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By the People, for the People

Tenant Organizing in Toronto’s Regent Park Housing Project in the 1960s and 1970s

Temple University, sean_purdy1966{at}yahoo.ca

This article analyzes tenant political organizing in Canada’s first and largest housing project, Toronto’s Regent Park, in the 1960s and 1970s, detailing the course of tenant organizing on the questions of project maintenance, the rental scale, and tenant management. Tenants organized around economic and political issues as well as for recognition and dignity in the face of social exclusion. Stigmatization of Regent Park has obscured the extent to which its tenants have resisted, rejected, and organized against dominant ideologies and the oppressive practices of state housing authorities. The author locates tenant struggles within the larger oppositional climate of the era and situates successes and failures in the context of shifting government policies and internal obstacles to sustained tenant organization. The struggles of public housing tenants to confront the rigid structures and policies of project management and propose their own alternatives are highlighted.

Key Words: public housing administration • public housing tenants • social movements • Toronto

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