“I truly believe this is the most important demonstration of a neighbourhood understanding where it came from and determining that it’s going to evolve into something different that’s healthier for everyone living there and who will live there,” says Mitchell Cohen, a social housing activist-turned-real estate developer best known for his revolutionary revitalization efforts in Toronto’s Regent Park. “I think it’s the most important transformation that is happening anywhere in the country.”
Just across the street from Scott Collegiate high school in Regina’s North Central neighbourhood sits an empty lot and a run-down house, an otherwise handsome, sturdy unit with an arched doorway boarded over with plywood to dissuade squatters.
Overgrown lots and derelict buildings are a common sight in the neighbourhood, as are residents clearly in the kind of poverty and distress that prompted Maclean’s magazine to declare North Central “Canada’s Worst Neighbourhood” almost 20 years ago.
It’s a label that still stings for many residents, who say it doesn’t represent the full complexity of the neighbourhood they love. And that’s true. Walking around the community of about 9,000 residents reveals a quiet beauty in the shadows of what was once a vibrant hub of commerce and small business in the 1980s. Canopies of mature poplar and elm trees shade sidewalks and fringe what Regina’s housing manager, Bill Neher, describes as an “amazing tapestry of architecture.”
That tapestry is coming to life again. A new plan with national implications involves the City of Regina seizing and buying problem properties, then placing them in a land bank where, for a minuscule fee of about $1, they’ll be turned over to non-profits and converted into affordable housing.
But it begins with a small group of Scott Collegiate students, the ones who look across the street at the derelict building and empty lot every school day.