kettal
Banned
Here's a more useful map, which indeed shows Malvern to have below average income levels.
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- Thread starter ssiguy2
- Start date
Here's a more useful map, which indeed shows Malvern to have below average income levels.
Chuck
Senior Member
Kinda proves my point. Put the two maps together, and you will see that the subway is definitely not guaranteed to generate wealth for an area. East of about Coxwell, the subway clearly hasn't done anything to raise neighbourhood income levels, nor between about Bathurst and Keele. In the east end, the subway hasn't even been successful at holding incomes steady.
Mainly because east of Coxwell along the Danforth it is a series of very dense social housing projects. You can't place social housing there and then wonder why the median income doesn't increase when you put a subway there! And east of Victoria Park, the subway is of very little benefit to the majority of the people who live along there, unless you happen to live right by one of the stations placed very far apart. Living next to those sections of the B-D subway is more like living next to a rail corridor than a subway corridor.
LAz
Active Member
Here's a more useful map, which indeed shows Malvern to have below average income levels.
Where's yo map from?
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
Here's a more useful map, which indeed shows Malvern to have below average income levels.
Are you aware of the difference between median in Toronto and average in the CMA? I guess not.
nfitz
Superstar
Where are these? I live in this area, and I haven't noticed anything that dense, west of Main.
And I'd disagree about that map ... it shows it's middle income both sides of Danforth all the way to Main (though there's a bit of low income on the north side, away from the subway between Woodbine and Main).
It's interesting to see that the Sheppard subway has no lower income along it, except right at the end. But then note that the map is based on data from a couple of years before the subway opened!
kettal
Banned
That also explains most of the other low income areas, subway or none.
The same is true of Yonge Street between Eglinton and Sheppard, yet that is an extremely wealthy area. You're looking for correlation where none exists.
SimonP
Active Member
The Ward 42 profile is here. Page 13 has the income statistics. Average income in Ward 42 is $26,845. This is well below the City of Toronto average of $40,379. , Ward 42 also includes some wealthier areas along the Rouge, making Malvern even poorer
Much of that decline is recent. Kettal's map from 2000 shows all of Malvern in light red. A similar map from the 2006 data would have about half of Malvern's tracts in dark red. If current trends continue all of Malvern might have sunk into the dark red by the next census.
SimonP
Active Member
You've very clearly pointed out why subways through low density suburbs are a bad idea. Initially they run through districts of single family homes, with only a few hundred people within walking distance of each station. Other people can take feeder buses, but most people in that situation will just continue to drive to work. Thus we are left with a hugely expensive subway line that no one uses.
Subway stations need high density towers to justify themselves, and the combined pressure of developers wanting cash in and the city wanting to increase ridership leads the city to permit such towers. This is fine downtown where most things are in walking distance and people are happy to live in condo towers. If you can get enough towers in one place, like North York City Centre and to a lesser degree Scarbrough City Centre you can also create a functional neighbourhood.
But what often happens are isolated tower clusters appear next to the subway, but they have access to none of the pedestrian accessible neighbourhood services of the core. You thus end up with districts like Main Square and Crescent Town. Tower clusters isolated from their surroundings and filled with people unable to afford to live elsewhere.
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
No one's proposed a subway line through low density areas with nothing but houses. Even the fantasy map proposals floating around are pretty good at sticking to corridors where almost every station has at least a cluster of apartment buildings and a busy connecting bus/streetcar/GO/whatever route.
Actually, stations are justified by riders, not tall buildings. Malls, low-rise office/industrial parks, schools, hospitals, park'n'ride lots, and, especially, connecting surface routes all pour in far more riders than almost any amount of local high-rise dwellers can generate, except for downtown and a few hyper-clusters like North York Centre. Why do these theoretical arguments always assume our wildly well-used surface network - probably the best part of the TTC - will be dismantled?
At least Main Square and Crescent Town have good transit and they can get almost anywhere in the city in less than an hour. Would you rather these apartments and the fairly poor people who tend to live in them be stuck at Kipling and Steeles or way out on Lawrence East? If you think Main Square is isolated, you need to take a tour of suburban Toronto. The lack of nearby pedestrian conveniences in a place like Crescent Town has nothing to do with the subway and everything to do with the urban design ideology of the era.
nfitz
Superstar
Very true ... but of that era? The design for the quarry lands on the NE corner of Gerrard and Victoria Park seems very similiar to Crescent Town ... and that might not be completed until the 2020s. I'm not sure it's just a function of the era.
SimonP
Active Member
Agreed, the crumbling towers without transit access are in even worse shape. Which is why providing improved transit to Malvern, Jane/Finch, and Rexdale needs to be the priority for any plan. Most subway based plans, such as Thomson's, completely neglect these areas.
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
Uh, yeah, it's a function of the era. An era when apartment towers surrounded by grass ('nature') and parking lots and separated from everything else was the residential ideal (and a practical ideal, too, given the need to house Toronto's ballooning population 40 or so years ago). This is common knowledge. No condo amenities, no luxury gated townhomes, no token retail nearby, except maybe a tuck shop if they're lucky. A project at the corner of Gerrard and Victoria Park is by simple definition not the same as a commie block tucked away in a ravine and with no kind of main street nearby (like Flemingdon Park) or nestled against a highway (like the 427 corridor).
And the other 90% of the city already has fantastic transit? Yeah right. A transit plan's priority needs to be moving people, not throwing billions of dollars at priority neighbourhoods. "My son would be alive today if only he had taken a streetcar ROW!" "My commute has been reduced from 90 minutes to 88 minutes...Yippee!"
Malvern isn't crumbling, by the way. I doubt anyone who's ever said Malvern needs anything has ever actually been to Malvern. Most of Malvern is really rather nice, and many of the problems are confined to a few townhouse complexes that aren't very close to Sheppard. The demographics are changing and Malvern is no longer filled with youths...the youths are growing up and the older neighbourhoods are already losing population. In terms of regional and local connections, Malvern would benefit most from the Midtown GO line, a subway extension to STC, and revamped bus service (for example, not forcing everyone along Neilson to go through Centenary to get to STC, or building a bus lane on McCowan, or adding real Rocket service to Finch, Markham, etc.).
An LRT on Finch West does nothing for Kipling and Steeles...but the Spadina subway extension will help by substantially slashing the dstance to rapid transit. The distance from the outer 416 to more central areas is the problem, not the existence of pretty fast and frequent buses. Lawrence East could reap quite a benefit from a brand new LRT line...good thing it's getting one. Oh, wait, it isn't. There's a hell of a lot of commie blocks in Toronto and a plan to save them by building LRT lines to each one would need like $100 billion. Every single arterial road in the city would need a line.
Sarah Thomson's plan is not perfect...who ever said isn't wasn't flawed or that it was exactly what we needed? She put about 5 seconds of thought into the plan and someone else map by stealing and adding randomly. What we're working with, though (unless/until Metrolinx swoops in and changes things), is a plan to neglect our trunk rapid transit network and run LRT lines out along a few corridors, offering a truly negligible net benefit to the city at the same extreme cost of subways. Toronto/the TTC can't do much with GO since it's out of its hands, but there's a lot more we should be doing with our bus network that doesn't take 5+ years and over a billion dollars to begin helping people.
nfitz
Superstar
Sure it is ... it just seems very similiar to the Gerrard/Clonmore project. Buildings surrounded by grass and parking lots. No retaill. Set way, way, way back from any street. I only disagree that this is a thing of the past.
See page 12 of http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/sc/bgrd/backgroundfile-16035.pdf
scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
You disagree because you're a simple contrarian. You can't not disagree.
Read the thread. Crescent Town is the way it is because that was the ideal way to build housing for the masses during that era, not because there's a subway station nearby (which was what Simon claimed).