“Yo. What the fuck iz you doin’?”
The rude boy in corn rows is spitting mad.
“Don’t be taken no pictures of me.”
“Gimme that!” Swat. Down goes my camera to the ground.
Three of rude boy’s friends swagger over from around the corner.
I’m in the Yorkwoods Gate housing complex on Grandravine off Jane and Sheppard, one of 13 social housing projects designated for possible redevelopment by Toronto Community Housing (TCH).
I’m here to document the designs that informed circa-1950s and 1970s social housing architecture. And have just inadvertently walked into a hornet’s nest thanks to my Canon digital that seems to be messing with some locals sense of privacy, or security. Tough neighbourhood.
But all’s well that end’s well. I manage to get my camera back after some explaining – and a scroll through my memory card for my newfound friends to prove I wasn’t in possession of any incriminating evidence, so to speak. Phew.
The tense episode has me thinking afterwards.
Journalists are accustomed to getting into places usually closed to others, venturing into hostile territory knowing we’re afforded some protection by our job. Why should we be any different? Is it our sense of entitlement or just arrogance?
Or does my rude awakening have anything to do with the segregated, some would say ghettoized communities, created by the social housing experiments of decades past?
It’s natural to be wary of strangers, especially strangers with cameras who seem to be poking their nose into your business.
But it’s also not a leap to think that the boundaries to social mobility set up by social housing have contributed to a distrust, even resentment, of not only the system, but perceived outsiders in general ie: nosy journalists, cops, people of a different skin colour.
TCH, this country’s biggest landlord, has come to the view that the social housing of the future must be built around mixed neighbourhoods.
It’s hard to argue against the concept. More than half of all people currently in social housing in Ontario are under 18. An astonishing number. It’s important, TCH argues, that they are exposed to and are given the opportunity to reap the benefits that follow from interaction with different groups and classes of people.
The concern of anti-poverty groups is the strategy laid out by TCH to create the mixed communities of the future – namely, the selling off of housing in disrepair and using the money raised to invest with private builders in new developments.
To anti-poverty groups, the plan is a recipe for gentrification that will ultimately push out the very disadvantaged it’s purporting to help. A fair criticism.
The social consequences of doing nothing, however, seem unthinkable for an entire generation of young people in social housing.
