Research has shown that ‘street codes’ often govern behaviour and violence in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. However, little is known about what happens to established street codes in a context of massive neighbourhood change. Our research in Regent Park, Canada’s oldest and largest public housing neighbourhood currently undergoing neighbourhood restructuring, we suggest that the displacement of ‘major criminal players’ from the neighbourhood has eroded the long-established codes of conduct they enforced and has undermined informal systems of criminal governance in the neighbourhood. As a consequence, young people express concern over what they perceive to be a growing preponderance of violence in the context of a competitive rush to fill a power vacuum created by the displacement of neighbourhood ‘old heads’.