Tall and serious, David Mitchell is the first chair of Toronto Community Housing to have actually grown up in one of the city's projects.

His boyhood home, Lawrence Heights, has been deemed so ugly and isolated that TCH just announced a 20-year teardown and rebuild. But Mitchell is not going to slag it.

"It was a very enjoyable life, really," he says of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when he lived in a three-bedroom townhouse with his mother and four brothers.

Mitchell talks about shoveling snow to save up money to buy a bike at Canadian Tire. He smiles when he mentions how sharing a room and a double bed helped him learn "cooperation skills."

The 43-year-old is both the part-time chair of TCH and the full-time superintendent of Mimico Correctional Centre. He's spent two decades working in jails and has a law enforcer's measured, multisyllabic speech.

At times, he's so protective of Lawrence Heights that it's hard to get a sense of what it was actually like to grow up there.

Meanwhile, the neighbourhood is apparently so awful that TCH is willing to spend $350-million-plus to revamp it.

One small sign emerges as Mitchell tours the modern, slate-grey hallway of the new seniors' high rise in Regent Park.

"See, this is what I like," he says. "When I was growing up, all the doors were red, blue, green, yellow. It was like ‘what is this, "The Simpsons"'?"

Born in England, Mitchell moved to Canada with his parents when he was six, the oldest of his brothers. For a while, the family lived in apartments and houses near the Don Mills "Peanut Plaza," but when he was nine, his parents split up, even as his mother was pregnant with her fifth son.

They moved to Lawrence Heights, near the Wilkinson Sword factory where Mitchell's mother worked. By high school, the differences between Lawrence Heights and the surrounding wealthier neighbourhoods started to become obvious, as his peers began to drop out of high school, get pregnant, or have run-ins with the police.

Mitchell credits his own will to stay on the straight-and-narrow to his Jamaican mother, who brought all of her sons to Seventh Day Adventist church, and who instilled her oldest with a serious sense of responsibility.

"There's a likelihood that if I had ended up in the criminal justice system as a client ... that my brothers may have ended up there as well," says Mitchell. "I'm the number one son. That comes with a lot of pressure."

Since the early days of his career, Mitchell has wanted to bridge the gap between low-income Torontonians and public services.

His first adult job was running recreation centres, where he involved parents in decision making around programs and staff. It's about more than deciding between a basketball court and a skatepark, he says.

"You can use those skills to meet with somebody in charge when your son gets kicked out of school," he says. "You understand clearly that if this kid is not educated, they're not going to go anywhere."

In 1992, Mitchell co-founded the Association of Black Law Enforcers, a group of police officers, correction workers, immigration and customs officials. The goal is better communication with marginalized communities, and convincing youth of colour that law enforcement is a viable career. The group has given out over $100,000 in scholarships.

"Sig-nif-icant," Mitchell says slowly, when asked about the effect of having people like himself and Jamaican-born deputy police chief Peter Sloly in the public eye.

"Here I am, a kid that grew up in the quote-unquote ‘hood'," said Mitchell, who says that during his youth in Lawrence Heights, calling the police after a crime was seen as betraying the community.

"Now, I'm in charge of the organization that's responsible for ensuring that we have quality communities, safe communities," continues Mitchell, who's been TCH chair for three years.

He mentions Keiko Nakamura, TCH's Japanese CEO, the first woman of colour to head a major social housing agency in Canada. "It's major messaging. It's just so powerful."

A runner in his spare time, Mitchell says he'd like to do a charity 10k this year. The boy who grew up in social housing now owns a house in East York, where he lives with his wife and three children.

"Where you find yourself in life should not limit you," he says, looking out at the lake from a fresh new balcony in an almost-brand new Regent Park.