Looking into my Window: Negligence, Obsolescence and Neoliberal Housing Landscapes

The purpose of my portfolio “Looking into My Window: Negligence, Obsolescence and the Neoliberal Housing Landscape” is to bring forth an assessment of the housing landscape in the City of Toronto from my perspective as a 20-year resident of Canada’s largest social housing provider, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). In situating my experience within the broader and more dominant narratives around housing in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), I highlight the limits to neoliberal practices in urban environments with the aim to have a generative output for community response to these limitations and the ways they impact neighbourhood change. This work engages diverse research modalities to explore, analyze and articulate the closure of social housing units throughout the City Toronto. The core question guiding this major research portfolio is: How do Toronto Community Housing Corporation closures advance the legacy of neoliberalism, and how are residents located in these closures? My major research portfolio is organized into three distinct outputs, each of which lends critical insight into the central research question guiding this work. These incorporate distinct research methods, and engage varied discursive entry points and perspectives. They remain grounded in a commitment to make legible and render visible the realities of marginalized people. 1) Policy Memo and Resident Based Planning Strategy: This output takes the form of a policy memo that profiles Toronto Community Housing Corporation’s relocation policy and challenges this policy for its lack of resident focus. My analysis of the relocation policy and procedure is grounded in the challenge by myself and a small group of residents who formed a resident advocacy group, Grow Our Grassways. It identified gaps in the “customer” service provision from the relocation team and in response, created a petition with a set of demands that would ultimately work to fill in service gaps and support the transition and relocation process of the tenants being moved out of the Grassways. This policy memo will treat the petition and set of demands from Grow Our Grassways as an autoethonographic document and will consider this document in relation to international approaches to relocation. Further, this output will detail the work of Grow Our Grassways to highlight how the community responded to the relocation. Resident-based advocacy initiatives are fertile ground for new, community-focused perspectives on urban planning in marginalized communities. The resident-based planning strategy is a document that captures the efforts of Grow Our Grassways during a fivemonth period in 2017, between the May and September months. 2) Research Paper: The purpose of this output is to analyse the dominant narrative that exists about social housing in order to determine the ways that it is situated within the neoliberal imagination. This output will consider neoliberalism, housing and race and space as important discursive themes to be extracted from mainstream media reports about the closure of Toronto Community Housing Corporation units across the city. I merge autoethnography and a critical discourse framework in order to incorporate personal experience with analysis of media and policy outputs to consider what is omitted in the delivery of ii these texts and how the issues that ail the social housing sector have been framed. This will include reports from the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail within the last five years as this time period best reflects the trajectory of recent housing development and sentiments about the housing landscape that are relevant to the context of the Firgrove closure. 3) Deputation and Photo Essay: Critical discourse analysis also provides room for visual image as a unit of analysis (Jorgensen and Phillips, 2002), therefore the photo essay will provide a visual narration of the ways in which I have felt like an outsider in my own home as a consequence of my being relocated. It will provide a space for catharsis- I will be able to explore the ways I felt let down and absented by the practices of TCHC through the imagery that is produced. I will be able to create a living archive with the photos because my claiming of the now dilapidated and condemned structures also signify home and a site of place-making for generations of racialized people in the City. Further, this form of essay allows for an evaluation of the neglect of the structures in Firgrove and therefore an analysis of time/space and what that means for racialized low-income people. This is significant in the context of an over-developed but starkly uneven cityscape – the affective landscape is jarring and telling and adds to the narrative of racial politics in the city. This photo essay will be prefaced with a deputation that I presented to the Toronto Community Housing Board of Executives on July 14, 2017 which challenged the shallow efforts of the housing provider to engage with residents around the closure of their housing