Edmund and I live "at the butt end of Saint Patrick Street", a Lower Town address that, 60 years ago when my mother's family lived near here, meant dire poverty, unemployment, shiftlessness, alcoholism and every other imaginable social misery. Today it is a speedily gentrifying street of freehold and condominium townhouses right next to a large tract of what we Canadians call social housing (i.e., an "estate") occupied mostly by recent immigrants. Somali and Haitian families are in the majority, but there are also plenty of folks from the Middle East and southeast Asia. It's nice here. Quiet, pretty, neighbourly, calm.

So what happened to Lower Town? In short, an urban clearance program 50 years ago that bulldozed the houses that lacked plumbing and central heating, followed by a 30-year economic boom that transformed Ottawa's lumpen proletariat into civil servants and service industry workers, and Ottawa's downtown tenements into bijou townhouses for the prosperous (like Edmund and me) and the aforementioned social housing. Where tarpaper shacks and cesspits used to be the rule, we now have rows of little brick three-bedroom houses, each with a front lawn and a tree in front, and a little back yard with a garden shed and a clothesline.

On my way home from work in the evening I often see families taking the air in front of their houses, grown-ups chatting and having a smoke while the littlest kids stagger around in the patchy grass. The chip wagon operated by a local Vietnamese family does a roaring trade, and the streets resound with the thwacking of basketballs and sneakered feet. Teenagers in hiphop gear lounge artistically, and bands of veiled girls wander about whispering in each other's ears. On Fridays, Jewish families stroll to the Orthodox synagogue on Chapel Street (no kidding).

Social programs that neo-conservatives describe as "federal meddling" and "nanny statism" have made Canada one of the most socially mobile places in the world. Today's refugee living on welfare in social housing rides the No 14 bus to the adult high school to learn English, and looks forward to the day in 20 years when his children are in university, if he has to drive a taxi 20 hours a day to get them there. Social mobility works the other way, too, and the people most likely to feel disenfranchised are the native-born lower middle-class and working poor, especially groups who used to find it easy to make a living but are now in trouble.

But when I walk through Lower Town, I see determination and hope at work. It's nice here.