“Encouraging the Behaviour We Want to Encourage”: Faded Promises of Security in Toronto Public Housing

David M. K. Sheinin

Colour photo of a city street corner with a police car marked "Metro Police" in the midground. Labeled "City of Toronto Archives, Series 1465, File 169, Item 144."
Looking north on Armadale from Bloor [with Metro Toronto Police vehicle]. [between 1980 and 1998].

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

In May 1988, the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) launched a new initiative to improve tenant security across public housing in Toronto. It began with a letter soliciting residents for their views. “You are well aware,” the letter started, “that a serious problem exists in your building with drug dealing, prostitution, purse snatchings, assaults, and related criminal activity.”  It went on to note that tenants sometimes became involved with drugs or sex work “and cannot get free from the persons who control these activities.” MTHA promised the deployment of more police officers in surveillance and investigation operations that would include stepped up raids on peoples’ homes. Advice from MTHA was jarring. Don’t carry a purse “if you really don’t have to.” Don’t carry cash “you don’t need to have with you.” Don’t thread a purse strap around an arm. You could be badly injured in a robbery. Apartment doors were to be kept always locked. “Sometimes, transients knock on tenant doors asking for a drink of water or to use the bathroom or to stay overnight. These are tricks that are used to rob unsuspecting tenants.” The letter was signed simply, “Management.” MTHA took as a given that violent crime was a dominant feature of life in public housing that sucked in vast numbers of residents. Despite that grim outlook, MTHA had no notion of how to improve resident life in the face of sometimes violent criminality. In what seemed to some MTHA workers a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy of failure on the matter, MTHA also took it upon itself to modify the behaviour of all residents. Toward that end, it hired the criminologist and security “expert” Clifford D. Shearing to write a pilot study on how to solve MTHA security problems. What, Shearing asked in an Orwellian line at the outset of his work, “should we do to encourage the behaviour we want to encourage?”

Shearing formed three teams of MTHA employees to build strategy. However, by the mid-point in his work, he found that Community Relations Workers (CRWs) on the teams remained doubtful about his process. He admitted that team members were under considerable stress as a result. The primary focus of the project was a vague combination of what he repeatedly called “caring” (without defining the term) and maintenance of MTHA properties. The latter was identified by the project as a “source of symbolic echoes and resonances that, in addition to portraying a message of caring, can be used to establish an ambiance of symbolic restraint… that will promote safety.” This sort of ambiguous language in project reports featured prominently in Shearing’s approach and may well have generated the doubts he reported among MTHA employees working alongside him for security improvements. Meanwhile, as the project unfolded CRWs and other MTHA employees who worked directly with residents noted problems in Shearing’s plan that the project had no way of addressing. As always, an inadequate budget limited the parameters of the possible, from fixing elevators to making certain building doors locked on closure. Moreover, CRWs recognized that when ideas about maintenance and security were communicated to maintenance staff, that was done in haphazard form.

MTHA problems remained the same they had been for decades—underfunding, poverty, unaddressed social problems among residents, and an unwieldy bureaucracy that could rarely get a handle on how to resolve the day-to-day crises of residents, much less chart a bold new, improved course for the future. Not long after Shearing submitted an initial review of his work to the MTHA board, board chair John Sewell wrote to Claire MacMillan, the MTHA district manager responsible for the Warden Woods public housing facility. A scared resident, Sharon Patterson, had been told by MTHA Security not to call them anymore about teenagers who gathered outside her door, but to call the police instead. “This seems to me,” Sewell countered to MacMillan, “a perfect kind of problem for our security to deal with in a reasonable way.”  He encouraged MacMillan to call Irwin Peters, the MTHA Security coordinator “to devise a means of getting the teenagers out of the tenants’ hair while still being able to have a reasonably good time.” Here, and in formal responses to other resident concerns about security, what remained unclear is likely part of why Patterson felt threatened. How could a solution be found to the problem presented with so vague, even if well-meaning, a gentle push from Sewell? That said, in his handwritten notes on the matter, Sewell jotted down more detail from Patterson—now shoved under the carpet. The teenagers were gang members and had threatened, “you’ll be sorry for it.” There had also been complaints from other neighbours. Sewell scrawled at the end, “put up signs prohibiting playing.” The problem had been poorly defined, and it remained unclear whether the teens were gang members (or just teens trying to have a reasonably good time). The solution of a sign posting was both laughable and sadly reflective of MTHA policy flailing.

In January 1988, MTHA struck a security committee consisting of Sewell, Peter Peterson (MTHA director of Operations), Dwayne Lougheed (MTHA coordinator of Security and Safety Services), Linda Bowes (MTHA District 1 manager), Chimbo Poe-Mutuma (MTHA director of Race Relations), Fran Smith, (MTHA property manager, District 6), Gord Bricker (MTHA CRW), as well as a police officers. But as in other areas, consultation with tenants was almost non-existent with only two MTHA residents assigned to the committee. A parallel report that year contracted by MTHA from The Research Group security consultants—led by Clifford D. Shearing—amplified a sense of chaos at MTHA. “Within MTHA,” The Research Group report stated, there were “many people concerned with seeing that doors had locks on them and with seeing that there were security guards on duty. However, what we did not find were people who were responsible for seeing to it that MTHA was safe and secure. The means had become the ends and in the process the ends, safety, security, and sanctuary had been lost in the shuffle.” In May 1988, John Sewell wrote to Irwin Peters asking, “what is vandalism?” The question was Sewell’s way of asking a big question about security that seems not to have been addressed, but it also underscored the lost-in-the-shuffle MTHA response to security problems. An enormous budget was being spent on solving security problems including vandalism. Yet the latter term had never been clearly defined. “What cohesive action,” Sewell went on, “will be taken to bring people together so they become aware of vandalistic acts?” There was no follow-up discussion of how tenants might be meaningfully involved in problem solving. Peters’ answers were chilling, suggesting moral weakness on the part of residents and more platitudes. Future goals, he told Sewell, would lead to a reduction in criminal activity thanks to community spirit and greater accountability among tenants—as though those traits were now lacking in public housing residents.

Most shocking about the Shearing and The Research Group reports was the absence of evidence of meaningful consultation with residents. The Research Group report was anecdotal, perhaps the tip of a much larger iceberg but vague on how tenant views were solicited, reported, or acted upon by MTHA. “Tenants ask,” the report noted, “‘Why don’t we have neat programs like dancersize?’-they believe that it is because outsiders prefer to put these high revenue courses in middle-class areas.” There is no indication here and in dozens of other places in the report how many residents wanted dancersize classes. More troubling was the reported case of a pre-school child of a tenant that was sexually assaulted by a neighbor. The complaint was “founded” the report noted without explanation. The tenant requested a transfer to avoid facing the attacker, but an MTHA CRW told her to expect that “kind of situation in contemporary society—not even a sympathetic reaction!” Though not as disturbing as the tenant’s report itself, the cavalier and vague documenting of the case by The Research Group further consigned this and other residents to social oblivion. In another case, the report stated, “a single mother will say, ‘I’m terrified living on the first floor’.” Will say? The question hinted at a generalized sentiment but provided no information on how many people felt that way or precisely why. There was a similar approach to the police. With no indication on how officers were surveyed, Shearing and his colleagues concluded that “many police officers freely admit that they prefer to give priority service to the taxpayers. (Even though in one division, police say they spend 90% of their time on calls for service to MTHA).”

The chaos at MTHA may have been one factor that cost John Sewell his job. In September he was fired as MTHA chair by the Ontario Liberal government that had appointed him two years earlier. While Sewell had been unable to muster a strong tenant consultative process as he had promised to do, some of the reforms he had initiated were quickly undone. One of the problems identified by Shearing and The Research Group was the absence of MTHA managers responsible for big-picture coordination of maintenance and security. Sewell responded by proposing on-site superintendents for each MTHA building site and by late August 1988 had already put six such managers in place. Two days after he was fired, MTHA general manager Kevin Gaul reversed the order and removed the superintendents. Another possible factor for Sewell’s removal was his outspoken position favouring civil liberties and his public criticisms of MTHA mismanagement. In response to growing bad press about illicit drug trafficking and related violence, MTHA had recently launched an aggressive eviction policy directed not only against drug dealers, but also at all family members in the same apartment even when the listed primary tenant was not accused of trafficking. The MTHA established eviction tribunals that had issued 65 eviction notices before Sewell’s firing. Most of those evicted had had no judicial trial. After Sewell was fired, MTHA hired the high-end Toronto law firm of McCarthy and McCarthy to manage the MTHA tribunal prosecutions and evictions grew at a quick, exponential pace.

Things went from bad to worse. In July 1994, on receipt of an audit of Toronto public housing by the accounting firm Peat Marwick Thorne, Ontario Housing Minister Evelyn Gigantes fired the entire MTHA board of directors for mismanagement. She added that very shortly there would be firings of administrators, management, and staff. Many of the problems faced by MTHA in 1988 had grown far worse, including security, maintenance, and a lack of tenant participation in decision making. By 2001, the now reorganized Metropolitan Toronto Housing Corporation (MTHC)—rebranded with the provincial offloading of public housing responsibilities from the province to municipalities—was evicting residents at a record pace, mostly for rent arrears. Peter Schafft, the MTHC chief executive officer, admitted that MTHC had become more business oriented than its MTHA predecessor, as building managers spent more and more time pounding on tenant doors looking for rent cheques and warning of eviction if payment were not made. Mel Lastman’s pipe dreams of mixed housing units had long since evaporated. Almost 70 percent of residents were now receiving public assistance while about the same proportion of tenants were women, many of them single parents. MTHC had contracted out growing numbers of buildings to private management companies Del Management Solutions and Greenwin Property Management, which were far more aggressive than MTHC-managed buildings in pursuing those residents unable to pay rent. In 2000, those companies forced 2,174 residents into MTHC tribunal hearings, menacing over 20 percent of their public housing tenants with eviction.

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

James G. Davis, Guarding Doors: My 24 Years in Public Housing Security. Victoria: Tellwell Talent, 2020.

Clifford Shearing, Metro Toronto Housing Authority Safety and Security Mid-Pilot Review. Toronto: MTHA, 1988.

Clifford Shearing, MTHA Pilot Study Report. Toronto: MTHA, 1989.

The Research Group (Clifford D. Shearing, Kathryn Asbury and Robert G. Hann), Metro Toronto Housing Authority Safety and Security Committee: Consultants’ Report for the 1st Phase. (Toronto, MTHA, 1988).

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