Towers in the Horizon, Spaces of Home: Reframing Toronto’s Housing Crisis Sneha Sumanth Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Collaborative PhD in Political Economy Carleton University
Abstract Postwar social housing projects in North America were modelled on Les Corbusier’s Ideal City or ‘towers in the park’ architectural typology. Typically located along the edges of cities and composed of clustered regimented concrete block towers amongst lower rise development that sit retreated from the street, these buildings form visible objects in a city’s horizon. In one sense, they resulted from insufficient access to shelter for the working class during the postwar surge of state-supported private home ownership. In another sense, they were created to facilitate the continued growth of the commodification of housing in urban centers. The east and northwest edges of Toronto contain many neighbourhoods constituted by these towers, also known as the inner suburbs, which today house many of the city’s immigrants, lower income, and racialized residents. Within the setting of growing income polarization in Toronto, these neighbourhoods showcase decades of abandonment and neglect. As neoliberal policies infiltrated the city’s housing system in the 1980s, the state retreated from the responsibility of providing shelter through a series of privatizations, deregulations and disinvestments in housing. A continuous decline of federally funded public and social housing projects, and a systematic offloading of state responsibility for daily and generational social reproduction onto the scale of the household, transformed them into derelict relics of the past under attack in all directions by the tentacles of hostile privatism and gentrification. In 2014, the City of Toronto established thirty-one Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs), many of which are composed of postwar inner suburb towers. The NIAs are identified as neighbourhoods with extensive poverty and crime, in need of state structured intervention. Behind this veil of state declared incapacity, and despite the austere appearance of the towers, everyday life continues to unfold within them with extraordinary stories of people’s resilience, struggle, solidarity, and despair, forged by the resistance of daily social reproduction against the anvil of neoliberal housing policy. In this paper, I will re-interpret the city’s housing crisis by problematizing a housing system operating under globalized neoliberal capitalism, and refocus the discourse on material and spatial conditions of home through case studies of three Toronto neighbourhoods labelled as NIAs - Jane and Finch, Regent Park, and Scarborough Village. The goal of the paper is to draw out the various interlocking matrices of power dynamics between the neoliberal state and the residents of Toronto, and their resulting transformation of the city’s built environment.
Which Crisis? Re-interpreting the Housing Crisis Housing around the world is in a state of crisis. Accelerating development consciously line the pockets of a select few, while pushing most into precarious conditions that affect all aspects of their lives. Decisions on the nature of housing development in a particular landscape are made elsewhere, by nameless entities interested purely in commodity (Marcuse and Madden 2016), taking on a placelessness that can only be attributed to the vagabond nature of capitalism (Katz 2001b). While the housing crisis is widely recognized, there is no deep understanding as to why it occurs, or what can be done about it (Marcuse and Madden 2016). The wide perception of the housing crisis is that an otherwise well-functioning housing system occasionally fails and need fixing. In most cities the crisis is seen as new and temporary, compartmentalized into an economic, social, or political issue. Attempts to resolve it are similarly temporary and isolated and do not acknowledge the deeper, structural issues at play (Kothari 2015). Marcuse and Madden (2016) posit that housing crises are not a result of systems breaking down, but of the system working as it intends to. Crisis is the predictable, default outcome of housing systems caught in the throes of capitalist spatial production. Its use in mainstream media and politics as a new, recent, and short-lived emergency is problematic. In reality, for the poor and working class, being in crisis with housing is the norm, and has been so for centuries (Marcuse and Madden 2016). Furthermore, it is often the more visible effects of the housing crisis that are given prominence both by the public and the state, leaving a majority of experiences of housing insecurity to go unaddressed (Cox et al. 2019). The crisis at hand can only be understood by problematizing the very nature of the current housing system. This calls for a close look at the inner workings of the housing system and the resulting material and spatial realities of people’s lives. Marcuse and Madden (2016) note that the shape of the housing system in any given location is an outcome both of priorities of the neoliberal state, and of the struggles between different groups and classes in society. There is a push and pull in the power dynamics of the housing crisis, both between the neoliberal state and its people, as well as between various race, gender, and class groups, and all of these occur in interlocking matrices of power (Lipsitz 2011; Ruddick 1996). In this paper I will examine these power dynamics and highlight the various spatial and material qualities of the home and neighbourhood formed as a result of their intimate relationships. Housing under globalized neoliberal capitalism The particular nature of the crisis faced today is unique to the conjuncture we find ourselves in – that of a housing system embedded in the operations of neoliberal capitalism operating at a global scale (Marcuse and Madden 2016). All around the world, the neoliberal model has prioritized housing as an elite commodity as opposed to a fundamental right for all human beings (Kothari 2015). Presently, neoliberalism utilizes the accelerated mobilization of the state as a puppet of capitalism, a twofold power exercised simultaneously at multiple geographical scales (Smith 2010). For housing, this means that even if the housing crisis appears in many forms around the world, such as postwar high rises in Toronto, border migrant encampments, favelas in Brazil, or slums in India, they originate from the same root problem: that of the 2
hyper-commodification of housing under globalized neoliberal capitalism. (Marcuse and Madden 2016; Rolnik 2019). Katz (2008) notes that neoliberal capitalism operates most apparently and with the greatest strength on housing. The commodification of housing today has reached a height of ideological dominance, where public interest, common good, and the prevalence of poverty and inequality, are overlooked in the name of the market. We live in a world where the entrenched idea is that the housing market means freedom, choice, and liberty, and the associated language that goes with this logic has taken away the consciousness to question what might be going wrong on a global scale (Hall and Massey 2010). As for the role of globalization, the current conjuncture is not simply about capital and commodities going global (as this has been the case for a long time), but that this global scale is being rescaled into the metropolitan level; where cities are becoming platforms of global production (Smith 2010). This is causing a dramatic increase in value placed into the core of cities where capital lives, and a systematic out-casting of marginalized populations to the disinvested peripheries of cities through spatial, social, and political mechanisms (Smith 2010; Rolnik 2019). Housing today is in a state of hyper-commodification. The opposing forces of polarization at work in metropolitan cities are stronger than they have ever been. State sanctioned mortgage practices such as redlining and racist patterns of land use employed in the 20th century having had their impact for close to a century (Lipsitz 2011). The repercussions of this are prevalent today with racialized people being ‘house poor’. Ongoing predatory lending and deregulations in home financing that disproportionately affect Black and Latino populations continue, reverberate through their homes, neighbourhoods, schools, and health care networks, deep into their social identity (Lipsitz 2011; Marcuse and Madden 2016).
The People and the State The State Retreats The postwar era of housing in the United States and Canada took on a model of state supported private homeownership (Rolnik 2019; Marcuse and Madden 2016). However, the commodification of housing did not adequately serve the social production and reproduction of the working class. In response, municipalities and charities built the very first examples of social housing (Marcuse and Madden 2016). In this way, social housing was born out of the inadequacies of the commodification of housing. Or in another sense, it was born to support the continued presence of the commodification of housing, embodying the contradictory relationship between social reproduction and capitalism. In Canada, neoliberalism made its presence in housing policy in the 1980s when governments moved away from the responsibility of housing provision through a series of privatizations, deregulations and disinvestments (Borras 2016). In 1986, public and social housing distribution was reassigned to provincial and territorial governments. In the 1990s, federal social housing was cancelled, and housing authorities were decentralized. This continuous decline of federally funded public and social housing projects under the operatives of neoliberalism has resulted in the deeply problematic experiences of housing insecurity disproportionately affecting 3
marginalized populations today (Borras 2016). The turn of the millennium is seeing a huge push in dislocated investments, where giant walls of placeless floating capital are constantly landing in locations all over the world as a spatial fix for overaccumulation in the form of housing developments (Rolnik 2019; Marcuse and Madden 2016). From the many decades of an ownership privileged housing system inaccessible to many Canadians, the gap between rich and poor has increasingly grown. The measured demographics alone point to drastic overrepresentation amongst vulnerable people and groups. Indigenous peoples, black peoples, immigrants and minorities, youth, people identifying as 2SLGBTQ+, families and women are highly overrepresented in Canada’s homeless and at risk of homelessness population (Hulchanski 2002). Often, intersecting aspects of precarity do not get captured. For example, close to half of youth experiencing homelessness in Canada identify as 2SLGBTQ+ and women fleeing violence are at much greater risks for homelessness (Borras 2016). Racialized family homelessness is the fastest growing demographic in Canada. Landlord discrimination is at play towards families with children, single mothers, and those on social assistance (Hulchanski 2002). It is abundantly clear that poor, racialized, gendered and class oppressed peoples bear the brunt of current housing systems. The neoliberal housing policies that have placed access to housing so far out of reach for much of the world’s population successfully disconnect state intervention from the housing market (Rolnik 2019, Kothari 2015). State initiated public housing projects eventually ceased following the claim that a development led housing boom in the private sector would result in a filtering down of opportunities to house the poor (Kothari 2015, Karakusevic 2018). In this hostile environment, existing public and social housing is met with distaste from corporations and public alike and is seen as a hindrance to growth and progress (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). As a result, across Canada and the US, there have been a series of structured disinvestments and retreats from public housing, and an offloading of responsibility for daily and generational social reproduction. The Necessity of Social Reproduction Social reproduction is constituted by the everyday material, social practices that sustain capitalist societies. It is the life force of social formation, it occurs daily and generationally, in multiple spaces and places, through various scales of body, home, community, and state (Katz 2008). I am employing it in the context of housing as it exposes the contradictory and complex relationships between people and capital, home and real estate, and community and state, through an emphasis on how the vital ingredients of social sustenance are constantly thwarted and overlooked in these dichotomies. In recent decades, the combined efforts of the state and capital under neoliberalism have offloaded the responsibility of social reproduction onto individuals, households, and civil society (Katz 2008), in various facets of daily urban life, a central one of which is housing. This is founded in a limited perception of housing that misunderstands it as a site of consumption, instead of one as social production and reproduction (Madden and Marcuse 2016). There is great porosity, in both directions, between the state and the individual through the context of home. Changes in the economy, investment, and disinvestment in various housing stocks and neighbourhoods, the planning of new transportation lines and the resulting 4
property value fluctuations ripple down into the body through their impact on home (Smith 1992). Similarly, the home becomes the geographical scale and arena for struggle, resistance and mobilization, and no other modern commodity has been as important for organizing against the oppressive forces of capitalism and neoliberalism (Madden and Marcuse 2016). Struggles in and against the neoliberal housing system are an arena for imagining alternative social and political orders. Katz (2008) notes how situations of crisis in social reproduction provide opportunity for the reinvention of everyday material social practices that can create long lasting and permanent structural change. The resilience, resistance and mobilization seen in the fight for social reproduction can be a revolutionary rupture (Hall and Massey 2010) that shifts our understanding of the current housing crisis. I will next ground this proposition through a look at stories of housing struggles and lived experiences of housing insecurity in the material fabric of housing in Toronto, Canada.
Toronto’s Third City Situating Toronto in Growing Polarization Toronto is a transnational metropolis. It boasts an identity of diversity and over the years this has become a growing reflection of its position on the global mainstage of economic and cultural networks (Bourdreau et al. 2009). The move for multicultural immigration and marketing Toronto as a welcoming, diverse city without actually providing equitable avenues in labour, housing, health and education has led to visible inequalities and racialized poverty (George 2012). Toronto attracts forty percent of Canada’s immigrants and of these a fifth of households are considered to live in unacceptable housing conditions, many of whom become part of the hidden homeless (Ghosh 2014). Paralleling the disadvantage most newcomers face in the labour market, their experiences in access to housing are marked with systemic discrimination and disadvantages (Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009a; Ghosh 2014). This is exemplified in the relationship between Toronto’s colored immigrants and the city’s postwar high rise social housing projects. In a study of Toronto neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2005, Hulchanski (2010) describes how Toronto is divided into three distinct geographies which he identifies as three cities. The first city is formed by the city center, where high income neighbourhoods close to subway lines undergo an increase in geographical area and income over the course of the study. The third city is formed by marginalized lower income areas in the northeastern and northwestern parts of Toronto and sees a steep fall in income and large expansion of geographical area over the course of the study. The second city is located between the other two, a middle-income zone that substantially decreases in geographical area over the course of the study 1. At the end of the study, Hulchanski projects a scenario of intense polarization in 2025 where the three cities morph into two cities if current trends continue without any serious urban policy, planning, and transportation approaches. The first city usurps the remaining north and east runs of the subways line, and the more isolated and disconnected portions of the second city fall into the third.2 Hulchanski geographically documents fluctuations that lead to an 5
intense income polarization in Toronto that is catalyzed by housing commodification, gentrification, and marginalization. The Ideal City: Inner Suburb Highrise Neighbourhoods Like many North American cities, Toronto’s postwar high-rise housing projects were modelled on Les Corbusier’s Radiant City or ‘towers in the park’ architectural typology where a sea of regimented concrete block towers were built with ample open green space that retreat from the street and stand as visible objects in the horizon 3 (Ghosh 2014). Focused on ‘clearing out slums’ and quelling the public unrest emerging from the working class, the spirit of these designs was to make noticeable an application of homogenization, rigor, and sanitization to working class housing. A majority of Hulchanski’s (2010) third city, also know as the inner suburbs, are composed of this typology. These relics of modernity and urban-suburban living house many of the city’s lower income, marginalized and racialized folk who make these buildings their home within the setting of growing exclusivity resulting from the city’s commodification of housing. Toronto’s inner suburbs draw a majority of immigrants in due to the affordability of the units, the family size 2 and 3-bed units and their proximity to work, community spaces and ethnic institutions. Over the 35-year period of Hulchanski’s (2010) report, the number of immigrants in the third city increased dramatically from thirty-one percent to sixty-one percent of the population. By-choice clustering in ethnic enclaves and ‘ethnoburbs’ are a key player too, where immigrants feel a sense of community in neighbourhoods occupied by their cultures (Kataure and Walton-Roberts 2014). This urban landscape showcases decades of abandonment and neglect. From 2005 to 2013, the City of Toronto partnered with the United Way of Greater Toronto to identify thirteen priority areas, all in City 3, that were officially labelled as neighbourhoods with extensive poverty, crime, and in need of social and community services. These have presently grown to 31 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIA) 4, a vast majority of which still lie in the third city. The following are three case studies that tell us fascinating stories of struggle and resilience during experiences of housing insecurity in some of these neighbourhoods. Jane and Finch: Neighbourhood 24 & 25 of the NIA Boudreau, Keil, and Young (2009b) reframe Hulchanski’s (2010) third city as the in-between city, a deprioritized zone caught between a prioritized dense city center and the growing sprawl of outer suburbs. The 1960s saw a surge in the building of public housing in Canada due to amendments in the National Housing Act. In the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, close to a quarter of dwellings were public housing units, following Corbusier’s modernist vision of an ideal city. The coinciding 1967 changes to Immigration Policy saw these newly built housing projects welcoming immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A coupling of the nature of the built environment and the neighbourhood’s demographic posed a unique housing mixture in Toronto and became a target of various racial and cultural attacks. After a series of shootings in 2005, these attacks grew to a notorious level of racial and class branding of the neighbourhood as dangerous and unfit for occupation with ‘too much’ public housing and violent crime. 6
With this came heightened policing, monitoring and surveillance in the neighbourhoods, specifically towards youth. However, it also galvanized a series of community initiatives and movements that have slowly merged with state support. The amalgamation of the City of Toronto resulted in a rescaling of public housing responsibility. In 2002, various public housing agencies merged into Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC), now one of the largest landlords in North America. TCHC operates locally through Community Housing Units (CHU). There are three CHUs in Jane and Finch, and each building elects a tenant representative for the CHU. The CHU and TCHC work together to navigate a push and pull between people and state through community initiatives under tight fiscal allowances to better the neighbourhood. Further to this, there are various community organizations that mobilized in the neighbourhood in their own responses to crime as well as need, with continuing efforts in targeted and general initiatives and services. The support of the state in these, albeit challenging and involving constant negotiation, can be seen as a return of the state to public housing (Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009b). The jury is still out on whether these collaborations will yield positively for the people of Jane and Finch, as thus far, the state still yields primarily to commodification, including in the work of TCHC, as the next case study will show us. Regent Park: Neighbourhood 72 of the NIA The original Regent Park development of the 1950s and 1960s was seen as a model community that succeeded in achieving social control through built space and the allowance for moral policing. Typical of postwar modernism, Regent park was the perfect combination of homogenization and segregation - two block compounds that were visually distinct from its surroundings, each identically regimented with isolated units set away from the street for maximum spatial separation 5 (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). Positive impressions of this model community changed with a series of women-led movements in the 1970s demanding better housing quality and safety. This coupled with the simultaneous withdrawal of federal level funding to public housing from the 1970s to 1990s resulted in the rise of public stigmatization of the neighbourhood as crime ridden and drug infested. The 1967 immigration reform also transformed Regent park from a mostly white population to an eighty percent immigrant population with a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009, Ghosh 2014). Most were low income, welfare dependent and unemployed, and many families were led by single mothers. These combined factors and the swarm of urban developers championing gentrification and revitalization as slogan solutions for ‘problematic’ ethnic enclaves (Ghosh 2014), resulted in redevelopment as the applied solution to Regent Park. The redevelopment proposal included two times the number of housing units and employed an “economic, social and cultural recolonization strategy” (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009, 121) that recommodified the previously homogenous segregated public housing complex into a neighbourhood with social mixing - normalizing language for gentrification - through a range of building types, tenures, incomes, uses, and activities. The recolonialization took place through a territorial strategy based on the management and control of residents, blatantly touting the idea that low income and racialized populations cannot live normally without external help (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). While the initial plan was to maintain all existing public housing units, contending developers swayed TCHC to settle for 7
40% of the original amount, stating they would relocate these units elsewhere in the city. Urban policy, gentrification, and architectural design transformed Regent Park from postwar public housing attuned to segregate and visibly demarcate the poor, to a culturally recolonized redevelopment that hides and obscures the poor. Crescent Town and Scarborough Village: Neighbourhoods 61 & 139 of the NIA Ghosh (2014) explores two neighbourhoods where Bengali immigrants call the postwar inner suburb high-rises their home. Similar to the homogenization of the original Regent Park from the exterior, these buildings’ design and operation are highly regimented, in an effort to suppress the social difference of people they were built for. Often in need of severe maintenance, they are considered eyesores and concentrations of neglect and poverty by the surrounding city. However, beyond the exterior of the building is the nucleus of home – a complex relationship between people and spatial experiences – both lived and conceived. Amidst the same threatening waves of gentrification disguised as revitalization that Regent Park underwent, residents of this tower face the contradictions of globalized neoliberal capitalism in their everyday lives. On one end they are expected to integrate economically and culturally to routine commodification, and on the other they are consistently denied access to shared resources such as public spaces on the grounds of race, class, and gender boundaries. However, amidst these oppressions, their everyday lives unfold within the building in collaborative social reproduction, developing codependence and community through actions like the shared use of communal space and exchanges of information on important resources. Due to the alienation they faced in public spaces outside the building, common areas like the laundry room became important for social networks. For a lack of exercise, corridors were converted for children to play. Music, dance, and language classes were informally organized in common spaces and the ground floor. A rented apartment was converted for prayers that the residents collectively paid for. A ground floor apartment in many buildings was converted into a grocery store and various other women run businesses were informally operating in apartments, such as daycares and parlors, creating an organic infrastructure of social reproduction in a city that otherwise capitalizes and excludes residents from these supports. For the residents, these buildings were transformed into neighbourhoods reminiscent of their home city, while exterior public spaces felt like a foreign land, and the city a symbol of despair and hopelessness through the active experience of exclusion and discrimination. Within the Bengali communities and amongst other colored communities nearby, global, and national narratives of difference and social identity still took place in the microcosm of the neighbourhood-building. In this way, the boundaries, scales, and meaning of home are expanded and contracted through the transformation of these run down, militarized buildings using the informal and vibrant resilience of people living in insecure housing conditions.
Conclusion These three case studies showcase the various scales and points of impact between a city’s residents and the neoliberal state in the context of the current housing system. Furthermore, these negotiations are grounded in local contexts of time, space, place, community, and identity. While portraying three different narratives, they share in the similarity of providing us 8
an avenue to re-interpret the history and meaning of housing crises through a geographically specific focus on lived experiences of everyday life. There are likely countless different stories such as these in similar Toronto neighbourhoods, perhaps even in other North American metropolitan cities. Each with its own capacity to reframe shallow interpretations of the contemporary housing crisis and problematize the embedded operations of a housing system. Material studies of homes and neighbourhoods can provide a strong opposing force to the apparent logic of housing commodification by directing the discourse to the complexity of people and their everyday lives, as they simultaneously undergo oppression and exercise resilience, both of which leave evident marks in the spatial fabric of cities.
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Appendix 1
Hulchanski’s (2010) study of the three cities in Toronto
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2
Hulchanski’s (2010) projection of Toronto in 2025
3
Le Corbusier’s Ideal City
Retrieved from: http://theinnercity.blogspot.com/2006/01/le-corbusiers-radiant-cities-or-super.html.
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4
Toronto’s Neighbourhood Improvement Areas
Retrieved from City of Toronto: https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-researchmaps/neighbourhoods-communities/nia-profiles/
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