Adam Gopnik, recently quoted in the Globe and Mail, on New York City neighbourhoods:
“I like the collision of types. The problem with our neighbourhood is that you walk out your door and you see people largely like yourself.”
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November 9, 2008
Class Warfare, they say….
broke out in Leslieville last week. Some of you may have seen the news reports.
Signs, looking much like the “No Big Box” posters which sprouted in front windows around the neighbourhood all summer long, were plastered to telephone poles and mail boxes, saying “No Yuppies in Leslieville.” Official reaction was swift. The signs were scraped off wherever they were found because, although they reflected tension in the neighbourhood, they also, unfortunately, crossed the line of free speech with an incitement to violence, in the small print, invited readers to smash windows.
Almost all who saw the posters had a strong reaction to them – either positive or, in politer company, more negative. It was after all all evocative act, one which had also sprung up in graffitti on condo bill boards or in murmurs on street corners.
The neighbourhood is in flux. According to the the South Riverdale demographic profile on the City of Toronto website, from 1996 to 2001, median household incomes grew by nearly $11,000 and the number of people who fall below the low income cut-off fell by 29%. See The 2006 numbers are still being crunched but will no doubt show the trend continues.
It is, as the local city councillor Paula Fletcher, says, a mixed neighbourhood. But it is, more accurately a neighbourhood, in transition. And that is a time when tensions, rightly or wrongly will surface.
The Toronto Sun, former bastion of the working class, rose quickly to the defense of “Yuppies” and those who like “venti pumpkin-spiced lattes.” Ignored were the complaints of rising rents and new, too-expensive stores.
The Toronto Star obfuscated, explaining that because the process wasn’t complete, because the neighbourhood still had rough edges, this wasn’t gentrification – and so, presumably, no one should be up in arms about the neighbourhood newcomers who were driving up housing prices (and therefore realty taxes). People are arriving, we are told, because they like the grittiness of the neighbourhood; no worries about what happened similarly on Queen St. West.
Even Garth Turner, (yes former Conservative M.P.), describes a process of gentrification in Leslieville (or South Riverdale if you have lived there longer) where “Greedy developers are trying to turn it into a yuppie park, which will displace those who have lived there affordably.” Turner says that the neighbourhood will never switch to upper class enclave, though, like nearby Riverdale or the Beach. He explains, in his blog advising a woman to sell and move away, that Leslieville is “iffy” and “a dump” hemmed in by highways and hosting a “smelly” waste treatment plant.
Still, whether Leslieville/South Riverdale becomes so trendy that it reaches some magic gentrification tipping point, some people are feeling angry about the changes in their neighbourhood.
At a minimum, a space for community dialogue is needed.
October 21, 2008
Racial divisions tracking income polarization
Three recent learnings from the Ontario Nonprofit Housing Association conference scared me about the future of our city:
I was sitting through a presentation I had seen a few times, about the growing concentrations of poverty across the city and the high income enclaves that were also emerging, when I was struck to hear how substantially these aligned with the emerging racial division in the city. Just as income has polarized even over the past five years, so have the racial divisions. Neighbourhoods which were mainly white at the 2001 census are now likely to be even more white, according to research being led by Professor David Hulchanski at the University of Toronto.
So, the next morning, as I sat through an anti-racism workshop at the same conference, we were asked if we saw evidence of racism in our communities. Hulchanski’s work shows that, as the city’s foreign-born population now hits 50% of residents and people of colour will soon be a majority of the population, many white people, especially those living in high income areas, are less and less likely to have contact in their day-to-day lives with those from another racial background.
Finally, in another session, we talked about the dynamics of what happens when mixed neighbourhoods disappear. Like the idea of supermajorites, as described by political scientists, when populations become more homogenous and ideas and social mores are not challenged, they tend to become more extreme in their positions.
All this means that urban residents, living within increasingly racially and economically segregated neighbourhoods, will become increasingly isolated and separate in their world views and experience.
As I said, scary.
David Hulchanski’s work can be found at maps of city neighbourhoods with very high concentrations of white and visible minority populations and a recent presentation.
Belonging Community 