One of the Mies-designed townhouses in Lafayette Park. Photo by Sarah Ojamae.

As far as downtown architectural landmarks go, it’s hard to miss the Toronto-Dominion Centre. Its sleek, black, rectangular appearance proudly demonstrates the modernist style of its architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. While Mies projects like Westmount Square and the former Esso gas station on Nun’s Island dot the landscape of Montreal, just past the western end of Highway 401 sits the world’s largest collection of his work. A short distance northeast of the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel is Lafayette Park, one of the United States’ first urban renewal projects.
Thanks to the foresight of the team who developed it, Lafayette Park has resisted the decay that has afflicted Detroit in the years since its groundbreaking in 1956. The neighbourhood stands as a well-planned, mixed-race urban neighbourhood that merited placement on the National Register of Historic Places. The site also provides possible inspiration for those planning urban residential development in healthier cities like Toronto.

The Toronto-Dominion Centre. Top photo by jamiegreen08 and bottom photo by articlamb, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Conceived in the wake of a 1943 race riot and postwar renewal, Lafayette Park was built over the remains of a predominantly African-American neighbourhood known as “Black Bottom” (whose name reportedly derived from the colour of the soil, not its inhabitants). As happened in the south end of Cabbagetown during the same era to make way for Regent Park, Black Bottom was bulldozed and its previous inhabitants moved into public housing complexes like the Brewster and Jeffries projects. Unlike Regent Park, the new housing scheme for Lafayette Park was geared toward middle-class renters and homeowners enticed by the promise of suburban living within the city. To Mies, replacing urban slums was a more sensible means of urban development than building sprawling suburban homes and subdivisions: “Instead of eating up the land they should have been developed as tall and low buildings in a reasonable way.”

Lafayette Tower West, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Photo by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.

That’s how Lafayette Park proceeded. The plan—originally developed by Mies, urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, developer Herbert Greenwald, and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell—envisioned several high-rise apartment buildings and a series of one-to-two-storey townhouses surrounding a 52-acre park in the middle of the neighbourhood. According to Mies, “If you build high, you must have enough space to live upon”—a principle he applied to residential and commercial projects alike (and typified in Toronto by the generous outdoor space surrounding the TD Centre). Though factors such Greenwald’s death in a 1959 plane crash dismantled the original team and led to other parties being involved in the final phases of construction, much of the vision for Lafayette Park remained intact.
While the apartments were easy to rent out, the co-op townhouses were a tougher sell. As the greenery that now surrounds them was just sprouting, residents felt that the square shape of the buildings and the sparse landscaping made them feel like occupants of a motel.

Marker proclaiming Lafayette Park’s place on the National Register of Historic Places. Photo by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.

While young professionals and first-time homeowners were attracted to the project, once their children reached school age they tended to move out to avoid dealing with Detroit’s declining education system. While the departure of young middle-class tenants led Toronto residential complexes like St. James Town to become home to poorer residents, Lafayette Park remained stable amid the decline of much of Detroit following the 1967 riots, partly due to city regulations that required Detroit municipal workers to live within city limits and partly due to the neighbourhood’s well-groomed, semi-secluded location.
Even when government housing assistance programs reserved space in the apartment buildings during a higher-than-usual vacancy period in the early 1990s, the results seem to have been more along the lines of mixed-income Toronto neighbourhoods like St. Lawrence Market than a stereotypical descent into crime-infested hell. The lack of balconies and other touches meant to foster privacy in Mies’s design removed markers of social class, so that from the outside it was hard to tell which units were occupied by market renters and which by government-assisted tenants. Events like pool parties and neighbourhood picnics fostered a community spirit. Many of the low-income tenants moved on after agreements with the government ended in 1998 and the neighbourhood took on a tonier air.
Townhouse prices, which remained low for decades, took off as the 21st century dawned, a reflection of increased appreciation for the now-historic architecture, attractive landscaping, and the safety of the neighbourhood. And with Detroit’s increasing potential and attractiveness as a city to incubate businesses like new technology firms and urban farms, we imagine the appeal of Lafayette Park will increase.

Mies van der Rohe Plaza, with Lafayette Tower West in the background. Photo by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.

Mies’s contributions to Lafayette Park are honoured in a corner of the Lafayette Towers Center shopping plaza. Between storefronts with varying degrees of vacancy (the opening of Lafayette Foods was considered big news in June, as a sign supermarket owners are willing to invest in Detroit) sits Mies van der Rohe Plaza. Standing in front of the nameplate, you can stare forward and admire the architectural design of the apartment towers.
Lafayette Park shows one way urban redevelopment projects could have enticed people to stay in cities rather than spread into the suburbs or made suburban developments more land-effective. The neighbourhood demonstrates the role of careful thought during development—as opposed to some Toronto condos where it feels like buying the land to build upon was the only planning consideration. It shows that architectural and landscaping considerations play a large role in whether a planned neighbourhood can develop into a community or, as in the case of some postwar public housing projects in Detroit and Toronto, become so dysfunctional that another round of renewal is required. We’re currently witnessing the transformation of Regent Park into what is intended to be a stable, mixed community that includes high- and low-rise dwellings and public space. Stay tuned to see if in 50 years, this new housing stock remains as desirable as the community built by Mies, Hilberseimer, Greenwald and Caldwell in Detroit.
Additional material from CASE: Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Charles Waldheim (New York: Prestel, 2004) and Conversations with Mies van der Rohe, edited by Moisés Puente (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

CLARIFICATION: August 8, 2011, 12:10 PM This post originally referred to Alfred Caldwell as the “landscaper” of Lafayette Park instead of its “landscape architect.” We’ve changed the wording to make his role in the development’s creation clearer.

Photo of Regent Park by L. S. Edwards from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Just before the May 24 fireworks reignited the ongoing Pride/anti-QuAIA debate at yesterday’s Executive Committee meeting, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s (still) one-man board of Case Ootes was given the go ahead to sell off 22 properties. (City council will need to approve the recommendation at its next meeting, so further debate is certainly still possible.) While possessing moments of drama and emotion, the TCHC debate ultimately lacked the highly-charged personal edge that gripped the Pride v. anti-QuAIA deputations. Perhaps that’s what happens when only one side holds all the cards.
What Tuesday’s TCHC process was also lacking was concrete answers. And not just answers to pointed questions from visiting councillors looking to score political points. Honest-to-goodness answers to honest-to-goodness questions asked by the mayor’s allies on the Executive Committee.
Like much of the rush to foist the Ford Nation mandate onto Toronto, there’s a sense that the mayor and his team don’t have to explain themselves. They won the election, so they’re free to do as they want. All this back and forth is simply wasting time. Pitter patter, let’s get at her!

It was in evidence at last week’s council meeting and the debate over proposed garbage outsourcing west of Yonge—City staff and privatization advocates were all a little hazy when it came to the numbers and figures. Would it save $8 million? If not, how much? Any? What about diversion rates? Different? On par? Improved?
Stop with all the questions, already! We campaigned on privatizing garbage. We won. We’re going to privatize garbage.
Likewise, Ootes and TCHC CEO Len Koroneos didn’t seem particularly driven to talk turkey about their recommendation to unload the 22 housing units. How many tenants would be affected by the sell off? Ummm… let me check my notes. 32? Who would be in charge of relocating the tenants losing their homes? Ummm… not sure. “The Planning Department’s not here,” the mayor offered up by way of an answer. What would be the difference in cost to the City between putting in necessary repairs and renovations and continuing to rent out units and simply unloading them as is? Ummmm… we’ll have to get back to you on that, councillor.
“A huge absence of information,” Councillor Janet Davis (Ward 31, Beaches-East York) suggested.
The committee wasn’t even provided with definitive numbers when it came to such fundamental inquiries about how much the City could really expect to get for selling the houses. Ootes is thinking close to $16 million. Others like Michael Shapcott at the Wellesley Institute aren’t convinced the number will be that high. Whatever sum it ends up being, the money will be applied to the backlog of repairs on other TCHC properties, which is now in the neighbourhood of $650 million.
Another number that came as a surprise to some councillors at the meeting: that $650 million is triple the repair-backlog estimate from just two years ago. And if that’s true, it’s hard to imagine how $16 million is going to make a lick of difference in their bigger picture, especially if we’re ultimately reducing the amount of rental units available to a list that’s already 10 years long to do it.
That seemed to be one thing we could safely conclude would happen if the sale gets approved by City council: less TCHC housing to go around. “A reduction of capacity,” as Ootes admitted reluctantly. But, he was quick to add, we weren’t responsible. “We’re not reducing capacity,” Ootes spun. “Capacity’s being reduced because we don’t have the money.”
It is a new age, a new reality, according to Councillor Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West). “We’re on our own,” he informed the room. We should never expect to see money from senior levels of government ever again. That was that.
So, wave the white flag and agree to be the hatchet men, to do the bidding of the provincial and federal governments’ respective and collective negligence in the social housing portfolio. Instead of standing up and fighting to protect the most vulnerable in our city, members of the mayor’s Executive Committee voted to use them as fodder, sacrifices to the new order. Making tough choices, it seems, means making other people pay for your lack of imagination and willingness to go to bat for your constituents.
“This particular sale of 22 houses is a start,” the unelected, unaccountable Ootes told reporters, undoubtedly striking fear into the hearts of every TCHC tenant.
For all the talk of having to go it alone and make choices out of necessity, due to fiscal restraints and not personal preference (the mark of all small-minded municipal politicians who operate happily under the umbrella of not bearing ultimate responsibility), the irony of the decision to sell the houses is that, even if City council agrees, it is still pending provincial government approval. What the Executive Committee signaled, really, with its vote to sell off TCHC properties, was that it was willing to get its hands dirty and be the bad guy.

Rob Ford speaks to the press briefly after council’s late-night Wednesday session.

For some, city council’s decision late Wednesday night to change the face and structure of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s board is a symbolic first step towards restoring public faith in the organization. Mayor Ford and many councillors who supported his calls for immediate resignations and removals emphasized a need for rapid action in the face of a crisis. Swift action, they argued, shows the public you’re serious. Well, sometimes haste also makes waste, and interferes with rules and processes that lead to the accountability we all demand.
Council decided to fire the remaining TCHC board members without even officially receiving auditor general Jeffrey Griffiths’ reports on spending and procurement improprieties. Mayor Ford, when questioned, said he did not not consult Griffiths or the City’s legal staff before asking council to replace the remaining four board members with Case Ootes, who will serve as lone director. This, after City staff repeated during questioning that the board members were not accused of any fraud or misconduct.

The mayor and other councillors conducted a debate on a report they could not reference without being ruled out of order. They used terms like “issues like these” or “whatever” to refer to the allegations of misspending in “the report that shall not be named”—the same allegations that the mayor was at the same time using to justify his request to fire and replace the board. He acted before the audit committee could even meet to review the report, and cancelled the executive committee meeting where TCHC tenants and other concerned Torontonians had signed up to give deputations and answer questions from councillors.
This swift action led to a quick dismissal of board members who wanted to continue serving. But the bypassing of processes meant to inform leaders before they act is an unnecessary and unsettling move. Mayor Ford remarked in his opening statements last night that his motion “is not about who did what and who didn’t.” But isn’t that exactly what concerned residents and stakeholders were after?

Adam Vaughan consoles a TCHC tenant upset at the conclusion of Wednesday’s meeting.

The public has no idea who misspent money at TCHC, exactly what rules were broken, how the persons involved avoided checks and safeguards, and whether or not they have been fired. We know that it wasn’t board members who violated the policies, but council has removed them anyway. Even the alternate tenant representatives, who never attended a meeting and were not, by anyone’s account, implicated in the wrongdoing were removed. Swift, yes—but not necessary or helpful in finding out who did what.
Council also decided to appoint Ootes, the leader of Ford’s transition team, as a lone director where thirteen once served. Council rightly limited his tenure to this June, but failed to restrict any existing powers of this new board of one. If Ootes is interested in moving the TCHC in another direction during his short service, he can do so without the voting input of tenant directors. Again, while this ensures that Ootes can move quickly to address problems at TCHC, it also means the board is, in number and in nature, necessarily less representative of TCHC tenants and Torontonians.
Ootes’ first move as interim director will no doubt be to assure tenants he intends to put them first. But council erred in asking tenants to take him at his word instead of maintaining their direct tenant representation and voting power. City staff said they couldn’t name an agency or commission whose board consists of a lone director. We don’t see how the speed employed to give him so much authority promotes accountability or restores public trust. If anything, Ootes will (or at least should) now be expected to spend time creating mechanisms for tenant input in lieu of the tenant reps.
In the same way, members of council should not have to rely on the mayor’s word and media reports when they have standing audit and executive committees, and an army of staff who can inform their actions. The fact that Ford asked council to make a decision on information it could not reference or debate merits serious scrutiny and concern. This practice undermines accountability and delivers decisions for the sake of appearing decisive instead of ones that are in the public interest.
Council did narrowly vote to publicize the expense records of board members, as well as staff who earn more than $100,000 a year. Yet the mayor and nearly all councillors who supported the board restructuring voted against these disclosures. Those (including Mayor Ford) who argued most passionately for swift removal of the old board also voted against setting a June deadline for appointing new one, although this measure also passed by a slim margin.
Our representatives must explain why their votes on these matters appear to sharply contradict their calls for timeliness and transparency. If council hopes to preserve its own claims to accountability in the wake of the TCHC changes, it needs to base decisions on “who did what, and who didn’t,” rather than “he said, she said,” “we’ll worry about that later,” and “trust us.”
Photos by Christopher Drost/Torontoist.

Photo by Nick Kozak from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

This afternoon at 5:30, city council will hold an “emergency” meeting to determine whether tenants of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation will have a voice on the body’s interim board of directors. Seven citizen members and two council members of the board resigned last week after two audits revealed reckless abuses of TCHC procurement and accounting policies. Mayor Rob Ford is now seeking to remove the remaining four directors, two of whom are elected TCHC tenant representatives Dan King and Catherine Wilkinson. The mayor reportedly plans to replace the board with Case Ootes, the former councillor who also led the mayor’s post-election transition team, to serve as a lone interim director of the TCHC.
Yesterday city council held one of its regular planned monthly meetings; we spoke with several councillors in the evening, after a lengthy and divisive session. Among those most vocally opposed to the TCHC board restructuring is councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale), who maintains that the tenant representatives “are elected by tenants, and tenants are the only people who should be able to rescind them.” McConnell expressed concerns about replacing elected tenant reps with a lone director, even on an interim basis. “If, for example, [Councillor] Doug Ford doesn’t like the job I’m doing, he can’t just ask council to get rid of me. He has to accept that I’ve been elected by my constituents, just as he has. ”

An excerpt from Adam Vaughan’s open letter on the TCHC, sent to constituents yesterday (and from which this post’s title is taken).

McConnell’s sentiments were strongly echoed by Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), who warned that mayor Ford was threatening to end “a tradition of tenant representation that dates back over more than fifteen years, to the Metro Housing Authority.” Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale-High Park) agreed, adding that council has options for ensuring continued board representation for tenants. And while many TCHC residents are very upset with the reports from the auditor detailing misconduct, they are also rejecting calls to summarily dismiss their chosen representatives.
When council approved Wilkinson and King to the TCHC board in 2008, it also approved as alternate tenant reps the two candidates who placed third and fourth respectively in the tenant elections. Perks said the alternates have not attended any TCHC meetings nor made any official decisions—they aren’t touched by the current scandals, in other words. “We can let them serve, or we can allow the current reps to serve until tenants can hold new elections,” said Perks. “Anything else would mean we are hastily, intentionally pushing tenants out of the decision-making process.”
While Councillor Raymond Cho (Ward 42, Scarborough-Rouge River) has publicly said little about keeping tenant reps on the board, he intends to retain his own board position as one of the remaining representatives from city council—the other who has so far refused to step down is Maria Augimeri (Ward 9, York Centre)—stating in a letter to the city clerk [PDF] that since he is a new appointee, “I do not believe that [the] motion will resolve the issues surrounding TCHC by forcing my resignation.”
Other councillors insisted that a swift removal of the remaining board members is a necessity, although none accused these board members themselves of any wrongdoing. Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre) is the one who moved the motion in council yesterday to vary regular procedure and open the debate about dissolving the current board of directors, a motion which failed to get the required two-thirds support needed to pass. He told us that he has received “calls from [TCHC] tenants saying they’re not happy with things that went on.” Holyday added that while he supports the immediate removal of the tenant reps, “they will have a chance to be re-confirmed and regain confidence” in the next round of TCHC elections.
Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East) suggested there are no clear parameters for the length of Ootes’ interim service, and the installation of a new full board of directors. “We’d like to see [tenant] elections happen as quickly as possible,” he said, but rejected any notion that tenant reps should be treated differently from other board members, emphasizing that “they have, in my opinion, even more responsibility…a higher moral obligation to their fellow tenants. They’ll have to defend the decisions they made.”
Tenants and the public can attend tonight’s emergency meeting—it will be held in the council chamber at City Hall—but will not be able to make deputations or address council to share their views.

Photo by MRLG from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

In all the public discussion of Toronto’s operating budget for 2011, there were a few proposed cuts that seemed to hog all the media glory: the TTC bus route service reductions, the possible closure of the Urban Affairs Library. But also on the chopping block is another, less easily understood item, generally given only passing mention in news articles about the City’s finances: the Tenant Defence Fund. Here’s what we were able to find out about it.

WHAT’S THE PROPOSAL?

Cut the City’s Tenant Defence Fund by $100,000, to save money on Toronto’s 2011 operating budget.

HOW WOULD IT AFFECT TORONTO?

To understand how the Tenant Defence Fund affects life in Toronto, we first have to look at the rules that govern rent increases for tenants in Ontario.
Each year the province sets what’s known as a “rent increase guideline.” The guideline is a percentage, tied to the Consumer Price Index, and it’s the maximum amount a residential landlord is allowed to raise a tenant’s rent without seeking special permission. This year’s guideline is 0.7%—the lowest in more than thirty-five years. (Most buildings constructed after 1991 are exempt from the guideline.)
When a landlord wants permission to raise rent by more than the guideline—which can only be done in order to cover renovation expenses, increasing utility costs, or the costs of hiring outside security—he or she has to submit an application to the provincial Landlord and Tenant Board. The application is called an Above Guideline Increase, or AGI.
The Tenant Defence Fund was set up by the City in 1999 primarily to help Toronto renters dispute AGIs. The Fund also provides help for tenants whose landlords want to evict them in order to demolish their apartments or turn them into condos. The original idea was that establishing the Fund would help protect Toronto’s affordable rental housing stock.
The majority of the Fund is paid to the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations (FMTA), who use it to provide outreach services and advice to Toronto tenants.
Geordie Dent, executive director of the FMTA, is understandably displeased by proposed cut. Of the $100,000 on the chopping block, $75,000 would come directly out of his organization’s budget.
“We’re going to have to cut service in some way,” he says. “So some people facing this [AGI] application, we’re essentially going to have to pick and choose and let them know that we can’t help them.”
Dent says the FMTA’s programs help about 30,000 people per year.
The Fund also endows a pot of money for grants that the City awards to groups of tenants (not individuals) who need money to fight an AGI, a demolition, or a condo conversion. If the City approves the $100,000 cut, the grant fund would be reduced from $75,000 to $50,000 in 2011.

HOW MUCH WOULD IT COST OR SAVE?

A spokesperson for the City’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration division tells us that the City spent $446,800 on the FMTA last year, on top of the $75,000 grant fund.
The cut would reduce that expenditure by $100,000 in 2011.

IS IT BALANCED?

It appears to be.
Since the Fund was established in 1999, there have been some changes in the laws that govern the relationship between landlords and tenants. The old Tenant Protection Act of 1997 was superseded by a new piece of provincial legislation called the Residential Tenancies Act of 2006, which came into force in 2007. The Residential Tenancies Act significantly curbs the power of AGIs.
Under the Residential Tenancies Act, above guideline increases are capped at 3% per year, for a maximum of three years. And when rent is increased with an AGI, it goes back down to guideline levels automatically when whatever extraordinary expense the landlord used to justify the AGI no longer applies. So if a landlord gets an AGI to cover renovation costs, the increase is gone after a prescribed period—though that period varies from case to case, and could be longer than a decade.
And so AGIs, the main things the Tenant Defence Fund was created to defend tenants against, are still a concern, but are no longer as formidable as they once were.
The trouble with cutting the Fund is that tenants don’t get the same kind of help from other sources. The province pays for legal aid clinics that help low-income tenants with certain kinds of landlord disputes, but Kenn Hale, director of the provincially funded Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO), doesn’t think this makes the Fund redundant.
“Provincially funded clinics have some significant constraints on what kind of work they do,” he says. “They’re really focused on low-income people. Since half the people that live in Toronto are tenants, a big chunk of them are not low-income people.”
“I would probably say the majority of tenants in Toronto don’t qualify for [provincial] legal clinic service. It doesn’t mean they’re well off; it just means that the eligibility rules for legal aid are very low.”
The Fund isn’t quite so selective about who it helps. The FMTA’s outreach services and advice are available to all, and grants from the Fund are given to groups of tenants who meet certain not-too-stringent criteria.
Hale doesn’t believe the province would step in to fill a gap in City-funded tenant service.
“I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “I think what’s going to happen is that the people who [the FMTA] was serving are not going to get service. Those proposals for rent increases…are going to go ahead without effective opposition.”
Brad Butt, president of the Greater Toronto Apartment Association, a group that advocates for landlords, says that in his experience provincially funded aid clinics have become involved in many AGI disputes, and that in any case, the Fund has outlived its usefulness.
“The whole idea of the Tenant Defence Fund in 1999 and 2000…was that tenants did not have that empowerment and that therefore the City needed to step in. That’s clearly not the case in 2011,” he says.
“I think the cut that’s being recommended is a fair one in light of how the world has changed over the past ten years.”
Butt is biased, but he has a point. Now that AGIs—the Fund’s main reason for existing—are weaker, it makes sense that City staff, under a directive from the top to cut costs, would choose this particular thing to trim. The amount of money that would be saved is miniscule compared to the City’s total operating budget, and cutting “tenant defence” sounds terrible—but under the circumstances, it appears to be fair. Tenants will still get help dealing with AGIs, just not quite as much as in the past.
Though it should be noted that Dent, the FMTA executive director, does not agree with this assessment.
“I have no idea why it’s being singled out to be cut,” he said recently.
“Mr. Ford has donated to us at our past fundraisers, so we’re essentially baffled as to why this is happening, with no notice, with no forewarning.”
Yes, Ford apparently made a donation.
“He gave us fifty dollars at one of our fundraisers years ago.”
Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist.

CORRECTION: February 21, 2:01 PM This article originally stated, incorrectly, that AGIs due to capital expenditures are eliminated after construction is complete. In fact, such AGIs go into effect only once construction is complete, and last for period of time prescribed by provincial law in accordance with the project’s “useful life.”

Photo of King, Queen, and Roncesvalles, looking southeast, by Alfred Pearson, April 17, 1923. City of Toronto Archives, Series 71, Item 2014.

Parkdale was established in the late nineteenth century as a suburban enclave where middle-class families could enjoy parks, the lakeshore, and the new exhibition grounds far from the bustle of the central city. Over the course of the twentieth century, Parkdale became increasingly seen as a slum at the end of a downward spiral. Then, in more recent years, the neighbourhood has been resurrected as a gentrifying urban village. So goes the commonly accepted version of Parkdale’s history.
But it’s all bunk. In Suburb, Slum, Urban Village (UBC Press, 2009), Carolyn Whitzman, an Australia-based lecturer in urban planning, explodes the simplistic narrative of decline and rejuvenation. Whitzman—who lived in Parkdale both as a tenant battling her building’s slumlord and later as a home-owner with a young family—argues instead that this uncomplicated image of Parkdale was repeated by journalists, real estate agents, local politicians, and social reformers until it became a taken-for-granted, dominant urban myth. But their version of events obscured the neighbourhood’s true diversity throughout its history. As a nascent middle-class suburb, the majority of residents actually walked to their jobs in the nearby industrial and railroad works; even as it was labelled a slum, it still provided good quality housing for those with moderate incomes; and, even as it became “a community of landlords and tenants in the City of Homes,” institutional lenders like the St. Stanislaus’ Credit Union helped working-class Polish and other immigrant communities become homeowners.
With some impressive digging through city directories, assessment records, land registry books, and building permits, Whitzman is able to compare cultural images of Parkdale to the neighbourhood’s real economic and social conditions. The result is an impressive book that demonstrates that the way history is framed—what/who is included or left out—and how we talk about the city has an impact on urban planning and real lives.

Photo by –richelle– from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Rummaging through oral histories recorded in the 1970s—which Whitzman ably employs to illuminate the personal side of living in Parkdale absent from mere statistics—she comes across the story of Ethel Abel. Abel recalled how, growing up, her Parkdale neighbours “were mainly professional people, lawyers, doctors, retired academics and so on.” Upon Whitzman’s closer inspection of assessment records, however, she discovers that Abel’s remembrances—while not exactly untruthful—were more likely her way of putting a positive spin on the adversity her own family faced.
After Abel’s dad’s tailor shop went bankrupt in the mid-1890s, prominent friends secured him a position at the nearby provincial lunatic asylum—a step down from owning his own business. “By the turn of the century,” Whitzman writes, “the family was renting out at least part of their twelve-room house, which by the 1930s had become a full boarding house. Rather than a story of residential stability and middle-class affluence, as it was used, Abel’s narrative can be seen as an example of the lengths to which some Parkdale families went in preserving an image of stability and affluence in the face of downward mobility.” Yet her story was published in neighbourhood newspapers, the Star, and repeated verbatim in planning reports in the 1970s and 1980s. The example illustrates the common pattern of urban mythology, left unquestioned, impacting public policy.
As Toronto steadily expanded outward in the early twentieth century, Parkdale was increasingly associated with the disorder of the central city rather than the suburbs. Moreover, Parkdale was home to a large stock of “flexible housing”—large houses that were converted into apartments during times of economic recession or high housing demand (and could be later de-converted). At certain historical moments, flexible housing was common at times across Toronto—35% of city households had lodgers during the 1890 economic depression, and 33% did in 1931. But, while neighbourhoods like Rosedale and the Annex actively resisted subdivided houses and eventually succeeded in getting the desired zoning protections, Parkdale’s flexible housing helped get the neighbourhood defined as a slum in 1934′s Bruce Report on housing conditions in Toronto. Parkdale’s housing stock was generally surveyed as being fair-to-good, but its housing forms didn’t fit the acceptable norms and the Bruce Report’s label stuck.
That Parkdale was a problem in need of major renewal became an accepted tenet of city planning. Zoning decisions in the 1940s and 1950s protected Rosedale and the Annex and others at the top of a hierarchy of good neighbourhoods. Parkdale, on the other hand, was near the bottom and an obstacle standing in the way of progress—as symbolized by the proposal to build the Gardiner Expressway. Not everyone, however, agreed with the doom and gloom of city planners. Immigrants empowered by their community’s institutional lenders transformed swaths of Parkdale into havens for working-class homeownership generations before Parkdale’s gentrification.

Photo by Lone Primate from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Parkdale’s decline into slum status by the 1960s and 1970s, when Whitzman detected a “decisive change in the health and welfare of neighbourhood residents,” was not accidental or inevitable but the sum of planning and political decisions. It was also facilitated, she continues, by the city’s over-emphasis on policing the class of housing instead of housing conditions.
Over the course of the century, municipal officials campaigned against immoral apartment houses in its earliest years, and looked down upon flexible housing in the 1930s and bachelorettes—or single room–occupancy units—more recently, rather than focusing on the quality of the housing or on the welfare of the citizens. The sad irony is that the city was never particularly successful at preventing any of these housing forms in Parkdale. And for all the rhetoric of city-building and calls for good housing, in practice “the regulations sought to limit housing choices for low-income people.” With a selective reading of history that ignored just how socially diverse Parkdale had been throughout its past, government policy privileged the priorities “of the minority—higher-income single-family homeowners—and ignored the needs of the majority—lower-income families and singles living in rented accommodation.” Whitzman’s political leanings are clear from her emphasis on social justice. But rather than targeting any particular politicians or parties, she targets the unequal division of power.
Whitzman’s intended audience is academic—and the book includes the requisite extended excursions through terminology, sources, and the broader intellectual debates impacting her work. Parkdale, then, is a case study she’s placing within the much broader academic context of urban theory, seeking to provide a “deep understanding of one place which is transferable, with modifications, to” other cities in Australia, the United States, and Britain. The localist wishes for some more sustained comparative discussion of the neighbourhood in relation to other Toronto neighbourhoods, like Rosedale and the Annex (both of which are mentioned at times) to clarify how specific decisions in one of our neighbourhoods affect others and to provide better understanding of exactly how other neighbourhoods succeeded while Parkdale failed.
Although as an academic book Whitzman’s argument defies easy or singular narrative, her deft handling of sources rewards with fascinating detail. In one case, it allows her to demonstrate the neighbourhood’s downward evolution through the prism of two individual properties:

On Dowling Avenue, for instance, a house owned by a barrister in 1913 was rented by his son to a car dealer in 1931. By 1951, it was owned by an absentee landlord and had been subdivided into four flats, lived in by a clerk, a salesman, an engineer, and a postal clerk. James Beaty’s villa, occupied by his widow in 1913, had been subdivided into three flats by 1931, rented to a civil engineer, a designer, and a widow. In 1951, these three flats were rented to another widow, a barber, and a booker.

Her book is a reminder that local histories and the assumptions we make about our communities need to be unpacked, questioned, and investigated further to come to a deeper understanding. It’s also a reminder about the power that language carries whenever we talk about the city and city-building. Loaded terms, which over-simplify a neighbourhood’s complexity, serve only to skew debate. After all, as Whitzman notes, if Parkdale is talked about as “a scapegoat, a dumping ground, barren and sterile,” it’s a small step to dismissing its residents with dehumanizing language like “riff raff” and “two-legged rats.”