Toronto public housing failures (or am I being redundant?)

[Connor]

A gem I found in my subtley marxist college sociology class:

"UNDER THE
PROUD STARES of city officials and the Toronto media, Alf and Teresa Bluett and
their four children walked up freshly-laid concrete steps into their new row
house in Regent Park housing project.



The Bluetts were the first family to move into the
pioneering Canadian public housing development in 1949. Alf, a car man's helper with the Canadian National Railroad,
had served five years overseas in the army. He was the ideal candidate for the
new project as housing reform advocates promised that it was a permanent, low-rental housing option for
workers unable to manage in Toronto's despairingly tight housing
market. 


As one admiring member of city government said of the
project in its first year: "a sign might well be erected somewhere on that 42-acre site - Good Citizens Dwell
Here."  The urban reform movement,
government officials, key sections of the business community, and the media
sang the praises of Regent Park as an outstanding initiative to tackle the low-income housing crisis for the
city's burgeoning working class.  Citing
prospective tenants and displaying flattering photos of the new dwellings, the Toronto
Daily Star described the project as "Heaven."
    


"Barely twenty years later, politicians, reformers, and the media were
singing a decidedly different tune.   Public housing projects were now
regarded as new slums, housing
only the rough and rowdy, many of them unruly children and teens, the
unemployed, or those on social assistance. 
Descriptions of Regent Park in the Toronto Star shifted radically
from "Heaven" to "colossal flop" and "hopeless
slum."


This negative image intensified considerably in the following two
decades.   By the 1990s, Canada's largest
housing project became virtually synonymous with socio-economic marginalization
and behavioral depravity.    In June
2002, a Toronto Star reporter characteristically referred to the housing
development as a "poster child for poverty."

Of
course it doesn't mention how diverting productive agricultural and
industrial land towards state-alters of destruction, poverty, and
depravity heavily contributes to inflation and an overall lower standard
of living for the poor.  In 2006 the city doubled down on their cocaine
perscription, with an initiative to "revitalize" Regent Park, rife with
Malthusian gobbledy-gook: "A
schematic site plan indicates the consolidation of density near a
central park
and existing arterial intersections as well as the introduction of
ground-oriented townhouses along rehabilitated streets" (City Noise). 
The boot licking media seems decidedly less reverent in their
state-worship of public housing projects, yet not willing to mercilessly
let the wheezing, disease-ridden parasite die and allow for creative, voluntary solutions to help the poor.