A Perception of Learned Helplessness: The Jane-Finch Neighborhood Versus Pessimism and Conflict at Toronto Public Housing

David M. K. Sheinin

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

In January 1988, long-time housing activist and president of the Jane-Finch Concerned Citizens Organization, Sheila Mascoll, wrote a letter of complaint to the editors of T.O. Magazine. A recent article had advanced the worst sorts of false stereotypes about the Jane-Finch community. The supposed normalization of drug trafficking in the area was cast simply as an alternative economy. “One of the very grave results of the article,” she argued, “is that it serves to paint a picture of a community divided against itself.” The article quoted a South Asian cab driver as having used the term “N” to describe African Canadians. “Such comments are irresponsible,” Mascoll noted, “and serve as fuel for those wishing to fan the flames of intra-community racial discontent.” The article was one in a long line of media pieces that helped reinforce popular notions of Jane-Finch as a place Torontonians would not wish to live, inundated with drug trafficking, violent crime, and “welfare recipients suffering from learned helplessness.” What most troubled Mascoll was that the magazine had been supplied with information on a wide range of events and programs that made Jane-Finch a vibrant community. All of that was ignored. Mascoll wasn’t finished. In correspondence with North York Mayor Mel Lastman about the article, she accused the mayor of the sort of neglect of and insensitivity toward Jane-Finch that had cast an unreasonable racist pall on a neighborhood where thousands lived, worked, and played.

In the mid-1980s, many Torontonians saw Jane-Finch negatively in a manner that incorporated discriminatory tropes linking race, immigration, illicit drug use and street violence. The Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) managed roughly 20 percent of the housing units in the area, representing some 7,500 people. Without the extremes of poverty and social problems of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis (demolished in 1972) or the Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago (demolished in 1995), MTHA housing in Jane-Finch and the neighborhood itself reflected some of the same problems faced by condemned public housing communities in the United States. Hospital services, recreation space, and commercial activity in the area, for example, were far poorer than elsewhere in the city, reducing opportunities for residents. Moreover, despite decades of promises to consult more regularly and more meaningfully with residents, MTHA had only very limited interaction with tenants and community advocacy groups that included the Northwest Advisory Committee and the Downsview Weston Action Committee, each consisting of residents, front-line social services workers, and local politicians.

By mid-1988, after almost two years in office, MTHA board chair John Sewell had grown less optimistic about prospects for public housing in Toronto. Long an advocate of tenant activism and governance in Toronto housing, Sewell wrote to his political ally, the urban activist Jane Jacobs. The latter had forwarded an article she had read about the success of tenant management of public housing in the United States. Sewell answered drawing on his own experience of visiting public housing units in Cleveland, Ohio at Lakeview Terrace, the same housing bloc mentioned in the article sent by Jacobs. Sewell was more circumspect than the article. “Tenant management has turned out to be not much better than management by Housing Authorities mostly because of lack of money.” The latter had been starved for cash and could not keep up with repairs on crumbling facilities. “I was absolutely shocked by the number of vacant units at Lakeview Terrace and other housing projects,” Sewell wrote, adding what he believed Jacobs knew; most public housing designs in the United States and Canada “offend the most basic rules of human need” and were almost unmanageable.

More optimistic than most MTHA staff on the question of tenant consultation and management, Sewell’s pessimism was an important reflection of MTHA policy stasis and low staff morale at Jane and Finch. Underfunding had been a key problem for Toronto public housing for decades, along with fiscal conservative politicians anxious to do away with what they viewed as the burden of housing subsidies. In 1983, conservative North York mayor Mel Lastman proposed a possible reduction in subsidized housing in Jane-Finch to the Ontario government. Lastman pitched that the area would be more likely to thrive if public housing were diminished and integrated with market value rental units. The province did not reject the proposal outright, but sent Lastman to the MTHA board, which established a committee to work on the proposal. Completed in September 1983, the committee report concluded that there was an excess of subsidized housing in Jane-Finch. Report recommendations included a reduction in the subsidized units available in MTHA buildings through a conversion of apartments to co-op and condominium housing, the sale of MTHA buildings, and other means. It also proposed hiring MTHA residents to conduct maintenance, the creation of a merit fund to offer awards for building maintenance, and the funding of youth groups. There was no discussion of where residents evicted to make room for non-subsidized tenants would go to live.

MTHA managers blocked the MTHA board committee from pressing ahead with decreasing subsidized housing in the area. This was not because of a rejection of the idea of mixed housing, or decreasing the number of subsidized units, but because employees felt that the board had overstepped its purview in proposing such sweeping changes without consulting MTHA managers. In addition, MTHA argued that it was unreasonable to conclude, as the report did, that in less than seven years, given the chance, half the MTHA units would be occupied by market rent-paying tenants who would have moved to Jane-Finch from elsewhere. MTHA management also thought fanciful the report finding (and board position) that private landlords would buy MTHA buildings. Moreover, in vilifying residents, the board seemed culpable of the same sort of discriminatory generalizations about the area that Sheila Mascoll would raise five years later. MTHA managers were also unhappy with a board finding that it was exclusively the responsibility of MTHA employees to find solutions to poverty and inequality in the area. MTHA managers underscored that problems were so significant in Jane-Finch because the North York Planning Board had foolishly allowed high density development in the area without key social services to support residents. Passing the buck, quarrels between management and the board, and internal MTHA squabbling had become a hallmark of public housing failures in Toronto and an impediment to meaningful change.

In the mid-1980s, the twenty-five-floor high-rise at 15 Tobermory Drive was the largest and most densely populated building held by MTHA, with 16 apartments on each floor. Having been designed to house families, 374 apartments had three bedrooms while 189 had two. As a result, resident density was extremely high. There were 1075 tenants on the books. Of those, 330 were children under 13, with 154 teenagers. Accounting for relatives and others in the building temporarily, MTHA calculated that the number of people present at any given time was closer to 1500. Residents noted that there was so much movement in and out of the building that it was impossible to distinguish residents from others, which in turn depressed the neighbourly atmosphere. Many tenants reported being afraid of walking the halls and riding the elevators in the evening, wary of illegal drug activity and petty crime.

Wear and tear on the poorly funded building aggravated living conditions. Use was so heavy on the four elevators that one or two were regularly out of service. There was no MTHA building coordinator and nobody else that might work with residents on problems of security. In June 1987, a group of teenagers in the building complained about poor recreational facilities to MTHA managers. In 1986, the Department of Public Health had identified a range of problems that had to be corrected in the swimming pool at 15 Tobermory Drive, allowing the pool to be opened that summer on the condition that reforms be completed by the following summer. Residents were livid that the pool did not open on schedule in June 1987 because Health Department instructions had not been addressed. In early July, MTHA announced that it would be 2-3 weeks before the pool opening—precisely what had been announced 2-3 weeks earlier. “I can’t seem to get a straight answer from anyone on it,” one MTHA manager lamented.

In March 1987, the basketball hoops, backboards, and poles were damaged, then removed from the building court. Teens from the building asked MTHA daily when repairs would take place. As of early July, there was no news. “Needless to say, the residents and myself are getting tired of the runaround,” a Community Relations Worker (CRW) wrote to John Sewell. Rumours ripped through the building, possibly started by MTHA staff, that the small MTHA office in the building would be closing. “MTHA is losing credibility with residents,” the CRW went on, “and I have to say that I have been embarrassed to be a member of management on a number of occasions recently because of the attitude of staff towards the residents and the problems here.”

In the decades that followed, the problems MTHA grappled with in the 1980s became more exacerbated. Violent crime rose, resident fears climbed, and outsiders continued to apply racist stereotypes in how they understood the neighbourhood. In 2018, Ontario Community Safety Minister Michael Tibollo showed that the discriminatory perceptions that had worried Sheila Mascoll thirty years earlier were alive and well. The member of the provincial parliament for Vaughan-Woobridge, whose responsibilities included oversight of the Ontario anti-racism directorate, told colleagues in the legislature that he had visited “Jane and Finch” clad in a bulletproof vest to “see what it’s like.” In response to criticisms from opposition members that the minister had stigmatised the neighborhood as violent and racially problematic, Tibollo responded only that the police had given him the vest to wear.

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.

Further Reading

Susan McMillan. “Forty Years of Social Housing in Toronto.” Canadian Social Trends. Winter 1987. 25-30.

Rita McWilliams. “Revolution in the Projects.” Reason. July 1988. https://reason.com/1988/07/01/revolution-in-the-projects/

Al Zabas. “Breaking the Rules to Build Homes.” Canadian Building. March 1988. 20-21, 25.