Consultant Woes, Community Relations Worker Doubts, and Bureaucratic Stasis at Toronto Public Housing in the late 1980s

David M. K. Sheinin

This is the third in a series of articles on Toronto public housing in the late 1980s. All entries in the series will be collected here.

In the 1980s, the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA)’s tenant population shifted as the demographic makeup of Toronto changed. At the same time, Community Relations Worker (CRWs) developed big and ultimately doomed plans for social service provision. The MTHA was hampered in its unwieldy mission. Poor organizational structure and management of CRWs meant they were not equipped to deliver ambitious programming. Furthermore, since staff failed to take demographic shifts into account and sometimes held prejudiced attitudes toward tenants, they failed to identify and plan appropriate programs. A consultant report from Simon Associates and the MTHA’s response to it provide a window on these major issues in MTHA in the 1980s.

Early in 1987, Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) tried to get a handle on unwieldy, poorly defined social service mission creep. The board commissioned Simon Associates consultants to report on how to move forward. The consultants produced, “The Social and Recreational Needs of MTHA Family Residents: Recommendations to Fill Gaps in Service.” Simon Associates emerged from the process uncertain about what CRWs should be doing. Just as important, they found that MTHA policy was all over the map. The CRW job description was long, messy, and cobbled together over time with new responsibilities having been added without any others having been removed. MTHA gave no guidance on how a CRWs should divide their time among a mountain of assigned priorities, nor what precisely each set of designated tasks entailed. While one given CRW might choose to focus on casework, another might get bogged down in administering resident housing transfers from one apartment to another. As CRWs had complained for years, there was no senior MTHA official responsible for guiding them in their work.

The MTHA Central CRW committee (CCRWC) responded to the data on behalf of CRWs in a manner that reflected CRW professionalism, deep concern, and sometimes troubling disdain for residents and their plight. This included the use of the heavily racialized US American term, “the projects,” to describe Toronto public housing. Simon Associates found that what they described as the problem of “young men hanging out in lobbies” could be resolved with better employment and recreation opportunities. CRWs disagreed and pointed ominously to the “cultural background” of the loiterers as a cause of their putative sloth. “It must also be recognized that some may be using this type of public space for illegal activities and therefore [it] is a security problem.” While Simon Associates found that tenants wanted a job, CRWs countered that this was only partially true. “Many do not seek it, as social assistance benefits give them more security (financial and medical).” While Simon Associates reported that one in four residents had tried to bring about change in maintenance at MTHA, CCRWC identified poor tenant care for their homes and their failure to report vandalism as having resulted in an unreasonable need for maintenance. What, the committee went on dismissively, were these supposed tenant initiatives for change and what were the results? CRWs noted the report’s 20 percent resident attendance rate at tenant group meetings but raised doubts about how regularly that 20 percent had attended. They were equally critical of the 70 percent that knew nothing of such groups which meant to CRWs that the groups were unrepresentative of tenants. In the absence of a representative sample of residents on tenant groups, CRWs argued, such groups became “autocratic rather than democratic.”

CRWs reasoned further that the Simon Associates report did not relate “the rights of the individual to self-determination and autonomy,” instead regarding residents as a group, imposing programs and services on all, and ignoring that “many of our residents are intelligent human beings who have active lifestyles and cope pretty well and prefer to keep to themselves or engage in outside activities without the need for any assistance.”

Despite that it was based on only a limited number of comments from tenants specifically recommended for interviewing by MTHA staff, a March 1988 report prepared by Nan Hudson for MTHA on tenant consultation at MTHA found that residents had not felt consulted by MTHA and were “angry and frustrated at the lack of respect shown” them by MTHA.

There was ongoing unhappiness within MTHA on how to proceed. In August 1988, MTHA authorized hiring a Community Services Coordinator (CSC) who would bear some responsibility for guiding CRWs, and would report directly to the director of tenant placement. CRWs balked. CSSCRW had recommended that the new CSC report to the MTHA general manager. But MTHA chair John Sewell decided that the general manager, Kevin Gaul, was already overextended, which explained the supervision shift to the director of tenant placement. The CRWs responded that the MTHA Tenant Placement Branch was exclusively responsible for residence allocations, and much of their work concerned incoming MTHA residents not yet on site. The CSC, on the other hand, would be at the centre of new policy development on social issues. It would therefore be essential for the CSC to report to the general manager, director of operations, and MTHA board. Sewell refused.

Bureaucratic Tangles

CRWs were at odds on how to address social issues. Some stressed community development work while others thought individual case work might be more effective. One CRW, Jackie Joyce, argued that the role of the CRW should be patterned on that of the patient advocate in Ontario hospitals, where the advocate prioritized their patients’ well-being, functioned autonomously, and advocated for patients. Joyce noted that this would necessarily place CRWs, like advocates, at odds with their employer. This also meant that CRWs would do casework only, not community liaison work or educational work with the public. Joyce reasoned that such a role for CRWs would encourage tenants to be more forthright in discussing their problems with CRWs. On the other hand, CRW Yvonne Tinglin claimed that CRWs should find a balance between community development work (whose definition remained unclear, according to Tinglin) and case work. “I am in favour of the idea that M.T.H.A should act as an advocate for social programs for the tenants but should not provide them itself,” she wrote. “Providing programs on site would appear to be a form of ‘segregation’ of our tenants and does not promote client independence.”

For the most part, MTHA administrators balked at the idea of autonomous CRWs potentially in conflict with management. One property manager, Tom Lee, argued that the mandate of MTHA was to provide decent and affordable housing. For tenants’ social needs, MTHA staff should work with tenants on those requirements, then move the problems identified outside public housing, to a community social service agency.

CSSCRW was unable to mediate a compromise on any of these issues, nor was MTHA. What was community development? How did it differ from community organizing? In the end, CSSCRW recommended that MTHA should advocate for social problems rather than deliver them itself, though this would not mean that existing programs should be shuttered right away.

The Elephant in the Room

MTHA gathered data and information on problems in public housing in a manner that focused explicitly on race and ethnicity, though CRWs and managers may not have seen it that way and showed no interest in providing social services in a manner that reflected the distinct needs of varied ethnic and racial communities in public housing. One internal report identified North Regent Park as a public housing complex where Vietnamese and other immigrants had been housed in the early 1980s when they first came to Canada. As a result, the report continued, other residents feared that these groups were taking over and fringe groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, had begun to exploit Regent Park and other “projects.” While CRWs did not always identify immigrants as a “problem” in and of themselves, they routinely saw the dynamic surrounding the influx of immigrants into public housing as problematic, lumping together immigrants, loiterers, the Ku Klux Klan, resentful longtime residents, and more.

Other outside groups, CRWs found, may well have been well intentioned but could inadvertently “stir up the pot.” This included the New York-based Guardian Angels and unidentified fundamentalist religious groups. MTHA identified 4,809 “security incidents” in 1985. At the 800 units at MTHA facilities at Jane and Falstaff, DeMarco Blvd, and Jane and John Best, only the first of the three sites had on-site security. There were 1,480 security incidents in 1985 with problems that included unemployed Black youth, lack of education among young residents, a high youth population, and drug dealing on site. At the Jane and Woolner, Dundas and Gooch and Humber Blvd sites there were 582 security incidents in 1985, a “large concentration” of Black residents, and poorly designed “projects” where buildings faced one another and were separated by a small, paved area where youth congregated with “ghetto blasters.”

In a reflection of the city itself, the racial, religious and ethnic dynamic of public housing had changed dramatically over the preceding decade. And for all the discussion among consultants, MTHA administrators, CRWs, and tenants themselves, MTHA managers and employees seemed oblivious to initiatives that might specifically address that transformation and how it was impacting the lives of tenants. Managers, CRWs, and other employees alternated between expressing sympathy for new arrivals in Canada, to framing problems in racialized and sometimes racist ways, to finding no reason to include the question of race, ethnicity, and religion in their consideration of how to bring social programs to tenants.

Today, MTHA’s successor agency Toronto Community Housing (TCH) takes some steps to address problems that were not considered (or ignored) in 1980s, including environmental and racial awareness. In 2020, for example, TCH established a Confronting Anti-Black Racism Strategy Team that, in turn, founded The TCH Centre for Advancing the Interests of Black People a year later. Financial problems faced by MTHA in the 1980s have been partially resolved by partnerships with (and funding from) private corporations and their foundation arms. The “Midnight Basketball” program for youth aged 14 to 18 is paid for in part by the Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Foundation. The “Be.Build.Brand” program encourages entrepreneurship for residents aged 18 to 29. It culminates in a business idea pitch night and is backed by Digital Main St. (which in turn received funding from Google, Mastercard, and eBay).

These programs stand in stark contrast with the ambitious and sometimes tactless proposals of the 1980s. Simon Associates and the CRWs did not suggest private sector partnerships in the 1980s, and their work now seems worlds away from how social programming in Toronto’s public housing has adapted to eternal underfunding today. New archival and other research for the post-1990 period is pending to help chronicle decision making processes on programming that started in the 1980s, and have culminated in the limited, privately funded, race-conscious programs in Toronto today.

David M. K. Sheinin is professor of history at Trent University and académico correspondiente of the Academia Nacional de la Historia de la República Argentina. His most recent book, co-edited with C. Nathan Hatton, is Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas (Lexington Books, 2024).

Author’s note: All archival material referenced in this essay is from Fonds 1306, Series 12, City of Toronto Archives.