The following is a sample Neighbourhood Profile from the Inner-city neighbourhoods section. Each profile is accompanied by a detailed map of the area, a listing of local Places, Entertainment, Food, Hotels, Services, Shops and more.

Regent Park

In the early 1940s this are supported the city's worst slums. Then came Canada's first large-scale housing project.

The existence of the neighbourhood enclosed by Queen, Parliament, Gerrard and the Don Valley has always been looked upon with a certain amount of derision. The ruling èlite looked down on the original unskilled Irish workers who settled here from the mid-1800s. Those who came after them were poor immigrants from other lands. Between the two world wars the neighbourhood deteriorated into a major slum. And the derision worsened.

In the mid-1940s the city decided to knock down the entire neighbourhood of small, rat-infested houses and re-build it. It was a bold and imaginative concept for its day. The area north of Dundas Street was designed for three story housing set amid enclosed open spaces, while south of Dundas accommodations would consist of high rise apartments. For people who had never had indoor plumbing or hot running water, the development bordered on Heaven. No one at the time seemed to realize that the whole project was designed without truly functioning streets. Those that did exist on maps were little more than dead-end lanes and walkways with no through traffic. Only Dundas Street East breathed any transportation into the area. And it managed to cut the project into two pieces: Regent Park North and Regent Park South. Each half then became an inward-functioning world unto itself.

The development was also a paternal, if not patronizing concept. Within two years of the first residents moving in at the beginning of 1949 there were confrontations with city fathers. People wanted to put up television aerials, but the mayor insisted this new form of entertainment was inappropriate for "the honest, though not entirely deserving, poor". One mother countered by saying that television in the home was necessary "to keep kids off neighbouring streets." The mayor threatened to have any aerials torn down.

By the mid-1980s, it became obvious to everyone that all good intentions to rectify "poverty, alcoholism, disease and broken families" were falling apart. The largely Caribbean, Tamil and Asian poor found themselves living in a neighbourhood rife with drug dealing and prostitution. The historic derision toward this part of town returned.

There are rumours circulating at city hall that the neighbourhood should be torn down again and built from scratch. And that's exactly the solution politicians had 150 years ago.