Home was on the other side of the tracks. Past the strip mall, along a winding street, under the hydro lines and over the subway tracks, and across a parking lot. “This was it,” Jay Pitter says with a long sigh. “This was home.”
The 12-storey apartment building in west Scarborough is where Ms. Pitter spent her childhood from 6 to 16, living with her mother in social housing. The building belongs to Toronto Community Housing today, and Ms. Pitter visited the place recently to show me the place she lived – and all that was wrong with it.
Ms. Pitter is the co-editor of Subdivided: City-Building in an Age of Hyper-Diversity, a powerful new essay collection from Coach House Books; she wrote the introduction as well as an essay, “Designing Dignified Social Housing,” that combines critiques of how social housing is conceived and Ms. Pitter’s recollections of this place.
She speaks of a profound alienation – and she ably critiques the physical attributes that made the place, and its residents, feel like outsiders. That isolation and sense of marginalization that badly hurt some of her friends and neighbours.
Ms. Pitter herself has moved on. She holds a post-graduate degree, lives downtown and works as a stakeholder engagement director; but she has a strong interest in placemaking, and with her essay, she is bringing some of her professional training to bear on this building.
“I feel like a lot of people who live in these communities don’t have a window on the outside world, and they don’t develop a sense of spatial entitlement,” she says. “They don’t feel entitled to more beautiful spaces, to safer spaces. It creates a psychological effect that’s real.”
On a sunny morning this month, Ms. Pitter’s childhood building near Warden and Danforth seemed in reasonable shape; its concrete and brick facades and concrete balconies were largely in good repair, the grass lawns mown, the pavement well-tended. The building’s front hallway, where Ms. Pitter remembers drug dealers and sexual predators hanging out at will in the 1980s, was both deserted and clean.
But it was also cramped. The lobby is surprisingly small; the building’s halls narrow; the windows in the ground-floor laundry room high and tiny, wrapped in bars. Ms. Pitter left here more than 20 years ago, and has rarely been back. “The only additions I can see anywhere on the building,” she says, “have been bars on the windows and security cameras.”
And this matters. “In other buildings, barriers are created by beautiful low walls, by shrubs,” she says. “Here, there are bars. It’s an institutional community.”
The basketball court a few minutes’ walk away, the one place devoted to youth recreation, is hemmed in by buildings, flanked by a high iron fence on two sides – concealed from the rest of the community and physically contained. “It is a cage,” Ms. Pitter says, looking around. “If you come to play here, you are going to be playing in a cage.”
When Ms. Pitter was growing up here, that sense was equally clear. “You knew,” Ms. Pitter recalls. “You learn spatial shame really early … I saw other people’s homes, and there was a sense of dignity and order; and then I came back here and there was a very different feeling.”
Ms. Pitter’s and her mother’s first home, as immigrants from Jamaica to Canada, was her grandmother’s house near St. Clair and Dufferin. Ms. Pitter’s grandmother “came from a family that owned things, and that was important to her,” Ms. Pitter recalls. She bought a large house “and carved it up into a million pieces. I think she always had six or eight tenants.”
But Ms. Pitter’s mother “was a free-spirited newcomer intent on integrating,” she writes in her essay. “My grandmother was a traditional Pentecostal who loved the Lord, wrestling, and judging women who wore miniskirts.” So into social housing they went.
And, in the 1980s, this was a dangerous place: Ms. Pitter recalls an underage sex trade that took advantage of teenage girls she knew. One of those girls – the older sister of a friend of Ms. Pitter, who was preyed upon by a local pimp – was murdered.
Ms. Pitter writes: “Where I grew up, our address and postal code were the equivalent of a scarlet letter – a place-based mark branding us as second-class citizens.”
She describes condescension from teachers, and from friends’ parents, that was coloured by racism. But Ms. Pitter dwells on the stigma that affects all social-housing residents equally, the fact of being set apart.
For one thing, many residents had no sense of belonging. “My mother always made it clear that we would be moving on from here,” Ms. Pitter says now. “And she did; it was only 10 years of her life that we spent here, but for me it was formative.” This lack of ownership, literally and symbolically, is powerful.
Why? It’s not simply the fact that it is an apartment building. At a glance, the building is much like other modernist tower blocks in the former Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York, many of which are stable and safe communities. But here, the recipe has been diluted; there is an inherent stinginess in the architecture.
In her essay, Ms. Pitter cites the scholar John C. Bacher that “social housing in Canada was visually designed to affirm that it was inferior accommodation intended to serve a low-income group.” This is visibly the case here – as it is in certain other social-housing developments of the same period in Toronto. It’s not just that these places have been poorly maintained and hard-worn; it’s that they were built to look and feel cheap in the first place.
This, despite the idealism that animated the work of the period. Architects in the 1960s saw themselves as agents of social change: To build housing for the people was the great goal of the modernist movement in architecture, which was aligned with the ambitious welfare state of the period.
In the world of urbanism and architecture, much of Ms. Pitter’s critique will sound familiar. Social-housing advocates, including the Pritzker Prize-winning Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, focus heavily on questions of community engagement and economic stability.
And the no-man’s-lands of Ms. Pitter’s neighbourhood are also out of fashion. All around the houses and apartment buildings of Warden Woods, there is a wealth of green space, front yards and side yards and unnamed green patches that belong to nobody in particular.
Today, making neighbourhoods connect to the rest of the city, and making public spaces that are defensible – to have “eyes on the street,” in Jane Jacobs’s phrase – is a given. North American public-housing providers now embrace the ideal of integration; TCH is attempting to break down the physical and social barriers that separate its tenants from the larger community, rebuilding neighbourhoods to include market-rate housing in Lawrence Heights, Alexandra Park and in Regent Park.
Those “revitalizations” are thoughtful efforts to undo some of the failed urban design of a half-century ago and remove the quarantined aspect of places like this. By bringing in market-rate housing, they also bring in private money to address TCH’s massive repair backlog, which it estimates at $2.6-billion.
But that number is too small: Even if the concrete isn’t crumbling, homes such as this retain a deficit of dignity.
Subdivided launches May 24 at Revival Bar in Toronto (783 College St).