Life in a Mixed Neighbourhood: Three Essays on Tenure Mix and Sociality in the Redeveloped Regent Park

This dissertation comprises three chapters of original empirical research concerning the mixed-tenure redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park public housing community. These chapters use survey data from 517 unique respondents in two different surveys to provide the first systematic account of attitudes towards the mixed community among both residents and users of Regent Park’s public spaces. It provides a quantitative complement to the large body of qualitative research that has so far been produced on the redevelopment and contributes to our understanding about how programs of mixed-tenure redevelopment may impact individuals on a range of social, health-related, and economic dimensions. Two chapters are based on data collected in a survey of residents of the redeveloped portions of the neighbourhood and investigate perceptions of stigma and collective efficacy. Another chapter uses data from a street-intercept survey to assess more general attitudes towards the redeveloped neighbourhood among all users of its public spaces. In general, responses to the various survey measures employed are broadly positive, although differences between tenure groups and along certain demographic lines are also apparent. An important contribution of this research is the explicit measurement of variation between individuals and the treatment of this variation as a phenomenon of fundamental interest. It is uniformly the case across chapters in this dissertation that variation between individuals explains vastly more of the observed variation in outcomes than do any other variables considered, helping to contextualize the diversity of experience reported in other research. The findings of this dissertation are broadly consistent with expectations that mixed-tenure redevelopment primarily tend to improve ‘placed-based’ outcomes and provides support for the policy, if expectations are limited to the provision of improved housing and public amenities with relative comity between neighbours rather than meaningful interaction between residents of different tenures. Ph.D