Regent Park is a neighbourhood located in downtown Toronto, Ontario built in the late 1940s as a public housing project managed by Toronto Community Housing. It sits on what used to be a significant part of the Cabbagetown neighbourhood and is bounded by Gerrard Street East to the north, River Street to the east, Shuter Street to the south and Parliament Street to the west. Regent Park's residential dwellings, prior to the ongoing redevelopment, were entirely social housing and covered all of the 69 acres (280,000 m²) which comprise the community. The original neighbourhood was razed in the process of creating Regent Park. The nickname Cabbagetown is now applied to the remaining historical, area north and west of the housing project, which has experienced considerable gentrification since the 1960s and 1970s.
History
Regent Park—and adjoining areas of the Old City's east end—were home to some of Toronto's historic slum districts in the early 1900s. Most residents of the area were poor and working-class people of British and Irish descent, along with smaller numbers of continental European Jewish and Macedonian immigrants. Concern over crime and social problems in the area, as well as substandard housing, led to plans for affordable housing during the Second World War. These plans came to fruition soon after the end of the war, when the Regent Park North public housing project was approved in 1947. Families began to move into Regent Park North in 1949, but construction continued into the 1950s. The last families moved into Regent Park North in 1957. In subsequent years, more public housing units were built in Toronto, including Regent Park South, which was completed in 1960. The high-rise portion was designed by Page and Steele while the spartan row house and walk-up apartments were designed by John Edward Hoare.
Although Regent Park had been designed to alleviate the area's substandard housing, crime, and social problems, these issues soon reemerged. By the mid-1960s, for example, there were complaints about the housing projects falling into a state of disrepair. Changes to the Canadian immigration system in the 1960s led to an influx of multicultural and multiethnic immigrants into the country. Some of these people, including immigrants from the Caribbean, China and Southeast Asia, settled in Regent Park in the 1960s and 1970s, changing the ethnic and racial composition of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, the area continued to have a reputation of crime. In the early 2000s, a new redevelopment plan for Regent Park was implemented. The plan in question called for Regent Park to be redeveloped as a mixed-income neighbourhood. Because of the area's proximity to the downtown core, it is potentially high value real estate. The neighbourhood's ethnic composition has changed between 2001 and 2016. In 2001, the neighbourhood was 22% Black, 21.8% South Asian, 19.5% European, 14.1% Chinese, 10.6% Southeast Asian and 3.4% Latin American. By the 2016 census, Europeans had become the largest group, while the presence of visible minority groups declined. The neighbourhood in 2016 was 28% European, 25.7% South Asian, 13.6% Black, 12.5% Chinese and 3.7% Southeast Asian. In Regent Park, the median household income in 2016 was $42,369, although there was a decrease in this income range as compared to 2011. This is lower than the median household income for Toronto at $65,829. As well, the Regent Park neighbourhood has a higher percentage of households without income (5.9%) compared to the City of Toronto average (4.7%) and 44.4% of households are at or below the poverty level, compared to 20.2% for the city average.