After 75 years, Regent Park has finally become what it was always meant to be: a neighbourhood for everyone. In his new book, Rhythms of Change, developer and social housing advocate Mitchell Cohen explains how:
Toronto, ON- December 6, 2024
Built in the 1940s as Canada’s first social housing project, Regent Park was long known as an underfunded neighbourhood with high crime rates, largely cut off from the rest of the city and devoid of essential services. Now, thanks to a $1.5-billion revitalization project—a combined effort of Toronto Community Housing and The Daniels Corporation—the community is thriving. The project has so far yielded thousands of mixed-income homes, a world-class aquatic centre, an artists’ space, an MLSE-funded sports haven and a namesake park.
Mitchell Cohen, president and CEO of the Daniels Corporation, has been at the forefront of this transformation. In his new book, Rhythms of Change, Cohen shares an in-depth account of the nearly 20-year journey that reshaped Regent Park. Here, he explains why Toronto’s housing crisis persists and how Regent Park’s success provides a blueprint for creating sustainable, affordable housing across the city.
Your career began as a YMCA community worker in Montreal. How did that shape your approach to urban development?
That YMCA was in Côte Saint-Luc, a low-income neighbourhood in Montreal. While I was working there, many families in the area were suddenly evicted from their social housing. They had just 30 days to find a new home, with no safety net and low incomes that severely limited their options. It opened my eyes to how precarious housing was for so many people. In 1973, that experience inspired me to co-found an affordable housing co-op in Côte Saint-Luc—one of the first of its kind in Quebec. After moving to Toronto in 1979, I worked for the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto, negotiating land deals to build nonprofit co-op housing. At the time, there was a robust federal program to fund the creation of affordable housing co-ops. But then everything changed in 1984.
What happened in 1984?
Brian Mulroney was elected prime minister. Soon afterward, the federal government downloaded responsibility for housing to the provinces and began a long and gradual process of cutting off its funding—including ending the program that paid for affordable housing co-ops. Without that funding, my work was throttled; we simply couldn’t develop any new co-ops. I decided I could make more of an impact in building affordable housing by moving to the private sector. That same year, I joined the Daniels Corporation, a development company. For 40 years, we’ve aimed to incorporate affordable housing into everything we do—Regent Park has been a culmination of that mission.
What went wrong with Toronto’s housing affordability over the years?
After the feds downloaded housing to the provinces, Ontario followed suit in 1995 under Mike Harris by shunting responsibility to municipalities. These policy decisions dismantled the framework that supported affordable housing development for decades. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Toronto’s current social housing predates 1995. Since then, developers in Toronto have built tens of thousands of condos without zoning requirements that mandate the inclusion of affordable units. Had just 10 per cent of those developments incorporated affordable units, the landscape today would be far better. The bottom line is that we stopped investing in affordable housing and we’re now paying the price.