By Dawar Naeem

Dawar is community journalist with FOCUS MEDIA ARTS CENTRE

The Activating Community Leadership (ACL) University of Toronto certificate course held in collaboration with the Toronto Centre of Learning and Development in Regent Park, provides a platform for residents to engage with and understand the dynamics of community and leadership. In this session, led by Chiyi Tam, Executive Director of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust, she looks at Toronto's housing crisis while empowering Regent Park residents to enact change.

With examples from various Toronto neighbourhoods, now and in the past, she provides background on the on-going issues for people in the rental market which stretch back generations.  She explains about some of the egregious decisions made by builders who often don't take into account the community flavour, thus causing difficulties for the locals and sometimes for the developers. She provides a story of a building in Chinatown.

She also explains the decision-making that developers make in buying and renovating buildings leading to renovictions and large increases in rent that results in the displacement of many people.

A tool that a number of people put in place in one Toronto neighbourhood that she highlighted -  many of whom were knowledgeable about urban planning - was the use of a Canada Land Trust mechanism.  It is a way of buying a tract of land that is put under this legal instrument. The piece of land is designated to be used as rental properties, (or a garden, park, or whatever) and it must remain as such forever. The land cannot be sold. This puts the people living there in charge as to rents, maintenance, renovation etc. 

Regent Park, itself, has gone through various stages of development. With the involvement of a developer in its next stage, there is concern about the number of affordable homes that will be made available.

Tam encouraged the participants in the course to become activists and use social media to further their stories and causes.