Redevelopment of Regent Park | U/C | Multiple Phases | Regent Park

[KGB]

Rebuilding Regent Park

After half a century of neglect, one of Canada's oldest social housing communities is finally getting a fresh start.

By Peter Sobchak Illustrations by Markson Borooah Hodgson Architects





Built in two phases between 1948 and 1959, Toronto's Regent Park is Canada's largest and oldest community housing project, and was created for one purpose: to give the city’s underprivileged a place to live. Located on the lower east side of Toronto, Regent Park is an area defined by four streets, Parliament, Gerrard, River and Shuter. Inside sits a mammoth community housing development with about 7,500 people living in 2,087 units of rent-geared-to-income housing spread over 69 acres.

To say that Regent Park is aging and requires significant investment to maintain or upgrade buildings and facilities is a gross understatement. Building and unit designs are obsolete, no longer responding to the current needs of households. An illustration of this is that Regent Park only has one convenience store and one Laundromat over the 69 acres. When you factor in the outdated urban design characteristics of the site, there are significant challenges in maintaining a safe and healthy community.

“Try to order a pizza in the middle of Regent Park,” says Derek Ballantyne, chief executive officer of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). “It’s really hard because even though you have an address, it bears little relation to the street because your building is in the middle of a whole sea of other buildings.” This is one example of what doesn’t work in Regent Park.

“The concept for the design of North Regent Park was the Garden City, the idyllic, post WWII British notion that you should not have cars inside the neighbourhood, you should just have open spaces, and the buildings will be placed in these open park-like settings,” explains Ballantyne. “This design may be desirable from a planning perspective, it certainly looks pretty, but for the people living there it creates a lack of being connected to a street and therefore a neighbourhood, you do not have a place within the city.”

The open spaces, while looking good when drawn up, are not places people feel comfortable in, because they are neither private – in the sense of a backyard or a courtyard which is semi-secluded – nor are they public. “This was all developed by a single corporation and is considered private property. So police don’t patrol through it, you don’t get municipal services going through there, and so on,” says Ballantyne.
“Over time, these open spaces have become much less pleasant and much more threatening to people, places you have to get across, not places you want to spend time in.

The tenants will tell you they do not feel good about letting their kids play outside the buildings; they cannot see them, they don’t know what’s going on out there, they feel there is a significant amount of anti-social behaviour to which the kids may be at risk, and so on. As a result you have these broad open spaces where nobody is, and they become an invitation for anti-social activities to take place. It becomes ‘Let’s go to Regent Park: there will be no police because they can’t patrol it because there are no streets up and down it and they don’t walk through it because it’s private property anyway.

Plus, there aren’t a lot of people around so they won’t hinder our activities.’”
Factors other than urban design have also had influences on the present state of Regent Park. “Policies in the past were put in place that made it so that after a person or family reached a certain income level, they were basically forced to leave Regent Park,” says Tanzeel Merchant, an urban planner with Markson Booroah Hodgeson Architects, one of the design firms that collaborated on the new Regent Park Plan (a consortium that included Greenberg Consultants Inc., David Millar Associates, GHK International, and others). “This meant that only the poorest group of residents stayed in the community. There was no diversity, and therefore no way to strengthen the community.”

As a result of all these factors, Regent Park has turned out to be a place that does not work in the long run, and although there have been various atte-mpts in the past two decades to address the issue of revitalization, no one has been able to come up with a successful plan. “Past plans were wrecked on the shoals of financial viability,” says Balla-ntyne. “None of the past attempts to redo Regent Park were possible because nobody had really looked at the viability of doing it in a comprehensive way.”
“What’s new with this plan is past attempts have looked at dealing with small bits of Regent Park at a time,” says Merchant. “They involved breaking up the 70 acres into bits. Our new plan looks at it holistically and breaks it into phases that make it possible to do the entire area.”


The Regent Park Plan is the result of an initiative that began more than a year ago when the TCHC, Canada’s largest landlord and one of the largest social housing providers in North America, asked for a study to determine whether redevelopment of the entire Regent Park community was feasible. “We wanted a plan that accomplished two things: a plan for a mixed community that reintegrated it with the rest of the neighbourhood and the rest of the city, something that takes Regent Park, which is an island in the east end of the city, and reintegrates it into the fabric of the city,” says Ballantyne. “And a financial plan that demonstrated the feasibility of redevelopment.”

The study included consultation with 2,000 residents, community agencies and financial, design and planning experts on ways to revitalize the community. The final Regent Park Plan – unprecedented in Canada in terms of the size and scope of the redevelopment – was approved by Toronto City Council by a vote of 35 to one.



A Need For Reintegration



The proposed plan for Regent Park outlines how 2,087 rent-geared-to-income units will be demolished and rebuilt in phases over 12 to 15 years. “By far the most important element of the plan is the extent to which the original street network will be reintroduced to the area,” says Merchant. This will return the site to a more usual urban pattern of traffic-bearing streets, and connect the new neighbourhood more closely with the surrounding neighbourhoods. The intention is to re-open all of the earlier streets in the area, such as Sackville, Oak, Sumach and St. David’s Walk, and to add new ones to create a finer grained pattern of blocks. This will provide greater permeability and development flexibility for a variety of building types and heights. This will create, it is hoped, a more diverse neighbourhood.



With all housing being street-oriented, there will be a clear distinction between private and public spaces. The built form of the area acts as a container of public open space, enclosing streets, highlighting corners, defining parks and providing ‘eyes on the street’ increasing surveillance and safety. The intention of the plan is to encourage the greatest diversity of building types as found in a typical downtown urban neighbourhood.

The buildings will be primarily mid-rise and mixed-use along the main streets and low-rise and residential within the neighbourhoods on internal streets. Inner streets would have townhouses or stacked townhouses with minimal setbacks to create lively streets that encourage neighbourhood interaction.

Another key element of the proposal is creating a large park system, which mixes linear park space with accessible larger green spaces such as a six-acre park fronting on Dundas Street, and the enlargement of the area surrounding the Nelson Mandela Park school grounds. Higher density buildings will create a street wall condition with a scale of a five- to six-storey base and will be set back above that height. This base-building condition will be especially important around the central park where the built form will define the open space. Buildings would maximize the opportunity to face onto public open space, with a few higher point towers located along Dundas and River Streets.

The result will be a mixed-income, mixed-use neighbourhood that is reintegrated with surrounding communities. A total of 4,500 housing units are proposed – 3,700 apartments and 800 townhouses of which 500 units will be designated for affordable ownership – as compared to the 2,087 currently on site. There is an assumption that the Rent Geared to Income (RGI) apartment units will be mixed with market units in as many buildings as possible.

In addition to shops, community services and space for economic development activities, the plan calls for an extension of the Parliament Street retail area south from Gerrard Street, and the addition of more convenience stores throughout the area. A total of 250,000 sq. ft. will be allocated for retail, commercial, community and educational purposes.

The plan calls for the redevelopment to be done over a 12 to 15 year timeline, in 12 individual phases, each phase a stand-alone development block. The first phase of redevelopment is expected to start in the southeast corner of Regent Park at Shuter and River streets. This phasing approach is being done to minimize disruption to the community, minimize the cash-flow impacts on TCHC, and ensure that market units to be built as part of the redevelopment can be absorbed by the market.

“This phasing and relocation of residents is purposely being done over a long time period for several reasons, one of which is to make sure residents aren’t being made to feel like they are being kicked out of Regent Park,” says Merchant. As the phases progress, when residents are affected by redevelopment, they will be relocated first within the Regent Park community and if this is not possible, to nearby sites. “There is a five to 10 per cent turnover each year,” says Merchant. “The plan calls for a stop to the inflow of new people for a few years, in order to keep existing people in Regent Park, and to free up some units for relocation.”



Financial Viability


The total price of replacing the RGI housing is estimated to be $450 million. “TCHC’s equity investment will be about $70 million, which comes from corporate-wide revenue over a 12-year basis,” says Ballantyne. “Plus there is an intent to bring in market units, so the equity they have in the land will be parlayed into cash, hopefully to the sum of $80 million to $100 million.”

Much of the TCHC funding for the proposed redevelopment is expected to come from savings generated on site, through significantly lowered operating costs in the new units, primarily due to lowered energy consumption, maintenance, and so forth.

The City of Toronto has agreed to waive property taxes for 15 years, and reduced operating costs will allow TCHC to borrow against redevelopment, meaning the largest part of financing will be borrowed capital. Assistance with infrastructure funding (sub-surface, roads and parks) is expected to come, with the city’s backing, from the provincial and federal governments: for example through Ontario SuperBuild funds, and Kyoto Accord money.

“The Plan sees Regent Park as a sustainable community that will contain particular attention to the entire development having a low energy footprint and other measures that help create a more sustainable development,” says Merchant.
The other main source of income will be derived from the lease or sale of land on the site not required by TCHC for its housing or for the park or other community uses.
Now, more than ever, there is a strong desire to actually do something about Regent Park, and optimism in the air about its future.

This is the first time Regent Park has been owned and operated by a single owner: the recent transfer of responsibility for assisted housing from the province to Toronto’s TCHC has offered the opportunity for a fresh start, a chance to revisit the possibility of redevelopment and regeneration. Past controllers did not have the means to do something on an appropriately large-enough scale, but the TCHC has both title to the land and an ability to do something with it.

Another encouraging sign is that Regent Park has demonstrated what Ballantyne calls “a community capacity.” “There are a large number of residents within the community who want to be involved in a change process, they want to affect change in their community,” says Ballantyne. “Not just change to the buildings, but change to the way it feels to live in that community, the social aspects of that community.”

It used to be said that the residents of Regent Park lived in a land of good intentions, but for many years those intentions were far from reality. Finally, after half a century of neglect, the city has pledged to redevelop the entire area. With luck, the final result will match the good intentions of its designers, and at long last give the residents of Regent Park what they deserve: a good place to live.

[Mr Man]

This is great news. I wish Toronto would fund more programs like this.

[KGB]

An update from today's Star.......






The big `reveal' at Regent Park
Social housing authority approves plan

5,400 new residential units to be built

LESLIE FERENC
STAFF REPORTER

It's the ultimate extreme makeover: a $1 billion overhaul of the city's crumbling Regent Park neighbourhood that aims to reshape and rebuild it from the ground up, giving the community a new lease on life.

The Toronto Community Housing Corp. has unanimously approved a six-phase proposal that would take 12 years to complete, chief executive Derek Ballantyne said yesterday.

He's keeping his fingers crossed that the massive redevelopment will get the nod from Toronto and East York community council on Jan. 18, and will get zoning and official plan approval from city council during its Feb. 1-3 meeting.

Proposal calls could go out to developers for Phase 1 by early spring. Demolition could begin in late fall, with construction starting in March 2006.

A progress report on the project yesterday notes that it would see the construction of as many as 5,400 residential units: 1,900 of them rent-geared-to-income, 300 to be offered to residents under an affordable ownership program and 2,900 available at market rental rates.

Once complete, the complex would be home to 12,500 people.

All 2,083 existing rent-geared-to-income units will be replaced and at least 700 affordable units built, some of them in surrounding areas. New shops and a major supermarket will also emerge, making Regent Park, a 28-hectare area bounded by Parliament, Gerrard, River and Dundas Sts., a vibrant downtown neighbourhood.

Dead-end streets, which were originally designed to be child-friendly but turned out to be breeding grounds for crime, will be eliminated and "invisible barriers" separating the neighbourhood from the city beyond will tumble when those streets are reconnected to the area, Ballantyne said.

The idea is to fully rebuild the 1940s neighbourhood, Canada's first social housing project, replacing rundown buildings that have become costly to maintain. The goal is a healthy community, with a mixed-income population in an area that's welcoming and safe.

The plan envisions a mix of housing types, from highrise to townhouse, and a mix of business and community services, "all the things that make a neighbourhood successful," Ballantyne said.

Some 56 per cent of the stock will be offered at market rental rates, 29 per cent rent-geared-to-income, 9 per cent other social housing and 6 per cent affordable ownership.

A large number of three-, four- and five-bedroom units will be offered to accommodate big families already living there. And all the buildings will be connected to the neighbourhood's new energy plant.

Existing residents will be temporarily relocated within Regent Park or other city housing complexes until new units are built. Vacant units are already being held for them, and the corporation will cover moving and utility hookup costs.

The corporation will pay the $412 million cost of replacing the existing units through operating savings, reallocation of funds from capital repairs to new construction, and the sale or lease of surplus land.

The city has already agreed to defer property taxes, and all development charges, about $13 million, will be granted back to Regent Park, Ballantyne added. He hopes senior governments will kick in the $40 million more needed for infrastructure.

[Mr Man]

A large number of three-, four- and five-bedroom units will be offered to accommodate big families already living there.

They thought of everything! This is truly great news for the city and residents of Regent Park.

[salvius]

Sounds pretty much perfect.

[SpatulaCity]

I agree, it sounds phenominal. It's amazing to compare something like this to what's happening west of downtown with cityplace and the other tower-in-the-park megaprojects. If that whole area or at least significant portions of it were similar in design, we'd be in seriously good shape.

Someone remind me why we're still building towers-in-the-park...

[KGB]

There may be something to that...while the west end of downtown has certainly gotten all the glory and the east side has the bad rep, it seems that the east side has actually been getting the more critically acclaimed and socially responsible mixed income/use developments.....Cabbagetown and St Lawrence...plus Distillery District and the up coming West Don Lands and Portlands....as well as the remake of Regent Park.






KGB

[cassius]

Because people continue to purchase them.

The Regent Park plan does sound good. Probably just as good as the existing Regent Park plans did back when they were first proposed. Will there be enough of a mix with middle income units?

[SpatulaCity]

well the mixed income aspect is probably the main difference. But this is more like getting back to what works... tried and tested, not trying out something relatively new.

[valantino]

Most happy that one of the Dickinson towers most likely will be kept.

BTW, the northern half of Don Mount Court is almost completely destroyed - only one six storey section remians

[KGB]

From today's Star....





Regent Park overhaul wins council's approval
Project will see social housing complex torn down

Community to include mix of incomes, public streets

KERRY GILLESPIE
CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

Doctors and lawyers living beside single moms and new immigrants finding their feet — that's the future for Canada's oldest social housing complex.

Yesterday, councillors voted 43-1 to go ahead with a huge 12-year redevelopment of Regent Park.

Demolition on some of the 1940s buildings at Parliament and Dundas Sts. should begin late this year; construction of the first new buildings will follow in three months.

This redevelopment is about much more than new kitchens and better bathrooms.

"It's a redesign of a neighbourhood. It means putting streets back in, it means making it look and feel like any other neighbourhood in Toronto... which is completely different than what it is today," said Derek Ballantyne, CEO of Toronto Community Housing Corp., the city's social housing company.

Right now, Regent Park, bounded by Parliament, Gerrard, River and Dundas Sts., is home to 7,500 low-income residents.

The singles, seniors and families live in 2,083 rent-geared-to-income apartments, where they pay 30 per cent of their low incomes in rent.

The neighbourhood is cut off from the surrounding city because there are no through streets, or shops and businesses to give anyone who doesn't live there a reason to go there.

When it was designed more than 50 years ago, the idea was to create a park-like setting. But rather than creating safe areas for kids to play in, the lack of public streets spawned areas where crime could flourish.

The plan approved by council seeks to change that.

It plans for a mixed-income community with regular public streets and neighbourhood staples like a grocery store and community centre.

In the redeveloped Regent Park, 1,500 apartments will be rent-geared-to-income, 500 to 700 apartments will rent for market rates and 2,800 homes and condos will be for sale.

Another some 600 rent-geared-to income units will be built elsewhere downtown, said Ballantyne.

"I fully believe this revitalization project is not just going to revitalize Regent Park, it's going to revitalize that whole neighbourhood. It's a terrific project," Mayor David Miller said.

Councillor Bas Balkissoon who once lived in social housing himself, called the project approval a "milestone decision of this council."

Mixing home ownership and market rental units into government-funded social housing is more than just good urban planning, noted Balkissoon (Ward 41, Scarborough-Rouge River).

It is the "creative way" the project is being made financially possible.

Half of the $1 billion total project cost is expected to come from private sector developers.

The rest is a mix of tenant rent money, loans and government funding.

Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone was the sole councillor to vote against the project.

He said he supported the redevelopment of Regent Park but feared a "loophole" would result in less affordable housing overall.

Pantalone (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) wanted all the current Regent Park rent-geared-to-income units to be replaced in the redesigned community.

He said he fears that the some 600 units that are slated to be built elsewhere will take up space that could have been used to more badly needed low-income units.

Regent Park tenants will be moved out in phases and all have been told they can return to homes in the new community if they want.

Councillor Glen De Baeremaeker said he's looking forward to the end of Regent Park being a low-income ghetto, "a place none of us want to go."

"I welcome the opportunity to change the mix... so you have doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, cashiers, everybody living in the same building, everybody mixing," said De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre).

Additional articles by Kerry Gillespie

[416]

Have any renderings been released or maybe a site plan?

[hkskyline]

As Regent Park falls, a hopeful vision endures
ANTHONY REINHART
14 February 2006
The Globe and Mail

The buildings with the blown-out windows at Dundas and Parliament Streets could easily tempt jaundiced assumptions about the neighbourhood.

If anyone is used to the cynical judgments of outsiders, it's the 7,500 residents of Regent Park, Canada's largest public-housing project and a steady supplier of news about poverty, drugs and violence.

Still, only the uninformed would have drawn dark inferences from the shattered glass yesterday. It was no act of vandalism, but Day 1 of Regent Park's billion-dollar redevelopment as a better-designed, and it is hoped, healthier community.

It's interesting how a few extra facts and a shift in perspective can turn a symbol of decay into a sign of hope, but that's pretty much what Adonis Huggins has been helping young residents to do here for more than a decade.

Mr. Huggins, 45, runs Regent Park Focus, a program that lets young people dabble in print and radio journalism, photography, filmmaking and music production. His work has just been recognized by “face the arts,” a campaign by the city and Toronto Life magazine to acknowledge people who enrich Toronto's cultural life.

Mr. Huggins's program engages young people in the affairs of the community by having them portray theirs as they see it from the inside.

It's about “being able to represent yourself, rather than be represented,” Mr. Huggins said yesterday, surrounded by participants' framed photographs in the program's headquarters, in the basement of a Regent Park apartment building. “It marries creativity and imagination with being able to have a voice.”

If they say anything at all, young people in struggling neighbourhoods aren't always heard over the sirens, headlines and political promises that signal the latest shooting. And the community shown back to them by the mainstream media is often more caricature than realistic portrait, Mr. Huggins said.

“Marginalized, low-income young people tend not to be represented in society as much,” and are beset with “the feeling that they're somehow outsiders,” he said.

Documenting their lives not only gives them power over their own portrayal, but the chance to put tough questions to politicians and police, all the while picking up skills that can help launch adult careers.

The program's website, at www.catchdaflava.com , offers a parade of participants who went on to formal media studies, and in some cases, related jobs. While he seems loath to take the credit, Mr. Huggins, a tall man with a quiet voice, is the one they have to thank.

He arrived at Regent Park Focus in 1991 with memories of how the after-school programs of his youth helped forge his future.

Born in Toronto in 1960, Mr. Huggins grew up in Kensington Market, the son of Caribbean immigrants whose jobs meant long hours away from home. His mother was a nurse and worked shifts at a hospital, while his father worked on CN passenger trains.

“There was no running around in the streets for me,” said Mr. Huggins, whose father, a former police officer, enrolled him in a youth drop-in at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church on Bellevue Avenue.

“That's where I got my first insights into working with youth.”

When the family moved into a house on Clinton Street in Little Italy, they were the only black people on the street for years. For that reason, young Mr. Huggins would often return to Kensington, “to what I perceived to be a safer community” because it was more diverse.

He studied community work at George Brown College, then spent three years in Halifax working part time and studying at Dalhousie University before returning to Toronto in 1991.

That's when Regent Park Focus was born, out of a provincial initiative to improve health and reduce drug problems in nine communities across Ontario.

When Mr. Huggins arrived there as a youth worker, he had trouble getting young people to attend meetings and discuss issues. But when he gave them a video camera and let them record themselves, a funny thing happened.

“We discovered that youth can make the lousiest videos, but they'll watch it forever, because they can see themselves,” he said, laughing at the early results.

He seized on the kids' enthusiasm and enlisted volunteers to help teach them production and editing skills.

A Regent Park community newspaper, meanwhile, had just folded, so Mr. Huggins started a group for young journalists and launched Catch da Flava, published every two months.

A radio station, photography program, music studio and Internet lab followed, all housed in a former boxing gym in the basement of 600 Dundas St. E.

The project has not been without its challenges. Two participants have been lost to violence in other parts of the city — one shot, another stabbed. Recently, a young videographer was robbed of his camera while filming, and a computer went missing from the music studio.

Still, in the context of a continuing program involving hundreds of young people over more than a decade, these were exceptions, not defining moments.

Having their own media has not only allowed the young people of Regent Park to more fully reflect life to themselves, but “we provide a mirror for outsiders” who might jump to conclusions, Mr. Huggins said, “to look at themselves and their own perceptions.”

[phunky]

there are renderings... i saw them on city tv. just don't know if they are online anywhere.

[rise_against]

I thought there was a thread last year with renders...anyways this sounds fantastic.

[phunky]

there are some renderings in this pdf from their site. it's a bit large over 7mb FYI.
it's from dec.2002 though so it's not as current as the rendering I saw on TV the other day.

[cassius]

Those renderings were only competiting proposals for the first development I believe.

[SpatulaCity]

^ pretty sure that was the winning bid but they have since pulled out.

[Taller, Better]

Everyone should be proud of this kind of city planning!

[hkskyline]

Sentiment runs deep in Regent Park
Jim Coyle
16 February 2006
The Toronto Star

"Where we love is home."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

It was easy to understand the cheers as the first bricks fell to the din-making demolition machinery at Regent Park this week and the city's ambitious redevelopment of the infamous housing project began.

What might have surprised outsiders, though, were the laments for the much-cursed, long-troubled place.

"I'm very sad," Saverimuthu Julius told the Star's Vanessa Lu as the family's third-floor apartment on Dundas St. E. crumbled. "How many times have I climbed up the stairs?"

Regent Park was where the family's memories were made, where the children grew, where their progress in a new world was marked. It is the place, when new and improved, to which they hope to return. It was, in a word, home.

The idea of home holds a powerful place in the human psyche - sometimes the more powerful for the meanness of its construction, the spareness of its furnishings, its hard-scrabble surrounds. Sometimes, roots grab most fiercely to the least hospitable ground.

Place is identity. "So where ya from?" one of the first questions strangers ask.

When travels and horizons are limited, the turf you occupy - every nook and cranny, every lane and sidewalk - becomes known inch by inch, intimately, the way a mother knows an infant.

Not to romanticize hardship, with its thin walls, intrusive sounds and smells, its leaks and drafts, its relentless limits. From such places, the goal is almost always up and out. And for most of its life, Regent Park seemed a good place to leave behind.

Built in the late 1940s and early '50s, the project in short order became a 29-hectare synonym for urban wretchedness, closed to through traffic, excluded from nearby commerce, a stigmatized place apart.

Its open spaces looked sensible enough on the drawing board but were calamitous in reality. Because those spaces belonged to everyone, they effectively belonged to no one - and in short order they became unused, uncared for and eventually ceded to the lawless.

Still, if there was, in the very design of a place like Regent Park, exclusion from the broader city outside, a symbolic shunning, there was often a sense of belonging within.

Whatever else they do, hard places instil a sense of identity often so deeply felt as to be indelible. There are few more wistful expats than those who grew up in the grittier parts of Glasgow or Liverpool or the Dirty 'Oul Dublin of decades past.

In hard places there is a sense of tribe, the fealty to place like the fealty to family. Members may criticize its shortcomings, but they are bound tight and defensive against insult from without.

Hard places are love-hate complexes. They can trap or motivate, toughen or break you down. They have their own codes and currencies, their education system, too. And it's not for nothing that so much literature - so much music and fashion - emanates from urban patches of want.

There, daily life is intense - the smells, the noises, the temper-fraying heat, the dispiriting cold. There, the senses, by necessity, become more acute. Paying attention - to a glance or a brooding silence, distinctions in might and status - is a survival skill. Details matter.

"To a middle-class stranger, it's true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next," Mordecai Richler said of Duddy Kravitz's Montreal. "But as the boys knew ... no two cold-water flats were alike."

There were tears this week for the simple reason that if Regent Park was written off long years ago as a failure of architecture and design, it was not necessarily a failure of the families who lived and loved there.

No more so, anyway, than in the fictional tenements of Betty Smith's Brooklyn or on Richler's St. Urbain St., or in the recent real-world renderings of Paul Clemens' east-side Detroit or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Bronx.

As LeBlanc wrote in her book Random Family, for the kids of Tremont Ave., "years of scaling rooftops, dangling from fire escapes and riding bicycles through the narrow alleys had made Tremont theirs. Tremont raised them up."

Place has that power. And sometimes, poverty measures only money - no small thing, right enough, but not everything.

An acquaintance who grew up in the Gorbals of Glasgow once said he didn't know he'd been born and raised poor until long after he'd immigrated to Canada, was watching a TV documentary one night with his wife, and heard the narrator talking about the worst slums in Europe as the camera panned his childhood street.

It is the way of the world.

"The library was a little old shabby place," Betty Smith wrote in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. "Francie thought it was beautiful."

That's why, amid the hopes and dreams for the new, tears fell among residents of Regent Park this week for the old.

For fleeting moments, maybe because of even harder lives they'd left behind, or maybe because love (if never luxury) was close at hand, what they knew there was sometimes beautiful.

And when it wasn't, it was still home.

Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.