[doady]

Shouldn't City #3 include parts of the 905 as well, especially Malton and southern Markham? This City #3, aka "The Clusterfuck", will just continue to spread further outward into the 905.

It just shows that James Howard Kunstler's prediction is true: suburbs are the slums of the future. The poor are living exactly where they belong: in the suburbs, the shittiest areas. As Kunstler says, since suburbs will become slums anyways, the best thing to do is just ignore them. If anything, money should be funnelled away from City #3 into City #1.

If money is instead funnelled into City #3, it will become a "black hole" for investment and there will be no returns. It will just suck the life out of the rest of the city.

 

[alphie20]

I just put down the Globe after reading this article, which is the lead story.

It is really a summary of what is anecdotally visible.
The corridor between Bathurst and Bayview from The Lake to Steeles is Toronto's most consistently affluent area. Outside of that, Queen street holds some old and new wealth on both ends and The Kingsway/Swansea, which are also visibly more affluent areas of the city. When you are in these places, it is just so obviously different from the City#2 and City #3 areas.

It's strange how polarized it has become and it is in the attitudes of how many people act. Living outside the central corridor is a big hit to social status in many people's eyes.

Having recently purchased a condo townhouse outside the "corridor" you refer to, I can attest to the attitude you mention. When my colleagues learn that I bought a place in Downsview the look of surprise and bewilderment is almost tangible (most of them have chosen to either move to the 905 [mostly Markham] or move downtown or along the subway lines). I thought of my place as a happy medium between the two, though articles such as the one being discussed have now left me questioning the wisdom of my decision. Needless to say, I sincerely hope the reports of the impending "ghettoization" of the inner suburbs are wildly exaggerated!!

It would be interesting to know how a similarly situated city has developed. Are there any national or international comparisons to draw upon? Any cities with a thriving core, a morbid middle region and then another (slightly less) thriving outter ring of neighbourhoods??

 

[grey]

Okay, here's a lenghty comment from my urban planning friend:





Toronto is a second or third tier global city – depending on your definition

That means Toronto should see a socio-economic bifurcation with a very wealthy financial/information/technology services elite and a minimum wage perma-temp service workforce like starbucks/best buy sales people et al. to serve the elite, and a shrinking middle class. This is already a recorded fact in first-tier global cities like HK/NY/London

Evidence of this was first seen in Toronto with a United Way study that was intending to find new offices – i.e. under serviced neighbourhoods. I think late 90s, a bit after the Anne Golden report on what to do with Toronto. The United Way study turned into the Poverty by postal Code report because, well, they found a huge ring of poverty outside the downtown core. It used to exist before, but it had worsened dramatically. So that then set off a bunch of academic studies that confirmed it six ways from Sunday over the years.

Normatively, the problem is that Canada (and North America) predicated its development on having a strong middle class (you probably learned about it in your degree) to drive economic development after the war – that way there would be little need for social services, etc. So now, while there may be more absolute people in the middle class, their proportion as a percentage of the overall population is shrinking.

More practically, what you end up having is a divide in the housing market. And in North America, your personal wealth is based on owning property. So, the significant number of low-end service sector employees are now competing for the same living space as the services elite. There’s only one outcome to that. The poor lose out and can’t afford to have children and have no secure housing tenure. There’s also no incentive – as we’re finding out – to drop rental control because dropping rental control is simply wiping out the lower end of the rental market. Why rent to poor people when you can lease to an elite? Maybe you can cope by moving out to the suburbs – but now you’re talking about commuting into work. Fact is weaker socio-economic groups are not at all mobile – the upfront cost of a move is too much to bear, so you have to make do with where you are while the cost of living creeps up around you. Not enough to force you out, but enough to keep you trapped. Pretty much it is only the middle class that can afford to move out to the suburbs and try to cope by commuting. But now you’re talking about families that spend up to 4 hours a day commuting on top of their work day. Diminished family time has very real social consequences – and this is happening to the middle class upon whom our society is predicated. That’s nothing to mention of the resource costs involved in maintaining infrastructure like that to support commuting, environmental issues, waste of human capital.

But the fact the middle class now lives outside Toronto is beside the point. Administratively, Toronto can only deal with its own residents. So now you have wealthy elite concentrated in the downtown and scattered pockets throughout the city, but an increasing number of people stuck at the other end of the livelihoods spectrum. So what do you do? Elites are always loathe to see more of their resource go towards the poor, so the lower socio-economic groups are frozen, and stuck by increasingly Byzantine regulations when it comes to accessing social services that might offer them a leg up. Politicians’ careers depend not so much upon the voters anymore as much as their donors – donors generally aren’t poor. An inevitably outcome is a deeply, deeply divided city. Maybe that’s not a problem, and what people want – that’s not for me to say. The inevitable level of division has very real consequences. And Canada being what it is, our social programmers pretty much end up trapping people (Star has been running a great series on people trapped in the system because it costs them significantly more personally to break out on their own, rather than live on the margins).

Anyway, the Globe series was nothing new. They’re just playing catch-up to the deepening poverty game that everyone except the Fraser/CDHowe types have been realising. We’re on the cusp of something, and it’s a question of what Toronto/Ontario/Canada wants to become. And it’s really not a question of people not having the initiative. Its barely possible to make ends meet working 2 full time shift jobs in Toronto (where the jobs are – you don’t have the same level of access or accessibility in the suburbs so moving to save living expenses is moot – you use up whatever cost of living you might have reduced with decreased mobility and opportunity) so you don’t even have time to upgrade your skills, let alone the money. And you’re not able to access the resources that might let you do that unless you’re absolutely destitute, because the slightest income you show basically counts against you. Its also next to impossible to claim EI now to help you between jobs. Something like less than 75% of full-time workers qualify for it now – and if you’re part-time, you can forget about it.

Anyway, rambling. Globe and Mail piece wasn’t anything special, but it’s the basis for a very complex and deeper discussion that simply isn’t taking place.

 

[grey]

Also

Because our cities are supposed to be self-funded through property taxes, there’s a systemic bias for all jurisdictions to prefer only wealthy residents. They’re more likely to own more expensive property, which means more money for cities to keep the services running, which means its not in a city’s interest to have a middle class, let alone poor people.

Welcome to the common sense revolution.

 

[urbandreamer]

Maybe, just maybe we have too many analysts and not enough common sense?

Remember, in many ways what is happening with all the new immigrants (the poor) is similar to what happened in the early 20th century: mostly rural people (many immigrants come from small towns and farming communities which is why they couldn't "make it" in their old country) moving to the city; it takes a few generations for these people to gain social status in the city. Toronto in many ways is still a frontier town, still trying to find its feet.

Poor immigrants vs. (mostly) white establishment. Nothing earth shattering here and to be expected. Let's wait a few centuries to see the "real" Toronto.....

 

[Hydrogen]

I don't think you will have to wait a few centuries. I think a few generations will establish whatever the city's social structure will be simply because immigration will not continue at the present pace.

Then again, the future is very tough to predict.

 

[DENTROBATE54]

Then again, the future is very tough to predict.

The GTA population should narrow in on 8 million by 2025. By then a quarter of all Canadians will reside in Southern Ontario.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Toronto_Area

 

[TrickyRicky]

"Remember, in many ways what is happening with all the new immigrants (the poor) is similar to what happened in the early 20th century:"

Urbandreamer, I don't think your characterization of the immigrant experience in the GTA is very accurate. Most immigrants are university educated people who are middleclass back home. People have their individual reasons for coming to this country and if you speak to new immigrants many are hopelessly naive, but most know exactly what they are doing. People do feel marginalized by the inability to seamlessly transition their skills from their home country but there is an equation of cost benefit that makes living in "poverty" here actually more attractive than being middle-class back home. People living in poverty here most often have microwave ovens, computers, cable tv, free education, free healthcare, state benefits for their elderly parents etc. sometimes even cars. In our coddled socialist la la land we often forget how hyper competitive the real world outside Canada really is. Speak to a new immigrant about poverty back home and they will tell you what it really is. We have little experience here.

 

[Observer Walt]

Hydrogen, I'm not sure why you would say that immigration will not continue at the present pace. The federal government, under both Liberals and Conservatives, has aimed to have immigration of over 200,000 per year, and of these, a substantial number end up in and around Toronto. I don't see what would change this, as long as the economy remains good.

Ricky's comment offers a good insight as well. "Bottom of the ladder" in Canada (not that all immigrants are in this category, by any means) is better than "middle class" status in most countries of the world.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Then there's people who were pretty high up the pecking order in their original country and are, in some ways, worse off here...some have accepted a loss in relative socio-economic standing for things like a social safety net, freedom of speech, etc.

 

[grey]

Here’s the other kicker to Toronto’s increasing poverty: It cost a charity group $28,000 to find out and tell the government.

FRANCES LANKIN: For proving what others couldn't.

For years, Toronto officials have argued that the city has starkly different problems and needs from the rest of the country. But it took Lankin, the president and chief executive officer of the United Way, to find a way to prove it.

When Statistics Canada released data showing that low-income households made modest gains across the country from 2000 to 2005, Lankin was convinced that was not the case for Toronto. So her agency paid StatsCan $28,000 to release previously undisclosed data on the City of Toronto.

The result was an eye-opening report, Losing Ground: The Persistent Growth of Family Poverty in Canada's Largest City. It showed the number of families with children in Toronto living below the poverty line increased by 9.7 per cent to 92,930 in the first half of this decade whereas across Canada, it shrank by 5.1 per cent. And in terms of the depth and breadth of poverty, Toronto is also poorer than the 905 suburbs and the rest of Ontario.

The report illustrates what those who work in social housing, food banks, settlement services and homeless shelters knew all along and what Lankin has argued passionately since becoming head of the United Way in September 2001: Hunger is rising in this city, and so is the need for public housing, good jobs, day care and help for immigrants. Nowhere is that more evident than in the explosion in money-lending outlets, which have increased by almost eightfold in a decade to more than 300.

In the wake of the United Way report, Premier Dalton McGuinty vowed to set targets and timelines for addressing poverty in Toronto.

For her efforts to focus attention on Toronto's specific problems and the need to find solutions, Lankin deserves the Laurel of the Year.

http://www.thestar.com/comment/Editorials/article/289857

 

[DENTROBATE54]

If we're dividing up Toronto into 3 parts, logically 1. Scarborough 2. North York/Etobicoke north of the 401 3. an amalgamation of Toronto, East York, York and southern Etobicoke. Looking at it from a geopolitical sense, prevents an inferior/superior; low-income/high-income dichotomy. A good balance of affluent neighbourhoods are present in each 'Toronto' to cancel out slums and housing projects.

About the immigrant experience Scarberian, 000s of people who are professional, upper middle class in their countries-of-origin gladly come here and thrive despite not finding work in their fields. Even poverty-stricken immigrants are better here than back home since 'our' definition of poverty still outpreforms the quality of life standards of two-thirds of the world. Things like free education, free healthcare, tax exemptions, gov't assistence, subsidized housing, food banks, NGO/public charities, readily available work, affordable non-essentials like cell phones/laptops/plasma TVs, etc. is quite hard to come by in regions outside of North America, Western Europe and Pacific Rim countries.

 

[adma]

Uh, I think you misunderstood (or at least garbled) the gist of the thread...

 

[alphie20]

Well, I can say, based on my anecdotal observations living out here in the hinterlands of the inner suburbs that the reports of people seemingly falling behind is real. The sense I get is that most working class people in the city feel like they have to work harder and harder just to keep what they have. As companies get squeezed to be leaner, meaner and more efficient year after year, quarter after quarter, they naturally look to one of the biggest expeditures on their books -- their employees. Far from sharing the wealth they've enjoyed during this decade's long run of an expanding economy, most companies have concentrated on focussing this largesse on its upper management, to the detriment of its front-line workers.

Now I'm not a union man myself, but I do feel this ever expanding gap between the compensation paid to management and senior excutives versus what's paid to the average employee is unsustainable. Grey's post regarding the biferation of the social classes in London, NYC and HK is interesting. I hope we can learn from their mistakes to ensure the same doesn't happen here (one of the fortunate things about being a tier 2 city is you get to learn from the mistakes committed by those tier 1 cities). Toronto doesn't have a history of creating gated communities to keep the undesirables out. There are no hard and fast dividing lines that separate the good side of the tracks from the bad.

Not to overly politicize this thread, I think what we see is the result of two decades of neo-conservative policies where the thinking was that one needed to unshakle the "industrious class" to acquire and keep more of their wealth, and this greater degree of wealth would, through some sort of socio-economic osmosis, spread to the rest of society. I think that experiment has more or less now run its course. Even Harper's minority government is basically telegraphing to its base that the cupboard is now empty, so far is it concerns more tax cuts; and the Liberals are making poverty reduction a campaign plank. Even in the U.S., the Democrats are running ahead of Republicans on a promise to bolster spending on domestic issues and increasing taxes to end deficit spending.

What might this potential pendulum swing mean to cities? Hopefully more spending on the things that plague the citizens of Toronto's inner suburbs (e.g. education, transit, social supports, assistance for new comers etc.) The "Move Ontario" initiative for example, should make living in the inner suburbs more tolerable from a transportation perspective and should add real value to the homes of those who live in these areas.

... now if we could only get rid of these awful stripmalls and rezone to increase densities, I'd be a happy Downsview dweller

 

[jetlife]

okay, here's a lenghty comment from my urban planning friend:





Toronto is a second or third tier global city – depending on your definition

that means toronto should see a socio-economic bifurcation with a very wealthy financial/information/technology services elite and a minimum wage perma-temp service workforce like starbucks/best buy sales people et al. To serve the elite, and a shrinking middle class. This is already a recorded fact in first-tier global cities like hk/ny/london

evidence of this was first seen in toronto with a united way study that was intending to find new offices – i.e. Under serviced neighbourhoods. I think late 90s, a bit after the anne golden report on what to do with toronto. The united way study turned into the poverty by postal code report because, well, they found a huge ring of poverty outside the downtown core. It used to exist before, but it had worsened dramatically. So that then set off a bunch of academic studies that confirmed it six ways from sunday over the years.

Normatively, the problem is that canada (and north america) predicated its development on having a strong middle class (you probably learned about it in your degree) to drive economic development after the war – that way there would be little need for social services, etc. So now, while there may be more absolute people in the middle class, their proportion as a percentage of the overall population is shrinking.

More practically, what you end up having is a divide in the housing market. And in north america, your personal wealth is based on owning property. So, the significant number of low-end service sector employees are now competing for the same living space as the services elite. There’s only one outcome to that. The poor lose out and can’t afford to have children and have no secure housing tenure. There’s also no incentive – as we’re finding out – to drop rental control because dropping rental control is simply wiping out the lower end of the rental market. Why rent to poor people when you can lease to an elite? Maybe you can cope by moving out to the suburbs – but now you’re talking about commuting into work. Fact is weaker socio-economic groups are not at all mobile – the upfront cost of a move is too much to bear, so you have to make do with where you are while the cost of living creeps up around you. Not enough to force you out, but enough to keep you trapped. Pretty much it is only the middle class that can afford to move out to the suburbs and try to cope by commuting. But now you’re talking about families that spend up to 4 hours a day commuting on top of their work day. Diminished family time has very real social consequences – and this is happening to the middle class upon whom our society is predicated. That’s nothing to mention of the resource costs involved in maintaining infrastructure like that to support commuting, environmental issues, waste of human capital.

But the fact the middle class now lives outside toronto is beside the point. Administratively, toronto can only deal with its own residents. So now you have wealthy elite concentrated in the downtown and scattered pockets throughout the city, but an increasing number of people stuck at the other end of the livelihoods spectrum. So what do you do? Elites are always loathe to see more of their resource go towards the poor, so the lower socio-economic groups are frozen, and stuck by increasingly byzantine regulations when it comes to accessing social services that might offer them a leg up. Politicians’ careers depend not so much upon the voters anymore as much as their donors – donors generally aren’t poor. An inevitably outcome is a deeply, deeply divided city. Maybe that’s not a problem, and what people want – that’s not for me to say. The inevitable level of division has very real consequences. And canada being what it is, our social programmers pretty much end up trapping people (star has been running a great series on people trapped in the system because it costs them significantly more personally to break out on their own, rather than live on the margins).

Anyway, the globe series was nothing new. They’re just playing catch-up to the deepening poverty game that everyone except the fraser/cdhowe types have been realising. We’re on the cusp of something, and it’s a question of what toronto/ontario/canada wants to become. And it’s really not a question of people not having the initiative. Its barely possible to make ends meet working 2 full time shift jobs in toronto (where the jobs are – you don’t have the same level of access or accessibility in the suburbs so moving to save living expenses is moot – you use up whatever cost of living you might have reduced with decreased mobility and opportunity) so you don’t even have time to upgrade your skills, let alone the money. And you’re not able to access the resources that might let you do that unless you’re absolutely destitute, because the slightest income you show basically counts against you. Its also next to impossible to claim ei now to help you between jobs. Something like less than 75% of full-time workers qualify for it now – and if you’re part-time, you can forget about it.

Anyway, rambling. Globe and mail piece wasn’t anything special, but it’s the basis for a very complex and deeper discussion that simply isn’t taking place.

this!!