Revitalisation gone wrong: Mixed-income public housing redevelopment in Toronto’s Don Mount Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article challenges the presumed benevolence of mixed-income public housing redevelopment, focusing on the first socially-mixed remake of public housing in Canada, at Toronto’s Don Mount Court (now called ‘Rivertowne’). Between 2002 and 2012 the community was demolished and replaced with a re-designed ‘New Urbanist’ landscape, including replacement of public housing (232 units) and 187 new condominium townhouses. While mixed redevelopment is premised on the hope that tenants will benefit from improved design and mixed-income interactions, this research finds that many residents were less satisfied with the quality of their housing, neighbourhood design, and social community post-redevelopment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic participant observation, this article finds that tenant interviewees missed their older, more spacious homes in the former Don Mount, and were upset to find that positive community bonds were dismantled by relocation and redevelopment. Challenging the ‘myth of the benevolent middle class’ at the heart of social mix policy, many residents reported charged social relations in the new Rivertowne. In addition, the neo-traditional redesign of the community – intended to promote safety and inclusivity – had paradoxical impacts. Many tenants felt less safe than in their modernist-style public housing, and the mutual surveillance enabled by New Urbanist redesign fostered tense community relations. These findings serve as a strong caution for cities and public housing authorities considering mixed redevelopment, and call into question the wisdom of funding welfare state provisions with profits from real estate development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".