Toronto's Regent Park a bold experiment to solve housing crisis

It's the dank, stinking stairwells of Toronto's Regent Park housing project that for residents like Ines Garcia represent the failures of the past, and now, as they're being demolished, hope for the future.

Garcia, a 48-year-old single mother of four, has been forced to shield her children from strangers shooting up heroin on the urine-soaked steps. The Ecuadorean immigrant once mustered the courage to tell a man smoking crack to do it elsewhere. He replied: "Bitch, you wanna die?" Garcia's eyes teared up at the memory.

If all goes to plan, Garcia, who makes less than US$10,000 a year juggling two jobs, soon won't have to climb the stairs to her subsidised apartment. She'll have elevators in a new unit in a new Regent Park, part of North America's largest social-housing redevelopment.

As its population swells to 17,000 from 7,500, the new Regent Park will mix renters in subsidised apartments with owners of market-priced condominiums and integrate the area into the city. The project is a public-private experiment in housing that will provide a test case for cities from New York to San Francisco struggling to offer affordable homes as property prices soar.

Toronto's average home price hit C$547,786 (HK$3.9 million) in March, up 79 per cent from a decade ago. The city of 2.8 million is tied with New York as the 14th least affordable of 85 major housing markets ranked by researcher Demographia, with Hong Kong at No 1. There are about 168,000 people waiting for subsidised housing in the city, where Toronto Community Housing (TCH) is the second-largest social-housing landlord after New York.

Built in the 1940s to house war veterans and immigrants, Regent Park was laid out as a so-called garden city - an enclosed neighbourhood with no major through-streets and plenty of parks.