dbd33

Regents Park maybe. It's interesting because the population reflects waves of immigration in the same way as the street where I grew up. In both cases waves of immigrants arrived, got established and moved out, leaving only a few failures behind. Regents Park used to be populated by Black people, many of them from francophone Africa. Now it's usual to see women wearing the hajib and not uncommon to see burkhas.

clynnog

I don't know that place....there is/was a place to the east of the Zoo somewhere on Sheppard that overlooked the Rouge Valley that was quite a dump...I don't believe it had dancers.

clynnog

Yes, I must admit I'd forgotten Regents Park (and I assume that Jane/Finch and Thorncliffe Park would also count). All of these 3 areas are rather high density housing and not the detached home slums of Detroit, Gary and ESL.

Isn't Regents Park being knocked down and being rebuilt as a 'paradise in the heart of the city'.

Mr Lee

Consumer rights are non-existent in Canada.

dbd33

It is. But then it was built as 'paradise in the heart of the city'.

Auld Yin

Regents Park is indeed being torn down and rebuilt. It was built in the late 1940's before the advent of the drug culture/crime haven it has become, and it has run its course as far as construction quality. It has endured much longer than many/most of the UK high-rise ghettos in the large cities. While not the most desirable area of Toronto it, in no way, disturbs me visually as those 1960's high-rises in Glasgow, Birmingham, London, etc, or the ghettos/projects of large US cities.

dbd33

I agree with most of that, Regents Park did follow the planning ideas of the time, low rise properties, town houses, no tower blocks. That depresses me. The nature and layout of the buildings is the same as many of the new developments in suburban Toronto. North Oakville, for example, much discussed on another thread, looks like Regents Park but with less grass. The area around Lakeshore and Southdown Road in Mississauga is covered in developments following the Regents Park model and more are being built even now. I suppose that all those jerry built projects built by the likes of Greenpark and Mattamy will be the slums of the twenties.

Where we differ is in lumping in the ghettos of US cities with tower blocks and housing projects. Compton, for example, includes very many detached houses which hardly differ from those in more salubrious neighbourhoods. Driving around, one must look for bars on the windows, knots of men drinking in the middle of the day, clues like that, as the structure of the buildings doesn't hint at the hell within. Detroit has housing stock which would be attractive were the place not so dangerous. The crack house in Jersey from which the Soprano gang stole the plumbing was physically an attractive building. The camelback shotguns in Algiers are gorgeous, if minimalist, structures.

US ghettos are not all Stalinist tower blocks, the UK is probably worse in that regard. Toronto too, of course, Rexdale has lots of tower blocks with those stupid diamond cross fences around them, allegedly to stop people running from the police but practically to stop anyone from going anywhere. And then there's St Jamestown.

Bleepedy Bloops

Saskatchewan is the only place that you can let your dog out the back door and watch it run away for three days.

It's kinda flat.

Lord Vader

I don't use the term "Ghetto" to describe a slum or economically depressed area, I use it to describe an area where a "minority" group live in large due to social pressure that results from multiculturalism, places such as Brampton ON or Richmond BC or any number of neighborhoods. New immigrants tend to stick to their own and not only shun the "non hyphenated" Canadians (what a ridiculous term) but the other groups of "hyphenated" Canadians. Of course this is not an absolute and there are likely many cases where people of different cultures do mingle with each other but on the whole this is not the case.
The only thing I ask for people coming here is that they adapt to the greater social customs that Canadians consider important such as allowing your children to decide who they marry and not engaging in the sale of your daughters, equality between the sexes, equality of all individuals regardless of income and social status, recognition of free speech, learn the damned language, keep your religious beliefs to yourself and brush up on what secular society means. I don't think I am being unreasonable. I don't care what you eat or what music you listen too or what type of alcohol you drink or the sports you like or the clothes you wear (well, with the exception of forced religious head gear and the like).
I have actually heard the opposite.
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/educatio...ss-employment/

This could be due to an oversupply of "skilled people" in some areas. This leads to another beef I have regarding the type of skills Canada attracts to the country but that is for another thread.

Lord Vader

Nah, it had to due with Quebec.

Yeah, most folks are OK with those things.

Actually, merging with the US is an intriguing thought. Maybe Canada could play the part of the Trojan Horse? Who knows with China on the rise, the babbles of the EU attempting to resemble a country by destroying the sovereignty of it's nation states, Putin's Russia trying to revive the Soviet glory days, maybe a united North America is the way to go, but then on the other side you get into the New World Order and North American Union stuff, it's complicated.
There is a joke that goes something like ,,,How do you kill a fox? Cut of one leg and get them to run across Canada. (groans from the masses)
Thousands of bipedals do the cross continental migration every year. Most in jets, many in cars, a few on motorbikes, a couple in bicycles.

MikeUK

Tough Luck

Canada needs the immigrants more than the Immigrants need Canada

So its the immigrants terms that count, not the dwindling numbers of 'locals'

Novocastrian

Maybe he can, maybe he won't though.

minimeeze

Because people who hold American, Austrian, German, Swiss, Japanese or South Korean licences... don't have to take a test.

Australia and Japan drive on the left.... it's all to do with a licence exchange agreement, nothing to do with safety!!

Plus places like Ontario allow people from the UK to exchange... so why is it different in B.C???

And what's the fact that i learnt to drive a "stick shift" (manual) car got to do with anything... they don't allow people who pass their test in an automatic to drive a manual car in the UK, because manual cars are harder to drive than auto cars. But here it doesn't matter.

JonboyE

I think ghetto is a pejorative term when discussing racial or cultural groups. Your definition is at odds with most people's understanding of the word.

What social pressures that result from multiculturalism cause you to describe Richmond, BC as a ghetto?

Lychee

I was thinking the same thing. Richmond is certainly not a ghetto.

By that logic, Okotoks, Alberta is a British ghetto.