Renewal is coming for Swansea Mews

Two years after a ceiling collapse, Toronto's new public housing boss says the community near High Park will be rebuilt

- VICTORIA GIBSON

Sean Baird is the new CEO of Toronto Community Housing Corp., Canada's biggest landlord with about 90,000 tenants. Given the depth of need in their communities, Baird stressed TCHC cannot see itself as a brick-andmortar landlord, but as a social service and a critical gathering place for other service providers.

A plan is finally taking shape to rebuild a condemned housing community beside High Park — more than two years after a devastating ceiling collapse triggered the evacuation of hundreds of adults and children and forced them to relocate across the city.

The plan isn’t public — yet. But in a wide-ranging interview, the new boss of Toronto Community Housing Corp., the city’s public housing agency, revealed he was briefed on a new vision for Swansea Mews in early June.

“We’re just in the initial stages of the development proposal, which is going to go to the city soon,” said CEO Sean Baird, the consultantturned-bureaucrat poached from nearby Peel Region who took the reins of TCHC in April.

It’s the first public update on the west-end housing site since TCHC stated its intention to tear the westend townhouse complex to the ground last spring. “The next stage … would be demolition, and then eventually building out a whole new community,” Baird said.

In another organization, this kind of major redevelopment might be all-consuming. But Baird knows there’s a long list of challenges to deliver on for TCHC’s roughly 90,000 tenants — from finally making good on the agency’s promise to review the circumstances around the unlawful arrest of four Black teenagers on their property in 2011, which Baird now promises to make public, to efforts to claw through a multibillion-dollar backlog of repairs.