I’ve also known several older close friends and family who made similar moves in their own communities, into purpose-built rentals or equity co-ops. People will downsize when they can do so comfortably nearby. But costs + planning rules make local mid-rise hard and push the opportunity cost high.

Surplus bedrooms point to policy failure. I’ve lived in a couple of new purpose-built mid-rise rentals on Toronto main streets. Many neighbours were older adults from the area who sold or passed homes to kids and downsized into the building. People need local options to not disrupt their lives.

Occupancy standards define deprivation in context. It is a human rights issue when a person or family is forced to live with many more people per bedroom, and when right-sized homes in the same area are unaffordable for them. That is a part of core housing need. Not density per se but it overlaps.

If we're talking about suitability, it's really about bedrooms. We haven’t built multi-bedroom units (TO and Van particularly) because they’re expensive and the most motivated buyers over the last 15 years were investors, not families, so the market never shifted toward delivering larger units.

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Regent Park has evolved beyond the plan. It’s what Richard Sennett calls an open form: something that is intended to change through use and care, shaped by the people who live there. That is the lesson, plan to build frameworks that let residents keep making the place their own.

Regent Park is often cited as a model, but too often only the surface is copied, the financing approach. It was a solution to a specific moment, led by first principles and community goals. If done today, we should draw on a stronger non profit sector and all three orders of government.

John recalled the team looking at precedents in the UK and US and really not seeing anything suited to Toronto. The team was made up of people who had been involved in the co-op housing movements of the 1970s and the perfect precedent was already in Toronto, Toronto's St Lawrence neighbourhood.

It’s easy to forget the conditions of that moment. Toronto Community Housing had just been formed and a solution had to be found given limited resources.

Residents were calling for improvements but had conditions, there was no point in the conversation without securing their right to return.

That early work evolved into a collaborative process of imagining a community involving residents, community ambassadors and kitchen table conversations, the attentive ear of a great local councillor Pam Mcconnell, the patient and persistent leadership of Derek Ballentyne and Mitchell Cohen.

His team produced the initial study that validated feasibility and mapped the opportunity, showing how to repair and re-imagine a Regent Park connected to the city when the new Toronto Community Housing Corporation little resources.