliest phases. The SDP was intended to foster continued supports in the realm of social infrastructure. It was meant, in part, to offset the difficulties of redevelopment for neighborhood residents, and as a demonstration that social planning was a valued part of the redevelopment work. TCH led the development of the SDP with assistance from the City’s Social Development, Finance, and Administration Division (St. Louis-McBurnie and Sanz Tovar 2020). The plan included seventy-five recommendations that touched on the activities of a wide range of stakeholders, from the City and TCH to local social service agencies, the school board, and residents’ organizations. These included general statements about the importance of integrating cultural communities and expanding outreach, as well as specific ideas, such as the creation of community gardens. Some SDP recommendations picked up on aspects of the physical plan—for example, the importance of properly maintaining the new internal streetscapes created as part of the urban design philosophy—while others outlined detailed instructions to TCH on providing replacement spaces for services, programs, and community activities within the new buildings. As a demonstration of commitment to social infrastructure, however, the plan essentially failed. It was never fully funded or implemented by TCH or the City. In 2019, reports suggested that a sum of $7.46M had been provided by the developer as a contribution to social infrastructure in the neighborhood’s redevelopment, and $864,000 was contributed by TCH (City of Toronto 2019b).

According to a city official interviewed, the SDP was neglected due to a lack of support. Despite vocal support for the SDP as a key component of equitable revitalization, the City and TCH did not provide the necessary funding or attention to realize the goals of social development. TCH did not take responsibility for implementing the plan, nor did municipal officials. While the SDP was promoted as an integral part of the revitalization from the outset, the plan was overlooked for more than a decade. Ongoing advocacy work by Regent Park residents, city staff, and the local councilor ultimately effected a shift. A motion passed by the local councilor in a 2019 City Council meeting, alongside resident advocacy efforts focused on highlighting the lack of social development support through formal and informal meetings at Toronto City Hall, helped to bring the challenge back to the attention of City Council (St. Louis-McBurnie and Sanz Tovar 2020).

In spring, 2019, Toronto City Council voted to approve an updated SDP and the city committed $85,000 to hire a manager to oversee the implementation of these efforts through the balance of the revitalization process. By February, 2020, a five-year/$2.5 million budget allocation was approved and was designed to finance a range of new priorities in the updated SDP, everything from mental health training to youth sports leagues, a community website, and small business supports.

The SDP, a document emphasizing a wide range of community-focused priorities, continues to underwhelm in implementation. The SDP was specifically designed with the understanding that physical redevelopment alone would be insufficient to provide the supports needed for public housing residents to thrive in the city. However, with both TCH and the city focused on real estate development and property management to cover the costs of redevelopment, Regent Park’s social development priorities, as articulated in the SDP, were neglected. Despite breaking ground on the redevelopment in 2006, it remains too soon to evaluate whether the most recent iteration of the SDP, and the commitment of both a dedicated manager and funding, will have the intended impact.

Community Benefits Agreement(s)

In addition to the SDP, Regent Park residents and advocates have also engaged in efforts to formalize commitments by the selected property developers to provide community benefits. CBAs are formal contracts between community coalitions and developers or government agencies. They are used in conjunction with large infrastructure and redevelopment projects as a way of guaranteeing benefit to communities experiencing disruption as a result of large-scale construction in exchange for political support, and are often tied to providing benefits to low-income or other vulnerable populations (Wolf-Powers 2010). Examples of community benefits can include local hiring and procurement commitments, affordable housing commitments, funds to build community infrastructure, and, in the case of the redevelopment of Yankee Stadium, tickets to baseball games (Wolf-Powers 2010). Though more commonly used in the United States than in Canada, CBAs have recently become more prominent in Canada in recent years (Alwani 2018).

Although the concept of CBAs was not formalized at the outset of Regent Park’s redevelopment, in 2006, the developer signed a contract in which it agreed to “use best efforts” to hire 10 percent of the workforce locally, a criterion which is typical of a CBA. In the initial phases of redevelopment, this commitment resulted in concerted efforts to encourage local hiring at newly developed commercial spaces within Regent Park, such as a bank, coffee shop, and grocery store. The lengthy and extensive construction process also translated into opportunities for local training and hiring. In the first years of redevelopment, TCH published metrics about the number of residents hired into local jobs on their website, although this information has since been removed. A 2019 city report indicates that 582 jobs were created directly for Regent Park residents in construction, retail, and administration, while another 1,108 residents found work through a City program focused on the neighborhood (City of Toronto 2019b). Detailed data on job creation, including statistics on full- and part-time positions, wage rates, and temporary jobs, was not collected or shared.

Resident leaders relied on their networks and relationships built in the community—with formal and informal associations, elected officials, media, city staff, and housing agency staff—to insist on their right to participate in the developer selection process for phases 4 and 5 of the redevelopment. Furthermore, leaning on established networks and organizations with advocacy experience, resident groups began to advocate for an extensive CBA in conjunction with the final rounds of rebuilding. In 2018, members of the Regent Park Neighbourhood Association (RPNA) reached out to the Toronto Community Benefits Network (TCBN), an organization that seeks to support the development of CBAs that promote economic inclusion in concert with communities, labor, workforce development groups, government, and industry. In turn, the TCBN began work on a strategy to secure meaningful community benefits in the final stages of redevelopment. TCBN assembled a network of local partners which became known as the Regent Park Coalition, and their goal was to obtain a commitment from the housing authority to include a requirement for community benefits prior to the selection of a development partner. In this regard, the residents succeeded at mobilizing and negotiating in ways that forced elected officials and organization leaders to act in their interests.

The Regent Park Coalition persuaded TCH to add language to the request for proposals requiring the bidders on phases 4 and 5 to include a community benefits framework which would be worth up to ten points out of a total of eighty possible points in the evaluation of proposals. According to a community organizer,

The most remarkable achievement of the coalition is that two years ago, we had no say in the language of the request for proposals and the process for allocating the CBA . . . because of resident leadership, we’ve changed the landscape of community benefits and improved community engagement.

The request for proposals stipulated that proposed CBA funding would be spent on jobs/training, scholarships, and community economic development. The decisions about how to allocate community benefits would be the purview of residents’ representatives and not TCH or the developer.

Somewhat ironically, conversations around community benefits have since emerged as a source of tension amongst residents. Despite the success of having a community benefits framework as a requirement for redevelopment, additional challenges arose with respect to identifying funding priorities. For instance, the Regent Park Coalition identified five spending priorities, including more accessible and affordable space for local organizations; funds to subsidize rental apartments in new private Regent Park buildings in perpetuity; and a locally controlled community endowment fund supported by contributions from the developer, TCH, and commercial rents (Regent Park Community Benefits Coalition 2019). TCBN estimated the cost of covering these initiatives to be between $80 and $100 million. Yet, when the selected developer for the final phases of redevelopment was announced in December 2020, an allocation of $26.8 million for community benefits was included, an amount that will not cover all the community priorities for community benefits and serves as a reminder about the limitations that municipal officials face in trying to extract concessions from their development partners. Differences persist in the neighborhood with respect to decisions about how the community benefits funding should be spent. It bears pointing out that residents have a range of priorities, and do not all desire the same outcome—making it difficult to suggest either success or failure related to determining the outcomes of the CBA.

The experiences of both the SDP and the CBA illustrate two key points. First, the development and investment on community supports both distinguish and complicate financialization efforts, adding a layer of expectation regarding what qualifies as success. Second, and this should be obvious but bears stating, in an entrepreneurial, financialized environment, community benefits and social infrastructure remain possible—but to be realized, they must be prioritized, staffed, funded, and measured.

Conclusion

To conclude, we return to three lessons illuminated through the case study of Regent Park and their broader application to understanding large-scale and long duration urban redevelopment in the context of change and uncertainty. Fundamentally, knowledge gleaned from this study includes a deeper understanding of the evolving complexity faced by municipal governments and agencies in delivering public mandates; tensions between economic and social priorities in an environment characterized by entrepreneurial approaches to achieving societal goals; and, in turn, the contemporary challenges created for urban planning and policymaking in service of the public good.

First, this research underscores the inability of municipal governments and agencies to support local housing and development needs without public funding. Local government efforts focused on financialization, as in the case of Regent Park, are a natural outcome of the reduction in public funding for public housing. For Canadian cities, a shortage of opportunities to raise revenues and the downloading of financial responsibility for public housing from more senior levels of governments onto the municipal property tax base contributed to the conditions in which an entrepreneurial, financialized redevelopment model was the only path forward. The idea that by leveraging land values alone, public housing can be funded through real estate profits is flawed. Uncertainty, with regard to, for instance, dynamism in construction costs, infrastructure expenses, and ongoing maintenance costs, means that very few projects can be self-funding. As other scholars have demonstrated (August et al. 2022), the limitations of a financialized model necessitate public sector interventions, and this is especially the case where public housing is concerned.

Second, we see the interplay and interconnectedness between prioritizing the economics of redevelopment in relation to the social needs and desires of public housing residents. Raising questions about the right to the city (Harvey 2008), and framing the need for redevelopment around serving and improving quality of life opportunities for public housing residents, necessitates a focus on community development. Yet, the economics underpinning redevelopment pulls resources and attention away from the underlying social goals. In the case of Regent Park, we see a return to community development efforts as the redevelopment progresses and shifts, primarily through associational support prioritizing community benefits. The res-ponsibility of garnering community benefits that would be suitable, sufficient, and supportive of the community’s needs required significant organizing and advocacy on the part of residents. Community-led advocacy and organizing preceded the city’s pursuit of improved community benefits and supports. It is through institutional actions and organizing that formal government agencies were pressed to return to the social-serving roots of the redevelopment vision. While this evidence suggests that governments can leverage financialization principles while at the same time prioritizing the needs of vulnerable groups, the voices of community organizations play a key role in ensuring that social benefits continue to be prioritized and formalized as part of the redevelopment agenda.

And third, this case study illustrates the ways in which public housing redevelopment focused on a financialized model challenges urban planners and policymakers in efforts to build inclusive and just cities. As the case of Regent Park demonstrates, prioritizing inclusion requires commitment, resources, advocacy, ongoing learning, an awareness of unintended consequences, and a willingness to change course as conditions evolve. It also reveals the limits of well-intentioned entrepreneurial governance, given the context of extended time horizons, financial uncertainty, and political volatility. In an environment in which a series of policy decisions dictated that public funding for public housing was unavailable, the rebuilding of Regent Park’s public housing between 2006 and 2021 was possible only through a financialized model. Studies of entrepreneurial governance suggest that the model itself distances vulnerable communities (Aalbers 2020). In practice, however, the case of Regent Park, financialization, albeit imperfect, created a pathway for the city and the community to continue to advocate for, and work towards, more affordable housing, community benefits, inclusion, and social justice. That these have not yet been suitably achieved is cause for further attention.