For Teresa Bluett, moving into her family’s new home in Regent Park on March 30, 1949, was like “walking into a dream.” The five-room house she, her husband, Alfred, and their five children had lived in on the opposite side of Sumach Street epitomized the slum conditions that Canada’s first large-scale public-housing project was intended to alleviate. That structure, which was condemned during the Second World War, was held up with bricks and railway jacks. Inside, the floors sloped and the plaster was cracked. An ancient coal stove provided heat.
When viewing the first completed units in Regent Park earlier that month, one particular item they lacked in their home sold the Bluetts on the project: a bathtub. “We have always been in the dumps, all our lives,” Alfred told the Telegram. “We are going to start life anew over there.” When she saw the bathtub, Teresa was ecstatic. “I’m going to sit in it for a year. Just let anyone try and get me out.”
The Bluetts were the first family to move into the new Regent Park. When moving day arrived, they were guided through their two-storey unit by Toronto mayor Hiram McCallum. After receiving a flower bouquet, Teresa pointed out to the press all of the marvels of her new home: an electric stove, a refrigerator, and bountiful cupboard space. Her children shared their plans for the basement. “We are going to make it into a den,” 14-year-old Billy Bluett told the Globe and Mail. “We’ll take our old sofa and bookshelves and put them down here. I’ll be able to do all my carpentry; we can have all the gang down here.”
The kids were told not to put their fingers on the freshly painted walls, which were done in shades of peach, turquoise, and yellow. While their rent increased from $19/month at their old home to $67/month (an amount based on their income), the family didn’t mind. “Here we don’t pay for fuel and water, everything is modern, and we are really happy,” Alfred said.
Plan for Regent Park as proposed by Housing Enterprise of Canada, Ltd., 1946. (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 2, Series 60, Item 644)
Regent Park was envisioned as a way to ease the post-Second World War housing crisis in the city, provide affordable places to live, and replace one of Toronto’s poorest slums. While experiments in social housing in Toronto dated back to the Toronto Housing Company’s Riverdale Courts (today’s Bain Co-Op) and Spruce Courts complexes in the 1910s, little more was accomplished until a committee headed by Lieutenant-Governor Herbert Bruce convened in 1934 to study housing conditions. It examined the physical conditions in two of the city’s slums, the Ward and Moss Park.
The resulting statistics from the 1,332 dwellings they reviewed were grim: 55 per cent were infested with vermin, 57 per cent were overcrowded, 58 per cent were damp, 59 per cent lacked a bathtub, 75 per cent fell below minimum health standards, and 96 per cent generally fell below existing standards for home amenities.
Agenda segment, October 22, 2014: Regent Park rebuild
Despite many recommendations and reports over the next decade that promoted slum clearance, nothing was built, as no level of government wanted to assume the financial cost. With housing stock unable to absorb the return of veterans, the beginning of the Baby Boom, and general population growth, pressure came from labour unions and veterans’ groups to start building.
The city commissioned a proposal from Housing Enterprises of Canada Limited, which envisioned demolishing more than 750 substandard homes in Regent Park and replacing them with 854 units that would mix row housing and family sized apartments. In an August 1946 report, the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, a housing advocacy group, criticized the plan, saying that the rents would be higher than most of the affected families could afford and that it would lead to the displacement of families and further overcrowding in the area.
Photos of the Bluett family moving into Regent Park. (The Telegram, March 30, 1949)
The CHPA believed the private sector would never tackle a project of the scale proposed for Regent Park. Neither the province nor the federal government expressed interest in providing subsidies. But Mayor Robert Hood Saunders supported the need for affordable housing. After discussions with the city’s Board of Control (the elected equivalent of today’s city-council executive committee), the following question was placed on the municipal ballot on January 1, 1947: “Are you in favour of the City undertaking as a low cost or moderate cost rental housing project, with possible government assistance the clearance, replanning, rehabilitation and modernization of the area bounded by Parliament, River, Gerrard and Dundas Streets known as the Regent Park (north) Plan at an estimated cost of $5,900,000.00?”
While the press demanded more financial clarity and felt the proposal had been hastily conceived, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Daily Star urged voters to approve the ballot question. “The responsibility of providing new housing for the residents of Toronto’s most depressed district already has been long delayed by the pettifoggery of those who would cry ‘wolf’ on taxation,” the Globe and Mail observed. “It is not unimportant to note that the opposers have done little to stimulate reform in the time they have had; that the problem has, if anything, steadily grown worse.” The plan was also backed by the Toronto Board of Trade, which believed that Regent Park would mean “more and better housing for more people, improved city appearance, a definite advancement in community life.” The CHPA campaigned for a yes vote through radio interviews, flyers, and letters urging municipal candidates to show their support.
Anti-Regent Park cartoon by Ivan Russell Johnson. (The Telegram, December 20, 1946)
The loudest anti-Regent Park voice was the Telegram, which warned taxpayers about the dangers of approving a large project with few concrete financial details. “Ratepayers may properly insist on the same care being applied to civic business as they are accustomed to give their own private affairs,” stated a Telegram editorial, which proceeded to compare the possible cost overruns to a recently purchased Island ferry that had run nearly $100,000 over budget.
The paper felt that nobody had justified why homeowners living near the project should subsidize their neighbours’ rent and that such costs should be the responsibility of higher levels of government. The Telegram’s arguments didn’t sway the public, as the vote came during a period when Torontonians were feeling less cheap than usual (they’d approved the subway system the previous year). Regent Park was approved by a vote of 29,677 to 18,028.
Over the next two years, the city laid out the groundwork for the project, creating a new public agency (the Housing Authority of Toronto) and setting rents (geared to income, generally 20 per cent of family income). Initial priority was given to low- and moderate-income families living in the neighbourhood as of July 1947. Tenants would have to cover their moving expenses and swear an affidavit regarding their income and family size. Lobbying higher levels of government took time but was successful: Ottawa agreed to grant up to $1.15 million, while Queen’s Park offered $1,000 per residential unit.
Toronto mayor Hiram McCallum lays the cornerstone at Regent Park. (Globe and Mail, September 30, 1948)
On September 29, 1948, McCallum laid the cornerstone for the 48-unit apartment building that, along with an eight-unit row house, formed Regent Park’s initial phase. McCallum praised the co-operation between the three levels of government. “The plan may cost more than we thought,” he noted. “But who knows when costs are coming down? And we can’t and don’t intend to let this stand idle for years.” Saunders, who was now the chairman of Ontario Hydro, also attended and told the crowd how happy he was that the project would bring better living conditions for Torontonians.
Inspecting the project in February 1949, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent declared that it was a milestone in Canadian slum clearance. While two years earlier he had, as a cabinet minister, declared that no government he served in would ever support subsidized-housing legislation, he now recognized the need for federal assistance. Later that year, his government amended the National Housing Act of 1944 to allow for subsidies that provided the basis for federal-provincial housing and redevelopment partnerships.
As the first tenants moved into their new homes, the local ratepayers’ association, which reputedly had as many or more members who lived outside the Regent Park area as within in, threatened to march on city hall on April 5 to protest the cost of the new rentals, urge that all demolitions for future phases be stopped until new units were ready, and demand a seat on the Toronto Housing Authority. The march fizzled out, and a 26-person delegation presented a brief to the Board of Control on April 13 in which it claimed that 80 per cent of current Regent Park residents wanted no part of the project, a contention contradicted by most recent surveys. The main issue appeared to be that homeowners felt they hadn’t being paid enough when their properties were expropriated.
Photos of the Bluett and Meere families previewing units at Regent Park. (The Telegram, March 15, 1949)
Officials soon touted improved education, crime, and health statistics. By the end of Regent Park’s first year, one city official observed that a sign should be erected declaring that “Good Citizens Dwell Here.” Completed in 1959, Regent Park enjoyed a honeymoon that lasted for many years before problems around design and social issues emerged.
When the neighbourhood was redeveloped in the 21st century as a mixed-income area, there were echoes of the hopes and excitement of the original project’s first residents, even if the desire for better living conditions was no longer symbolized by a glistening new bathtub.
In its current form, the Toronto Ward Museum observes, Regent Park is one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city: “This diversity is at the heart of what makes Regent Park unique, because as many people have noted, Regent Park is not the buildings, parks, or pools, Regent Park is the people who live and work here.”
Sources: Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance by Albert Rose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958); Regent Park: The Public Experiment in Housing by David Zapparoli (Toronto: The Market Gallery, 1999); the December 27, 1946, and March 31, 1949, editions of the Globe and Mail; the Fall 2003 edition of Labour; the December 12, 1946, December 20, 1946, September 30, 1948, March 16, 1949, and March 30, 1949, editions of the Toronto Daily Star; and the December 29, 1946, December 30, 1946, and March 15, 1949, editions of the Telegram.
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