Undertaking a large-scale redevelopment in an inner-city area is rarely successful, particularly if one of the major objectives is creating housing for poor people. Urban regeneration, as the process is known, is even more suspect when undertaken by government. The St Lawrence Neighbourhood in downtown Toronto is a very successful and notable exception, and therefore of special interest.

Only six years before commencing the St Lawrence Neighbourhood, governments in Canada had publicly abandoned the process of urban renewal as an utter failure. The St Lawrence Neighbourhood happened only because the need for housing the poor remained urgent. It flowed from essentially the same set of objectives as urban renewal, but what made it different?

Perhaps the most important difference was a new set of housing programs created by the federal government in 1973, although a new approach to thinking about the design of such a project proved to be equally important to its success. The new programs, which were abandoned only 20 years later as being too expensive, went beyond the simple provision of basic housing for the poor. They encompassed social policy goals for assisting the poor to integrate into society and thereby became tools for dealing with wider urban issues from a social perspective.

These programs enabled the creation of co-operative and non-profit housing as a new way of housing the poor. Non-governmental organizations were able to provide housing for those in need, tenants could control and collectively own buildings, and most important of all, the programs mandated a mix of incomes. Old-style public housing had been directed only at those most in need, that is the poor often on welfare. The new programs would cater to a mix of the most needy and a proportion of working people in lower- and middle-income ranges.

In creating the St Lawrence Neighbourhood the objective was to avoid the project mentality of a group of buildings that produced the ghetto associated with urban renewal. Instead, the housing was to take its cue from the typical Toronto neighbourhood. From this starting point, three principles emerged: public streets should be the basis of the neighbourhood, buildings should address the streets, and there should be mix.

The typical Toronto neighbourhood is not very special, architecturally speaking – the houses are cookie-cutter, builder-designed, run-of-the-mill. But the individual houses are less important than their conglomeration along public streets, which are richly adorned with trees, and connect to schools, parks, and usually a main street with shops within a few blocks. The streets create the fabric that we know and love as the Toronto neighbourhood.

Streets in the St Lawrence Neighbourhood were planned to be just as in any other Toronto neighbourhood, that is they were to be public, continuous, and extended into and through the neighbourhood, integrating it fully with the framework of the surrounding city. This meant adding more streets rather than cutting off existing streets as was the norm in urban renewal projects. For new buildings in St Lawrence, it was decreed that they would to relate directly to the public streets, with front doors opening onto the streets and with the public streets and lanes being the only place of pedestrian circulation – again a departure from the project mentality.

The final key principle was mandating mix, again a condition found in most neighbourhoods and never in projects. Mix in St Lawrence became almost a fetish. Development was to be mixed in housing type, housing tenure, income group, land use, and even developer. The neighbourhood was developed with a mix of non-profit, co-operative, and private owners, and among each there were many different developers. The non-profit and co-operative buildings all had tenants with a mix of incomes, made possible under the new housing program. A quarter or more of the housing was private market, primarily for ownership. The least successful was the mix of land uses; in the initial phases there could perhaps have been more retail and more work places.

St Lawrence features the best residential architecture produced in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s. There are fine buildings by Henno Silaste, Irving Grossman, Ron Thom and Jerome Markson, among others. They worked with limited budgets and a narrow range of materials. They produced the first stacked townhouses in Toronto, now being built throughout Ontario, and their quality has yet to be exceeded. They also related higher apartment forms to rows of townhouses and the buildings worked in unison with interesting parking and open-space solutions. The earlier phases were all kept to red brick, unnecessarily abandoned in later phases over concerns about uniformity. Building heights were also allowed to creep up in the later phases. But neither the change in materials, the mix of fine architecture and ordinary buildings, nor somewhat oversized buildings seem to matter. Instead, they prove the importance of the simple principles that make it all work as successfully as the existing Toronto neighbourhoods.

Today, the neighbourhood extends well beyond the original boundaries. It is no longer apparent where the St Lawrence Neighbourhood project undertaken by the City of Toronto ends and where the rest of the city begins. Today, there is much more ownership housing than subsidized housing, and there is a considerable mix of land uses with much space for work, retail, entertainment and education. St Lawrence never was a project. It became a neighbourhood from the start, catering to many poor people, but also becoming a catalyst for the regeneration of a large part of the city.

In labelling the 1973 housing programs as too expensive, governments never acknowledged that the programs did more than just house the poor. Today, people are again demanding that governments house the poor and address questions of urban infrastructure. Let us hope that when governments are forced back into the housing business, they do not return to the mean-spirited model of urban renewal that is sure to fail, but look instead to the model that is best illustrated in the St Lawrence Neighbourhood. A made-in-Canada, proven solution – let’s use it.

Frank Lewinberg