Deborah is a Cooperative student at FOCUS MEDIA ARTS CENTRE

Since 1949, Canada’s first historical public housing project in Regent Park has grown and has become the largest within the city. The plan was to support lower-income communities while they tried to improve their circumstances.

Since 2005, Regent Park’s revitalization plans were to transform aging infrastructure into an improved community that provided housing to mixed-income individuals and their families. The housing mix included new rental buildings, townhouses, commercial spaces, community centres, parks and other new residential buildings.

To attract new homeowners, recent plans for adding bike lanes, wider roads and improvements to public transit are in the process of being made and are meant to help connect Regent Park to the rest of the modernized City of Toronto.

With these drastic changes to the Regent Park community, some local residents strongly oppose the revitalization saying that it increases displacement and many are concerned about how new homeowners will interact with longtime residents.

To gauge residents' thoughts on the matter and to assess the extent to which Regent Park community members feel that the changes in the neighbourhood are good or bad, two RPTV reporters, Kedar Ahmed and Fabio Rivera, went out to the streets around Regent Park to capture people’s thoughts.

While on balance, quite a few people were highly positive about the revitalization, there were detractors too. For example, two local workers at Regent Park, Krysta and Dan, shared their thoughts on the matter. “You force the people that live here out, 'cause they can’t afford to live here anymore or  you’ve torn down the building they used to live in and that just to me feels like gentrification.”

Another individual said, “Definitely the rents going up, (that is)... a huge part (of gentrification), lack of (affordable) housing, building condos and dispensaries, there's not really much resources for a lot of people.”