Cynthia Rosefield has been an activist since 1986 when she became homeless and fought the system to get AFFORDABLE HOUSING. Rules were changed for everybody as a result of her efforts. She is a long time resident of TCHC  and has been working in Lawrence Heights for 23 years as an advocate and activist.

She is also a GRADUATE of VOICES FROM THE STREET 2005-6, and a member of the EDITORIAL BOARD of PEACOCKPOVERTY.

The Lawrence Heights Commmunity: Now And After Revitalization

by Cynthia Rosefield

Photos by Ron Craven

Ron began taking pictures of hydro poles. They were painted with bright colors and hopeful sentiments from our Youth.  The community health promoter, Domenic Brizzi, who is a safe harbor for residents, directed this  youth initiative and they’d  done a wonderful job of uplifting the neighborhood.

A youth initiative  to spruce up their ‘hood.       

We walked to my house which fortunately I’d tidied up. They commented on how spacious it was, the window in the bathroom, the yard, as well as the new cupboards sideboard. All that seemed to be needed was a good paint job.  I have been here 9 years now and I haven’t painted although it would not have been a huge burden on the maintenance budget.  If I could afford to paint and do repairs I would probably be living in my own house.

we have gates in our community that keep us separate from Lawrence Manor,  a large community of high-end private dwellings.next door.

On the way to the gate we met with a very nice man who was out tending a small garden in his yard. We stopped to talk and he told us that his thirteen year old son had planted it and he was trying to keep the squirrels away.

A 13 yr old boy planting a garden? I’d say his odds in life are pretty good!

What a tradition to pass along to our youth.

Ron kept commenting on how much green space we had and how beautiful the trees were.  I decided to show them our community gardens.  I explained how they came to be.  That this was entirely a tenant initiative by and for the tenants so the people in the apartment buildings would be able to have fresh fruits and vegetables themselves.

At the very beginning the tenants enlisted the help of the Community Health Promoter to be able to get tools, soil and water to start digging the plots up.  The Property Manager agreed and they were off.   The tenants worked day and night planting and weeding and looking after their space, many times with children at their sides.

Although we have no reasonably priced stores to shop at within a reasonable distance from our homes, I realized just how great this community is. I always knew the people in the community were just as great. We continued on to the other gates and were disappointed that some things may never change.  But one thing that is going to change is “our home”:  the revitalization of Lawrence Heights. Something that will take away all the beauty we have.

The next article, I will talk about the “revitalization”

***********************************

The Truth about Revitalization

By Cynthia Rosefield

Well after such a lovely article on the beauty that is Lawrence Heights, the sprawling green spaces, the large backyards enjoyed so much by families celebrating milestones such as birthdays and babies being born and barbecues just for the sake of getting together. The healthy community that provides 102 acres of homes, apartments, playgrounds and gardens is rapidly reaching its destiny as part of a Toronto Community Housings initiative they call Revitalization.

Revitalization is another word for selling as much city owned land now occupied by rent geared to income housing and subsidized homes to achieve a mother load of income for the housing providers, taking away those beautiful green spaces and replacing them with modern steel and glass buildings. They will be sure to provide one big park in order to appease the city mandate for land restructuring.

Toronto housing also proclaims that this move forward into the future with areas that will be filled with people who have mixed incomes will achieve a panacea where the pockets of ghetto crime will no longer exist.  They have proclaimed how well these mixed income housing projects will turn things around. They never the less forget to mention that the housing will not actually be truly mixed. People with low incomes will be confined to their own areas and buildings and people who come to purchase the endless new condominiums will also be segregated from the low income community.

One can see the fences being raised and the no trespassing signs now.

Our youth will gaze at these areas and contemplate the obvious differences. They already struggle to separate themselves from the stigma attached to living in a housing project. The hurdles they must overcome are enormous from peer pressure to racial profiling by the police and single parent homes without their fathers as role models. This is more than what should be expected from any child in life. They may also shoulder the blame in the event a crime is committed in the area, after all “that’s what poor young (esp black) kids do.”

Aside from their feeble attempts to manipulate us into believing that our old crumbling housing needs to be replaced it is obvious gentrification is taking place, forcing people out of their community.  The loss of our community means more than breaking houses. It means breaking lives.

When we were told about this project in 2007 we were at a loss because this decision was already final and the only thing that was possibly malleable was the process that would be undertaken. We placed zero displacement as the number one priority.  People would otherwise have to leave the area during this construction. After a long fought battle by a small number of tenants we were told that this could be done here because of the amount of empty land spaces throughout the neighborhood.

We would certainly have had more demands approved had the community rallied around our issues.  The unfortunate part is that the majority of our community are newcomers from war-torn countries in Africa. This made it much easier for T.C.H.C. to carry out their mission. Knowing that people who had just found refuge and safety in a foreign country would not dare to complain or have their voices heard for fear they would be homeless once again, T.C.H.C. rolled out their plans. Everything began falling into gray areas which no one with any authority seemed to know much about.

The ‘consultation’ meetings were intentionally held close together and at times when the majority of people were just coming home from work.  People began to feel meeting exhausted. The repetition of another so called consultation with the community worked to wear down even the strongest voices. It has become glaringly obvious that the train is on the tracks and we are merely being tolerated along the way.

to be con’t

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CYNTHIA ROSEFIELD HAS BEEN AN ACTIVIST SINCE 1986 WHEN SHE BECAME HOMELESS AND FOUGHT THE SYSTEM TO GET AFFORDABLE HOUSING. RULES WERE CHANGED FOR EVERYBODY AS A RESULT OF HER EFFORTS. SHE IS A LONG TIME RESIDENT OF TCHC AND HAS BEEN WORKING IN LAWRENCE HEIGHTS FOR 23 YEARS AS AN ADVOCATE AND ACTIVIST. SHE IS ALSO A GRADUATE OF VOICES FROM THE STREET 2005-6, AND A MEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF PEACOCKPOVERTY.

The Lawrence Heights Commmunity: Now And After Revitalization

by Cynthia Rosefield

Photos by Ron Craven

(SCROLL DOWN FOR LATEST ENTRIES)

our seniors building

Ron began taking pictures of hydro poles. They were painted with bright colors and hopeful sentiments from our Youth.  The community health promoter, Domenic Brizzi, who is a safe harbor for residents, directed this  youth initiative and they’d  done a wonderful job of uplifting the neighborhood.

A youth initiative  to spruce up their ‘hood.       

the backyard

We walked to my house which fortunately I’d tidied up. They commented on how spacious it was, the window in the bathroom, the yard, as well as the new cupboards sideboard. All that seemed to be needed was a good paint job.  I have been here 9 years now and I haven’t painted although it would not have been a huge burden on the maintenance budget.  If I could afford to paint and do repairs I would probably be living in my own house.

my kitchen window

my kitchen

we have gates in our community that keep us separate from Lawrence Manor,  a large community of high-end private dwellings.next door.

On the way to the gate we met with a very nice man who was out tending a small garden in his yard. We stopped to talk and he told us that his thirteen year old son had planted it and he was trying to keep the squirrels away.

tending a teenager's garden

A 13 yr old boy planting a garden? I’d say his odds in life are pretty good!

What a tradition to pass along to our youth.

Ron kept commenting on how much green space we had and how beautiful the trees were.  I decided to show them our community gardens.  I explained how they came to be.  That this was entirely a tenant initiative by and for the tenants so the people in the apartment buildings would be able to have fresh fruits and vegetables themselves.

gardens by and for tenants

At the very beginning the tenants enlisted the help of the Community Health Promoter to be able to get tools, soil and water to start digging the plots up.  The Property Manager agreed and they were off.   The tenants worked day and night planting and weeding and looking after their space, many times with children at their sides.

Although we have no reasonably priced stores to shop at within a reasonable distance from our homes, I realized just how great this community is. I always knew the people in the community were just as great. We continued on to the other gates and were disappointed that some things may never change.  But one thing that is going to change is “our home”:  the revitalization of Lawrence Heights. Something that will take away all the beauty we have.

The next article, I will talk about the “revitalization”

just a bit of repair

our youth

what will happen to our pool?

***********************************

The Truth about Revitalization

By Cynthia Rosefield

Well after such a lovely article on the beauty that is Lawrence Heights, the sprawling green spaces, the large backyards enjoyed so much by families celebrating milestones such as birthdays and babies being born and barbecues just for the sake of getting together. The healthy community that provides 102 acres of homes, apartments, playgrounds and gardens is rapidly reaching its destiny as part of a Toronto Community Housings initiative they call Revitalization.

Revitalization is another word for selling as much city owned land now occupied by rent geared to income housing and subsidized homes to achieve a mother load of income for the housing providers, taking away those beautiful green spaces and replacing them with modern steel and glass buildings. They will be sure to provide one big park in order to appease the city mandate for land restructuring.

Toronto housing also proclaims that this move forward into the future with areas that will be filled with people who have mixed incomes will achieve a panacea where the pockets of ghetto crime will no longer exist.  They have proclaimed how well these mixed income housing projects will turn things around. They never the less forget to mention that the housing will not actually be truly mixed. People with low incomes will be confined to their own areas and buildings and people who come to purchase the endless new condominiums will also be segregated from the low income community.

One can see the fences being raised and the no trespassing signs now.

Our youth will gaze at these areas and contemplate the obvious differences. They already struggle to separate themselves from the stigma attached to living in a housing project. The hurdles they must overcome are enormous from peer pressure to racial profiling by the police and single parent homes without their fathers as role models. This is more than what should be expected from any child in life. They may also shoulder the blame in the event a crime is committed in the area, after all “that’s what poor young people do.”

Aside from their feeble attempts to manipulate us into believing that our old crumbling housing needs to be replaced it is obvious gentrification is taking place, forcing people out of their community.  The loss of our community means more than breaking houses. It means breaking lives.

When we were told about this project in 2007 we were at a loss because this decision was already final and the only thing that was possibly malleable was the process that would be undertaken. We placed zero displacement as the number one priority.  People would otherwise have to leave the area during this construction. After a long fought battle by a small number of tenants we were told that this could be done here because of the amount of empty land spaces throughout the neighborhood.

We would certainly have had more demands approved had the community rallied around our issues.  The unfortunate part is that the majority of our community is newcomers from war-torn countries in Africa. This made it much easier for T.C.H.C. to carry out their mission. Knowing that people who had just found refuge and safety in a foreign country would not dare to complain or have their voices heard for fear they would be homeless once again, T.C.H.C. rolled out their plans. Everything began falling into gray areas which no one with any authority seemed to know much about.

The ‘consultation’ meetings were intentionally held close together and at times when the majority of people were just coming home from work.  People began to feel meeting exhausted. The repetition of another so called consultation with the community worked to wear down even the strongest voices. It has become glaringly obvious that the train is on the tracks and we are merely being tolerated along the way.

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Transforming a Toronto public institution

Building communities takes imagination, determination and a willingness to take risks; all the while dealing with competing visions, countless nay-sayers and numerous tempting opportunities to delay or change direction. No one knows this better than Derek Ballantyne, this year’s recipient of the Jane Jacobs prize. He’s been described as a community consultant who gets things done without having a bulldozer mentality. He knows how to create work environments to support his vision. And as a long-time volunteer he understands the importance of buy-in. “The lessons I have learned from the community sector have been very valuable and are translatable into a large organizational context.”

A compelling vision is often simple and it was Derek’s genius to confront the fact that in 2002 the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) was a community in name only. How could a newly amalgamated collection of public housing companies with over 58,000 units and an overall population greater than Prince Edward Island become an innovative and transformative institution? And do so when most people said it could not be done!

In retrospect, he says, he drew heavily on his early housing experience with a small inner city housing nonprofit in Ottawa, Centretown Citizens’ Ottawa Corporation (CCOC). He had originally joined the organization as a volunteer and by the mid-80s was chair of its board. CCOC was founded by activists in the 70’s and has remained dedicated to its goal of building community both within and around its 1,300 units in downtown Ottawa. Here Derek learned that companies could be communities, that communities had to be built from the bottom up, and that the business culture had to be values-based.

By 1989 community building had become his passion and he moved from the federal civil service into community nonprofit housing as a full-time endeavor. As general manager of City Living, Ottawa’s municipal housing corporation, he began to implement his ideas on a larger scale as well as incorporating organizational transformation and a political environment into his way of working.

It proved to be another step towards the challenges he would face when he moved to Toronto in 1999 to become the CEO of Toronto Housing Company which subsequently merged with the Metro Toronto Housing Corporation to become TCHC, one of the largest landlords in North America. With a population of 160,000 residents, Derek knew that he had to do more than just collect rents and fix broken window panes.

A dramatic institutional shift had to take place – in the way people within the organization worked; in the way decisions were made; and in the way residents felt about the communities they lived in. The solutions weren’t easily apparent – how to engage workers and residents in the idea of a ‘new’ organization. A lot of anger, a rigid bureaucracy and a long history of unfulfilled promises had been inherited from the earlier organizations.

But, just as important, (but of less interest to the media) there was a tremendous reservoir of committed, community-minded residents and staff who could be the building blocks of a different culture. Ultimately the answer was not to create one organization but to reorganize the company into numerous neighbourhood-based Community Housing Units, each operating within the financial and value system of the whole company but encouraged to interact and innovate within its own neighbourhood.

By listening closely to frontline staff and making tenants active participants in the change, things slowly started to turn around. The outlines of a different company began to emerge. What Derek and his team learned was that tenants wanted to have a voice, and wanted to have a say in how to make their community a safer and better place to live. Today, there is certainly no shortage of suggestions from the tenant body who now participate in elections that are larger in size than many of Canada’s smaller cities. Since 2002 tenants have also sat on advisory tenant councils which address local issues, allocate resources and develop local business plans.

And Derek adds, “After a couple of years when TCHC became known as a better place to work, we began to attract bright and dedicated people who had worked in the community-based sector where I started as a volunteer. They had skills and fresh ideas which a large organization can support with resources. It was ‘win-win all round.”

Derek also looked at how to overhaul the financial picture: “It was pretty clear, until quite recently, that the senior levels of government were not going to provide the funding we needed to repair our units. Unless we could leverage some cash flow from the housing assets, we were not going to be able to improve the living conditions in our communities. We realized that with the size of TCHC, we were a market unto ourselves and could compete both internally and externally. We went through a long and complicated rating process – a first for a social housing organization in Canada. And ultimately, based on the quality of our assets and cash flow, we were able to borrow at very competitive rates over $250 million dollars. It still wasn’t enough but it allowed us to start the rebuilding and repair programs in earnest.”

Derek and his team came up with the idea of setting up their own service providers. For example, they created Housing Services Inc., a construction and management company wholly owned by TCHC which bids on contracts both within and outside the portfolio. TCHC also helped create a laundry service with private sector investors that not only provided better service but generated additional revenue to upgrade existing services. Revenue was also generated through rooftop antennas and rooftop advertising.

All this meant an ability to make new investments. It meant more money for improving and repairing crumbling housing much faster. And as importantly, as part of creating stronger communities, it meant that TCHC could invest in people through a Social Investment Fund – for example, funding a youth centre in Pelham Place and starting community gardening programs.

For the last six years, Derek has been overseeing the redevelopment and transformation of one of Toronto’s largest urban neighbourhoods – Regent Park. One would think that the Regent Park renewal would stand out as his most important project. While Derek doesn’t deny its importance, he wants to see it in the right context. While the Regent Park revitalization has been given a lot of press, in the end, it will affect approximately 7,500 people. But there are another 150,000 residents living in TCHC properties. He insists, “We’ll never be able to do a Regent Park in every neighbourhood. But we can do other things that will affect many more lives.”

Derek would be the first to admit that he didn’t do all this alone. When asked about leadership, he points to three important characteristics. First, he or she should allow for risks to take place and support a risk-taking environment. Next, a leader builds both the internal and external confidence of the organization. He or she builds the space to allow for creativity. Finally, “you have to order your ideas. You can’t do everything at once and you have to make strong priorities and stick to them.”

When asked about his proudest moment, Derek talks about how tenants have become more involved, how they feel they have more say in how they live, how they feel confident to be their own change. In the end, there’s no better compliment than when tenants tell him, “My place is a better place to live.”

On May 15, 2009, Derek started his new position as the Chief Operating Officer of Build Toronto, a City of Toronto organization that will engage private and public sector partners in the development of city real estate. If his past successes are anything to go by, we can look forward to some exciting new developments in Toronto’s urban fabric.

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