Derek Ballantyne

Housing advocate, builder, CEO, Toronto Community Housing

“The idea for Regent actually started on the back of an envelope,” Derek Ballantyne says. “We needed to come up with an entirely different plan.”

Before Ballantyne came onboard, plans for reinvigorating Regent Park had gone through starts and stops for more than 20 years.

In 2002, he was named CEO of Toronto Community Housing. Over the next six years, Ballantyne led the group in obtaining $630-million for capital repairs in low-income, public housing. (Recently he secured a long-term investment plan for an additional $1.1-billion over the next 10 years.)

Ballantyne was going to knock down Regent Park — and then rebuild it again.

“When you start anything, there are doubters,” says Ballantyne, 54. “Some doubt because they can’t fathom how to get anything started, others doubt new ideas. The important thing is having enough faith in an idea to see it through.”

The first Regent Park towers were levelled at 470 Dundas St. E. on Feb. 20, 2006. Tenants should be moving into their new apartments, in a mixed-income neighbourhood, with both condos, public parks and green energy, on May 1.

“We looked around Boston, London, Chicago, but found the best inspiration for mixed housing closer to home,” he explains. “The best example of integrated urban development? St. Lawrence Market, a stone’s throw from Regent Park.”

At St. Lawrence Market, parks, schools and trendy condo owners share space with low-income housing units and the overriding feeling in the area is neighbourhood pride. Ballantyne says this is what he’s building in Regent and it’s caught the eye of housing advocates across Canada. Already, architects from Vancouver and St. John’s, Nfld., have visited his site with the aim of importing the radical thinking to their own cities.

“Public organizations have been vilified for not being action-oriented and not being entrepreneurial,” Ballantyne says. “In Regent, we’ve demonstrated that’s not true.”

Follow the rebuilding project at www.torontohousing.ca/regentpark.