Transition Zone

The Regent Park that has been a beacon for vulnerable communities is clearly endangered. You can feel and see this trend among the new towers and topography of the Toronto neighbourhood but also in the data and census numbers that signal a slow shrinking of its Black population.

Just east of downtown, Regent Park was built as a sixty-nine-acre public housing project in the 1940s. That it is now being gentrified is not surprising, nor are the complexities of the intentions behind its makeover. Rhythms of Change: Reflections on the Regent Park Revitalization, a conversational career memoir by the real estate developer and jazz musician Mitchell Cohen, gives insight into the leadership behind this significant undertaking.

Born in Regina, Cohen attended McGill University in the early 1970s. Shortly after graduating, he set up a social work practice in the basement of a red-brick building, part of a Montreal development known as the Gardens. Here he had an epiphany about housing instability. After willful neglect pushed the complex into disrepair, his landlord issued eviction notices to all the tenants: thirty days for families, and Cohen, to leave. He would lose a workspace —“it was visceral”— but many others would lose everything. Alongside hundreds of tenants, he fought management and helped convert the Gardens into one of the first housing co‑ops in Quebec.

Cohen’s interests shifted to building. He eventually joined the team of urban planners behind the Regent Park revitalization, which was conceived in the mid-1990s by a group of local women and the city’s social housing agency, today called Toronto Community Housing Corporation, and approved by city hall in 2003. Cohen includes excerpts from the Regent Park Social Development Plan, a “groundbreaking document” of guiding principles that was composed over years of “intimate sessions led by community animators” and conversations with “highly engaged residents.” Key among the objectives that emerged from this “all-important” plan, Cohen explains, was the “right of return,” which would ensure that all displaced tenants could come back to a guaranteed residence.

Cohen’s description of the ongoing transformation has a certain salesman-like quality to it. Full of bullet-pointed tips, it could be repurposed as a redevelopment pitch deck. Colourful pages — and his renaming of chapters as “verses”— add to the effect. These tonal decisions that make the narrative more readable are, at times, noticeably dissonant from the severity of the subject at hand.

In this way, the book feels geared to the modern, well-meaning real estate guru. Its lessons are arranged in clear stages. Some relate to the strategy of Cohen’s construction company, the Daniels Corporation, and others are gleaned from his personal life. Sidebars about his time as an activist and about his musical career share space with reflections on Regent Park. In a passage about a moment in spring 2005, when he was still learning about the neighbourhood, Cohen describes seeing flashing lights as police cars chased teens across a dusty baseball diamond where kids were playing. The residents and organizers he sat with were unfazed. “This was my introduction to the community,” he writes. “The most surprising aspect of the experience was that no one was surprised.”

Rhythms of Change reminds me of the only certainty that any low-income area sanctified by the promise of renewal can expect: people will get displaced by those with new-found relationships to the neighbourhood. I grew up in a similar place in Toronto, Lawrence Heights, once vilified as the Jungle, and many of my relatives lived in Regent Park.

While Cohen doesn’t quite tackle the unease I carry, he does a good job of decentring himself from the history of this part of town. He explains how the original design — inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement — quickly led to isolation and stigmatization. He also includes the perspectives of some residents, whose voices stand out amid his descriptions of policy manoeuvres and marketing efforts.

Cohen is perhaps most compelling when he observes his own distance from this place he has helped recreate. In verse 20, he describes an evening in 2013 at Paintbox Bistro, a dining and entertainment space meant to symbolize a new era. As the jazz legends Archie Alleyne and Jackie Richardson wrapped up their sound check, sirens started blaring: a young man had been shot nearby. Cohen understood this as “a powerful reminder that the work of the revitalization had only just begun.”

Throughout, the social worker turned construction executive underscores that “this monumental challenge” isn’t just about bricks and budgets; it’s about serving people. He writes about the importance of community involvement and highlights the meetings and social gatherings that engaged long-time residents in the decision-making process.

The repetition of his obvious goodwill does, however, read as an overly optimistic defence of such large-scale revitalization projects. The problems many people have with these ventures aren’t meaningfully addressed — perhaps the most notable one being that, despite intentions, they almost always destabilize low-income households for long periods of time. Cohen acknowledges that “implementing the ‘right of return’ principle is an enormously complex undertaking,” especially when families have been relocated to far-flung parts of the city. How TCHC, in partnership with Daniels, has offered a sense of security to those at risk is muddled to the point of ambiguity.

I’ve been to meetings about similar development proposals, and a cousin of mine who grew up in Regent Park attended some of the same assemblies that Cohen recounts. He lived in Regent Park when it was that Regent Park and now finds himself making a life elsewhere. Meanwhile, friends who stayed or returned speak of a lingering apartness, as if they exist alongside the new condo owners rather than among them.

Rhythms of Change raises critical questions about poverty, violence, and responsibility, but it leaves much unaccounted for when it comes to best practices, affordability, and home ownership. In the case of Regent Park, it remains unclear whether residents who have endured the disruption of this drawn-out redevelopment will be encouraged to thrive in their new streets.