A 1960s public housing project now mid-way through its own reinvention

Alexandra Park

Built in the 1960s as a low-rise public housing complex west of Kensington Market, Alexandra Park has spent the last decade being redeveloped into a mixed-income neighbourhood.

Toronto skyline
Toronto skyline, 2012 β€” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

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Alexandra Park was built in the 1960s just west of Kensington Market, part of the same wave of postwar public housing construction that produced Regent Park, replacing older Victorian rooming house stock with a low-rise complex of townhouses and apartment buildings designed under then-current public housing planning models that favoured superblocks disconnected from the surrounding street grid.

A redevelopment in progress

Like Regent Park before it, Alexandra Park has been undergoing a major, multi-phase redevelopment since the 2010s, led by Toronto Community Housing in partnership with private developers, aimed at reconnecting the complex to the surrounding street grid and mixing market-rate condominium units in alongside rebuilt social housing. The project has followed the same "revitalization" model used in Regent Park, with existing residents guaranteed a right to return to new units as construction proceeds through the neighbourhood's footprint in phases.

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