Sorry, I was being facetious with my title. I’m sure there are plenty of designers who do a great job of doing their own PR. Hell, Karim Rashid should start his own agency! But if you ever want to have a chat with a member of the creative class who refuses to spin anything, I recommend you hook up for a drink with Andy Stretch.
Andy is a very a good friend and one of Toronto’s top environmental/industrial/interior designers (is there anything he can’t do?). Remember YYZ on Adelaide? That was his. Not bad, eh? Below, is his response to one of my earlier posts that brought up the topic of revitalizing the city’s waterfront with mixed- income housing. A wee warning, though: left-leaning architecture, design and city planning students may find the following very offensive. Reader discretion is advised.
(Please note: Andy’s message has been re-printed with permission and was not changed or altered in any way)
Cool blog dude.
Forget PR you should be writing articles for design and lifestyle magazines!
Only one thing I don’t agree with and never have: The idea of revamping the lakefront and making it a mix of low and high income housing. Revamping the lakefront=great idea, no question. I actually won a contest to redesign the whole thing from Exhibition to the humber a few years ago. But low income mixed with high income housing=never happen.
Actually that’s not true, it has happened, time and again and it never works, ever. It’s the wet-dream of all first, second, third and even some fourth year architectural design students and in theory it seems like a great way to enhance the standard of living for low-income families while at the same time “keeping it real” for Richie Rich’s. But it never happens that way.
The sad fact of the matter is that the low income lifestyle has the opposite effect on the community, and before long you have massive, formerly expensive housing that nobody with any money wants to live in. Shortly thereafter, those houses get purchased by deadbeat landlords for pennies on the dollar and they get cut up into multi-unit, unsafe housing. The population of the area grows to it’s breaking point as illegal housing proliferates, schools become overpopulated, youth becomes increasingly disenchanted and bored, crime rises, and the neighborhood becomes one of those areas that no one wants to walk through at night.
If you don’t believe me look at the area around Queen and Jamieson, that area was once a very high end neighborhood, with massive, mansion size housing, and big spacious parks and boulevards. Enter the Ontario government of circa 1970 who thought “why don’t we throw a couple of subsidized living apartment in the area and use the affluence of the area to motivate those families in low-income situations to aspire to greater things”. Wrong. Commence deterioration of neighborhood. Now it’s an area filled with mansions housing dozens of families each in less than legal conditions in a neighborhood that no-one with half a cent to their name will touch with a ten foot pole.
It’s a sad truth but a truth nonetheless. People who work there entire lives to amass significant wealth just don’t want to walk out their front door and see there uneducated neighbors yelling and screaming from the comfort of their cheap plastic lawnchairs on their government subsidized front-porch. It’s nice to think that people would be willing to take one for the team/good-of-society but who’s going to volunteer for that when they can live in riverdale instead? So they don’t contest it…well they do…but when they lose they just move out, and five low income families move in, in their place.
The reality is, that low income housing needs to happen in areas that are of little public and tourist significance to the city in general, as long as it’s laid out properly with an adequate amount of parks and wide enough streets and bright enough lighting, it won’t turn into the projects, and it will be a pleasant place to live… for the most part.
The important areas of the city are then left to high income housing, because high income families take pride in their properties and take care of their neighborhoods so that everyone in the city can enjoy them fully and completely. True, only the most privileged can live there, but everyone in the city has the opportunity to visit the location and not have to fear for their wallet or there lives.
That way in the end everyone benefits, whereas the other way everyone ends up losing.
It is what it is, it’s been tried time and again, and always fails. It’s human nature. Everyone would like their neighborhoods to be a utopia of peace and harmony where everyone can live no matter what their stature in society as long as their neighborhood isn’t the testing ground.
