Stigma consciousness in Toronto’s mixed-tenure Regent Park neighbourhood

The ongoing mixed-tenure redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood is a multi-decade effort to rebuild the aging community’s stock of post-war public housing and radically reshape the social composition of the community with the introduction of market owners and renters. This research provides a useful quantitative complement to the now extensive body of qualitative research concerning the neighbourhood’s redevelopment, specifically investigating perceptions of stigma among both public housing and market residents using Pinel’s Stigma Consciousness Questionnaire. We find that respondents of all tenures report relatively low levels of stigma consciousness. Unexpectedly, the largest observed difference between discrete tenure groups was between market owners and renters within the market units. Additionally, we find that non-native speakers of English report lower levels of stigma consciousness while the largest source of variation, by a wide margin, is between individuals.