Posts tagged ‘Urban Affairs’

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December 29, 2009

Neighbourhood vitality in Toronto's towers

Toronto’s residential towers are flung far across the city’s inner suburbs, tossed over subway lines or sprinkled along ravines and major roadways, further from transit. E R A Architects made the strong case for the renewal of these urban structures, and the City’s (now being re-branded) “Mayor’s Tower Renewal Project” has focused resources on these vertical neighbourhoods.

Wading into the issue soon will be a new United Way Toronto report on housing and neighbourhood vitality, tentatively titled (until the marketers get a hold of it),The Role of Housing in Neighbourhood Vitality: An investigation into the impact of high-rise living on personal well-being and neighbourhood vitality. It will examine the quality of housing in these mainly private marker towers located within the poor neighbourhoods in Toronto’s inner suburbs; it will also measure residents’ satisfaction levels, the impact on health and well-being for themselves and their families, their attachment to the neighbourhood and the experience of various populations groups within this housing stock.

United Way laid the groundwork for this study as part of its Building Strong Neighbourhoods focus. Part of this earlier work was laid out in an exploration of the elements of neighbourhood vitality. That report went so far as to recommend useful data variables which could be drawn from primary and secondary sources.

Scheduled for release sometime in the first half of 2010, the donor-funded report is a rigourous and sweeping undertaking with a total survey interview sample of 2800 tenants and additional focus groups. York University researchers (led by Robert Murdie) are already undertaking to replicate the survey in the Parkdale neighbourhood.

The data collection was completed through the fall with a team of interviewers and 3 field coordinators. Data cleaning and analysis are now underway.

The research is being done in partnership with the

  • Social Housing Services Corporation, looking at the potential of a provincial roll-out
  • Toronto Community Housing, to compare social housing tenants and private market renters
  • Toronto Public Health, to understand the impact of housing on health
  • Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, to inform the new provincial housing strategy
  • City of Toronto, to create a a baseline of knowledge and also test the limitations of the complaints process, and
  • Apartment Association of Greater Toronto, who has provided access to private market rental stock.

Posted in Demographics, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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October 23, 2009

"Are there limits to gentrification? Evidence from Vancouver"

Gentrification is fifty years old this year, UBC professor and Canada Research Chair in Geography David Ley explained to a University of Toronto audience earlier this week. Or at least the word “gentrification” is.

Although attributed to sociologist Ruth Glass first in 1964, the term can be found in an unpublished paper of hers five years earlier. Glass’ definition still holds up well, Ley explained. Gentrification is the movement of middle income households into lower income or working-class neighbourhoods.

Ley was speaking a Cities Centre hosted lecture entitled “Are there limits to gentrification? Evidence from Vancouver.” Reflecting back on the decades of work he has done on Vancouver neighbourhoods, Ley made the following points, some new, some old.

Shifts in the housing and labour markets are linked

While the labour marker and the housing market have been “commonly partitioned in academia,” they are coupled.

Citing the historical shifts in Cabbagetown, Ley read off a list of occupations from the 1960s and then a few decades afterwards. Physicians replaced Punch Press Operators. Teachers replaced transit workers. Higher income occupations replaced working class occupations. (It’s similar to the process I have described in my own neighbourhood in an earlier post.)

“Clearly a social change was going on,” said Ley.

The growth in the managerial and professional class occurred at the same time as the closure of factories were disappearing from Canada’s 5 largest metropolitan areas.  Almost as an aside, Ley pointed out the unrecognized role good quality public sector jobs has played in generating this shift. [One can’t help thinking how this links to Richard Florida’s idea of the creative classes.)

So, as the labour market shifted, the housing markets were likely to follow.

Industrial transition is the meta-narrative in the story of gentrification.

Gentrification plays out differently in different places because of the varied conditions. Urban areas with a stronger industrial base, such as Winnipeg and Windsor, will be less likely to face gentrification than post-industrial cities, such as Toronto. During the 1970s and 80s, for example, Toronto gained 60,000 of these higher status jobs while 75,000 jobs were lost in other parts of the economy.

The movement of artists predicts gentrification

The presence of artists other “pre-professionals” (with a lot of cultural capital, but little economic capital) signals a neighbourhoods in transition.

Ley described artists as modern magicians, transforming the material world of disinvested neighbourhoods, creating cachet.  Young professionals, eager to pick up such cultural capital, soon follow, driving prices up. So artists are continually shunted along out of the secure neighbourhoods into other working class, and often non-English -speaking, ones.

“So where they were in 1971, they are gone. And where they weren’t, they are in 1991,” Ley said. “Their concentration leads to their own elimination.”

The middle class then begins to move in, once terra incognito is proven. In Toronto, we saw movement along Bloor Street as this occurred. In Vancouver, the growth was along Main Street.

So what kinds of neighbourhoods has gentrification favoured?

Ley’s study of Vancouver neighbourhoods since the 1970s found these patterns:

  1. Gentrification typically occurs in areas adjacent to other high status areas.
  2. It also typically occurs close to environmental amenities, such as waterfronts and parks, where Ley remarked wryly, physiques can be admired.
  3. Gentrification occurs overwhelmingly in areas which are Anglo-Canadian (British stock).
  4. Gentrification occurs in areas where rents are above average.

This is the founding pattern. Ley said wryly that he missed the opportunity in the 970s to become a millionaire when he had the predictive model to see where gentrification would spread. Instead, Ley said, he had only the deep moral satisfaction that he had had the insight, if not the wit, to invest.

“However, once the market is ‘proven,’ a much more eclectic, experimental phase follows,” Ley explained, “and areas likely to gentrify become much harder to predict.”

Some neighbourhoods resist gentrification

People have been talking about the imminent gentrification of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Grandview Woodland for 35 years, Ley explained. It has many heritage buildings, walkable, close to water and some tree-lined streets, all indicators in the earlier model of a place ripe for gentrification. And yet, they remain, some of the poorest census tracts in Canada.

Attempts at gentrification are regularly made by hopeful arrivals. Condo marketers have played off this grittiness, advertising, “Be bold or move to the suburbs.” But, as one local business owner said to Ley, “these people just wash through.”

So how have these neighbourhoods resisted persistent attempts to move them upscale?

Ley’s short answer: A complex local sense of place which is unfriendly to gentrification

Ley’s longer answer:

  • Proximate to an industrial waterfront, where one nearby resident said the rendering plant had made him a vegetarian.
  • A challenging street scene that creates unpredictable encounters in public space.
  • Local politics are highly tolerant of existing diversity and hostile to capitalism in general. For instance, when Starbucks opened on Commercial Drive, their windows were smashed repeatedly.

Neighbourhoods “in decline” are where poor people are housed, yet, Ley cautioned later, governments need to be cautious about intervening there, as improvements may lead to displacements.

Gentrifiers can triumph through persistent incrementalism

“There is clear evidence gentrifiers are trying to change their externalities,” Ley said as he flipped a transparency onto the overhead.

The graph showed the number of complaints about the smell emanating from the local rendering plant. A wave of complaints in the 1990s lead to  changes. Then, in 2005, the complaints sky-rocketed, doubling, even when additional changes were made.

Ley flipped another transparency onto the overhead: An excerpt from the Globe & Mail’s real estate section, Done Deal. A five bedroom house with a two bedroom rental unit in Grandview Woodland.

  • 1996 – Selling price, $277,000
  • 2001 – Selling price, $428,000
  • 2006 – Selling price $920,000
  • 2009 – Asked $899,000; Selling price – $1,015,000

It is one of the dichotomies of the private market, Ley explained, later in answer to a question from the audience. “The bottom line is if we have a free-market in land, than those with the most money will outbid others and hold the land.”

Recognizing the right to the city for poor people

The Downtown Eastside has held gentrification at bay, mainly, Ley says because 40% of housing in the neighbourhoods is non-market. The City has sustained affordable housing units, and neighbourhood residents and organizations have a “poor people’s turf” legitimate.

The local ethos is preservation, public investment and revitalization without displacement. It is a grudging recognition of a right to the city for poor people.

Government regulation and policy is central

In the past century, Ley explains, neo-liberal policies have encouraged the spread of gentrification and the displacement of poor people because of the lack of investments it has made in affordable housing. Escalating levels of public debt will work against the revival of a welfare state that will create new housing.

The current push for sustainable housing and improved “eco-densities” will further aggravate the problem of affordable housing and further prime the inequality that is running the poor out of Canadian cities, Ley explained.

Although newer developments purport to improve densities, building taller buildings, the units are large and use more expensive materials, leaving those with low incomes displaced form the areas being “renewed.” Indeed these taller buildings often have fewer people in them then low-rises they replaced.

Gentrification cannot be benign

Strictly speaking, if higher-end housing units are built as infill or on brownfield, displacement of the poor is not an issue.

However, Ley explained in response to an audience question, the argument shifts then to the effects beyond the building unit itself, such as whether other middle income households are then drawn to the area. Housing co-ops, for instance, have been argued to prime neighbourhoods for gentrification. One social housing service provider explained to Ley that they want their housing to be “gritty” so that it doesn’t generate these external effects.

Finally, approached afterwards on the topic of mixed neighbourhoods, Ley explained that social mixing is usually just a transitional stage, on the way to complete gentrification.

The audience would have stayed longer to flesh out the lecture further, but another class arrived, this time to face an exam.

read more »

Posted in Blog menu, Daily Life, Demographics, Diversity, Gentrification, Inequality, Neighbourhoods | 7 Comments »

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October 4, 2009

Overheard at the SPT Symposium

Late arrivers had to sit along the steps in the auditorium at New College/U of T. Ed Broadbent led off Social Planning Toronto‘s Building the Future We Want symposium. Chief economist at the TD Bank Don Drummond sat in the second row, his session and chance to answer was up next. Potential candidate for mayor of Toronto Glen Murray was scheduled to finish at the end of the day.

It was the place to be. Registration had had to be cut off. Organizers were also wise enough to schedule long breaks so that registrants could network. {Shameless ad inserted here: If you haven’t become a member of the newly re-branded SPT, you should.}

I couldn’t stay for long, but even the few morning hours I attended yielded some great quotable quotes. Here’s two:

  • “Everybody’s talking about community hubs within their own silos.”
  • “David Frum is my favourite Canadian export.” (okay, Broadbent said this in his speech.)

What did you hear?

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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September 30, 2009

Right to the City

This flyer came across my desk (well my computer) for an upcoming seminar. Cities Centres at the University of Toronto, The Wellesley Institute and Rooftops Canada are bringing Ana Sugranyes, the General Secretary of Habitat International Coalition to speak on the topic: Right to the City! Lessons from Chile’s social housing experience. An estimable guest, to be sure, but a bit of a dry topic — unless one is one of those dedicated souls who maintains a keen interest in diverse worldly affairs.

But one of the phrases popped out at me: Right to the city.

It’s been chortling around in leftist circles for a little while, spreading across equator and creeping north now into the United States and Vancouver. Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman has profiled the topic. Right to the City chapters have erupted throughout U.S. cities, on three coast. Vancouverites have united under the same rallying call in their anti-Olympics advocacy.

The concept of Right to the city holds that, as inhabitants of the same urban space, we are all equal participants. The movement has become a way to capture the wide range of interests (of women, low-income people, immigrants, people of colour and all other diversities under one banner. It frames how we live together in these urban spaces.

Right to the city has been more eloquently described:

The question of what kind of city of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
David Harvey, The Right to the City

The Wellesley Institute has a notable record of identifying and acting on issues ahead of the curve, as examples their work on community-based research, social determinants of health, housing and inclusive zoning. Cities Centres and Rooftops are also no slouches.

So, if they’re bringing Right to the City to Toronto, it’s probably time to pay attention.

Posted in Inequality, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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September 12, 2009

Defining race (and racism) in the TDSB Learning Opportunity Index

The Learning Opportunities Index (LOI) is one of the Toronto District School Board’s key tools for directing resources to the neediest students in the system. Therefore, it’s vital that the index measure deprivation accurately and reliably.

The newly modified LOI dropped less predictive measures of student performance, such as average income, housing type, and immigration status and now includes variables which are better able to measure poverty. Of the new variables, the most powerful are “families on social assistance” and families in the bottom income quartile (as measured by the LIM).

Trustees bite the bullet

So, even though some schools shifted down the ranking and would now potentially lose resources, Trustees (or most of them) bit the bullet and voted to adopt the new instrument.

Still there were some misgivings.

For instance, in terms of external challenges, critical race scholars in the U.S.A. have shown race and poverty have separate effects on student achievement. That, even when income and other demographic characteristics are controlled for, students of different racial identities perform differently within the American school system. This finding has been used, reasonably, as the basis for the creation of Africentric and other race-based schools.

When the new LOI removed the variable of immigration status — often conflated with race in the Canadian context —, the TDSB faced the problem that race, in any form, had been excised. The LOI faced the critique it had been homogenized, to the detriment of its mission of accurately measuring external challenges, and to the detriment, especially, of black students.

So the Board asked the LOI review committee (of which I am a member) to also examine how and whether race should be included in the LOI.

A question for policy wonks or for research geeks

Given the range of views on the question, perhaps the task is really better suited for politicians and policy wonks than for statisticians and research geeks.

However, the review committee has begun its review. We will look at the broader literature, and we will test the utility and strength of any new race-based variable within the Toronto context.

A problem of definition

The first problem has been trying to figure out how to approach the problem.

For instance, producing an accurate description of the term”race” is tricky because race is a social, rather than a biological construction. Its definition and boundaries are blurry and ever–changing. Statistics Canada doesn’t even use the term, but instead says “visible minority” — a bare truth in Toronto — for anyone who has a heritage other than white.

Yet, within the Toronto context, when we compare the performance of “visible minority” students against that of their white peers, there are only subtle differences, sometimes in favour of students of colour. “Visible minority” status alone is not correlated to students’ academic performance. And, that’s a relief. In fact, it’s as it should be.

However, others remind us, we know there are differences between some racial groups.

So we have to explore the term further. Some advocates have been quite clear, we need to stop skirting the issue and name the problem of academic underachievement as one of Black and Aboriginal students, and a few other historically–disadvantaged groups. If we are prepared to do that, academic interventions can be better targetted.

Reliable school–level data

So, if this is the next step, to look at particular racial groups, can we get reliable school-level data? (School–level data is needed to calculate the LOI so that each school can be accurately assessed and ranked in comparison to the others.)

The school board census is the obvious answer. Among its many questions, the TDSB’s student/parent census asked respondents to identify their racial background. However, this won’t work for the LOI.

While useful at a system– or even ward–level, the census data won’t allow reliable comparisons at the school level. For example, some schools had a high non-response rate (students wrote in “Martian” as their answer to the question of their racial background, and various classes never even did the census). The census also happened long enough ago that it no longer supplies a current picture of the Board’s students.

Ranking and weighting races

Ethnic origin might be another usable category from Statistics Canada data, and one which may give more subtlety to the analysis.

Board research has shown that groups of students born in various parts of the world perform differently. Should we parse, weight and rank the value of my children’s English⁄Celtic heritage against their Chinese heritage? (As the discussion unfolds, one can’t help but feel like the evolutionary psychologist University of Western Ontario professor, Philippe Rushton wading into the world of measuring head size to explain intelligence.)

What are we trying to measure? And where does ethnicity blend into culture or language?

And, in the end, does the Board have the stomach to rank one ethnic group against another in the allocation of scarce resources?

Fixed identities

This exercise is different from research which shows different outcomes for students who have already gone through the education system. In this exercise, we are saying that because a student comes from a specific racial background, a priori,  we will award additional resources. We are pre-judging their performance.

The awkwardness of this is that a student’s racial background is different from all the other measures currently used within the LOI because race is fixed. All the other measures, such as parental marital status, education level, and income, can be changed, even re-mediated through social policy and individual effort.

Measuring racism rather than race

Perhaps then, more accurately, this quest to measure the impact of race should be more fittingly seen as a quest to measure racism. We should be measuring the disadvantage which led to the poor environment which created the external challenge some students face. Those who argue for reparations would argue for such.

So, then, the questions becomes, how to measure this.

Use a geographic lens

There is no general “measure of racism” which we can easily access to measure how Toronto students are doing in school. So this is where geography can help. We may well be looking for a measure of concentrated disadvantage or a measure of a neighbourhood peer effect.

Racism creates the inequitable conditions whereby students of colour are more likely live in poor neighbourhoods with low levels of education, fractured families, and little access to good jobs — all variables now included in the LOI and which make it a strong measure of external challenge.

Neighbourhoods may well be the key driver in a student’s performance. And it’s a premise which has some credence.

In 2005, Robert Sampson at Harvard (one of my favourite researchers), investigated the connection between race and violence; he found that the main differences between different racial groups’ levels of violence were explained by demographics and neighbourhood conditions. He recommended that interventions which “improved neighbourhood conditions and support families” would be the most effective way to reduce violence.

Sampson also found that neighbourhood distress was inversely related to the number of workers in professional occupations and the proportion of married parents. Higher levels of recent immigrants also had a dampening effect on violence. Tom Carter, at the University of Winnipeg, has cited research supporting similar conclusions in his studies on the inner city.

In effect, what looked like racial differences were actually problems rooted in poverty and deprivation.

Furthermore, an American study found that while racial segregation has been declining, educational segregation has increased. So neighbourhoods are more divided along, arguably, class lines than racial ones. (I don’t know of a similar study in a Canadian urban centre.)

More to thresh out

In the end, what seemed like an easy question may have a complex answer.

read more »

Posted in Blog menu, Demographics, Diversity, Neighbourhoods, Public Education | 1 Comment »

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July 16, 2009

One neighbourhood, many politics

It could have been an awkward conversation — me: a manager; my neighbour: a striking city worker; and another neighbour, who makes her living in the service industry, depending on tips.

The topic of the city workers’ strike, now ending its third week, had just popped into our front porch chitchat.

I froze, tried to shoo the topic away.

But instead, what started as a snipe about “greedy unions” turned into a wide-ranging discussion about the integrity in collective bargaining and the hard and very human realities of living through a strike. The exchange became a chance to soften hard lines which missed the complexity of our situations.

By the end, we were laughing, teasing, empathizing.

We were able to have this conversation because we had all know each other for over a dozen years. We trusted each other to have this hard conversation.

The Toronto Star profiled a similar encounter between neighbours. It is, though, a conversation that may be less and less likely in Toronto neighbourhoods, which are increasingly divided along income lines. (Why do we build homogenized houses of similar value in separated neighbourhoods?)

What happens in neighbourhoods which have less diversity, whether those differences are along political, class, or racial lines? Political science presents a useful concept to answer this: supermajorities (more than a majority, often 2/3).

In supermajorities, diverse opinions are not heard, and political positions harden. What was a conservative or a progressive belief becomes, in an unchallenged field, an ultra-conservative or a radical one.

Conversations like the one on my front porch tonight reminded me of one more reason why mixed neighbourhoods are important.

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Posted in Daily Life, Diversity, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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May 31, 2009

Key factors associated with youth delinquency

A Statistics Canada analysis this spring looked at factors associated with delinquent activity among immigrant youth in Canada. Ostensibly, the report was comparing newcomer and Canadian-born youth, but what it found was more about the importance of family and friends.

The report on property-related and violent activities relied on self-reports from the 2006 International Youth Survey.

Youth were asked if they had participated in a series of risky behaviours in the previous 12 months:

  • Property delinquency was measured as youth who had damaged something on purpose (including bus shelter, window or seat), stolen a bicycle or vehicle, stolen from a store, burglary and arson
  • Violent delinquency was measured whether a youth had snatched a purse or bag, carried a weapon, threatened someone with harm, participated in a fight intentionally.

Here’s what the report found:

Rates of both property and violent delinquency vary by generational status within Canada. Native-born youth reported the highest rates of property-related delinquency, while youth who had immigrated to Canada after the age of 5 reported the lowest rates. However, factors other than generational status were found to account for differences across generational groups in rates of property-related and violent delinquency.

Having delinquent peers has the strongest effect on all youth in terms of explaining rates of self-reported delinquency. The odds of reporting property delinquency were more than three and a half times higher for youth who had delinquent peers than for those who did not. Youth who reported having peers involved in delinquent activities were almost three times more likely, as those without, to report violent delinquency.

Relationships with family also play an important role. Youth who reported a good relationship with their mother were less likely to report violent delinquency.

Youth who spent the majority of their time with friends were also more likely to report property  and/or violent delinquency. Youth who were isolated from family or friends reported higher levels of property delinquency.

If youth reporting being a victim, they also were more likely to be involved in delinquent behaviour. Those who had experienced a theft were more likely to report property-related delinquency. They were also more likely, along with those who reported having been hit violently, to report violent delinquent acts.

Finally, schools play a role as well. Youth who aspired to university were less likely to report either type of property or violent activities while youth who skipped school were more likely to do so. Youth who felt that their school was ‘unsafe’ were also more likely to report having committed acts of violent delinquency.

In sum, protective factors for youth included aspirations for university and spending time with family and/or close relationship with mothers. (Recent immigrants were most likely to enjoy these conditions, and therefore were least likely to be involved in delinquent behaviours. Stereotypes, be damned!)

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Posted in Blog menu, Demographics, Diversity, Neighbourhoods, Youth | 1 Comment »

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May 5, 2009

A white resident’s dilemma: gentrification or segregation?

A Twitter friend, @JessieNYC, a smart and progressive woman who lives in New York City, worried recently about the selection of her new home. She had two choices: to live on the Upper East Side, a high income and mainly white neighbourhood, or to move to another apartment in East Harlem. Her choice was essentially to remain, isolated, in a white enclave or to become a gentrifier.

Gentrification is an issue about which I think a lot, but have hesitated to write about specifically because this is so personally about my neighbourhood. However another Twitter user I follow recently posted a link to Life, Inc., a searing analysis of gentrification and racial politics in Brooklyn, New York. So I have decided to take the plunge; these are things that have to be debated.

For the past fifteen years, my neighbourhood has been changing.

Renters have been displaced as homes are converted to single family dwellings. Front-yard vegetable gardens are being replaced by granite rock and Japanese maples. Median income is rising. The occupational classes of my neighbours have been changing. Where I used to live next to taxi drivers, railway conductors, sales clerks, hotel maids and medical secretaries, I now live among a range of fashion, acting, film and visual artists and writers, and professionals such as social workers, librarians, teachers, and museum curators.

And the neighbourhood is now less racially diverse. Where my (mixed-race) children could see their Chinese heritage reflected around them, where they learned to greet older adults as Po-po or Gong-gong, many of these families have moved away, almost always to be replaced by a young, white couple and a large dog, pleased to be able to afford to enter the housing market on their two incomes. One of the kindergarten teachers at the school where my kids, now in high school, attended, was surprised to realize this year that every child in her morning class is white. When my children were young, she had less than a handful of student who were white.

When I whined about these demographic shifts, a Facebook friend called me out. “Tough living where others want to live, isn’t it?” he said.

Even Jane Jacobs defended gentrification, saying this “unslumming” showed the desirability of a neighbourhood and improved the neighbourhood.

Others have admonished: Change happens!

So I have struggled to articulate my discomfort with these changes.

They are threefold:

  1. The economic drivers of the change
  2. The racial impacts of gentrification
  3. The homogenization of the neighbourhood

1. The neighbourhood change is as a result of economic forces. CUNY Professor Neil Smith provides some insight into the dynamics of these shifts (See the blog Racialicious for more). The forces underlying these moves and improvements to the the neighbourhood are economic – nay, capitalistic, rather than a reflection of social forces or personal decisions.

Smith elaborates, denying “our goal is some rigidly conceived `even development’. This would make little sense. Rather, the goal is to create socially determined patterns of differentiation and equalisation which are driven not by the logic of capital but genuine social choice.“

People will maximize their return, so if that means selling out while prices are high, so they will move.  At the neighbourhood level, this plays out as high residential mobility, as prices continue to rise, and people’s price point is reached. (I remember when the first house on our street sold for over $250,000. My older neighbour crowed to me, “Diane, we’re quarter-millionaires!”). When my neighbours move away, they are having their rental housing sold from under them, or, as owners, are cashing in and moving further away, often outside the city.

These individual actions have a cumulative impact.

2. These neighbourhood changes play out racially, as well. In a city as diverse as Toronto, what plays out economically plays out racially. And because income and race are correlated here, upwardly mobile neighbourhoods are becoming whiter. Professor David Hulchanski’s work is bearing this out (see my previous post on racial divisions tracking income polarization).

The racial composition of my neighbourhood has shifted, and whites are becoming the dominant racial group here, the very opposite dynamic of what is happening demographically in the city.

3. Perhaps the most telling symptom of gentrification, is that this demographic shift is unidirectional.

Gentrification happens, in stages. And, as working class has shifted to artistic class, the upper class (and higher housing prices) cannot be far behind. The downtown city core of Toronto has become a destination.

Some of neighbours are just fine with that. Often, these same some, upon their arrival here, find the rough granularity of the neighbourhood disturbing. Often, they moved here thinking they have purchased a good bargain, just at the edge of one of the high-income neighbourhoods around us, and they mistake this neighbourhood for that one. It’s not long before they are disappointed and organizing a petition.

Or, sometimes, they thought the “colour” would be nice. And, yet, their singular arrival usually displaces an East Asian family. (Stats Can data shows one in five ethnic-Chinese people left the neighbourhood between 2001 and 2006.)The only in-migration to the neighbourhood, besides whites, are some South Asians and Urdu-speakers because the mosque and commercial district is in walking distance (Their numbers doubled, so that now they comprise 5% of the local population).

The answer to these three problems, the economic, the racial, the homogenization, is to purposefully plan for mixed neighbourhoods. Left to wider economic forces, the poor (and, by corollary, people of colour), are continually displaced.

So what to do, after all this awfulizing? Mixed neighbourhoods!

Sometimes, as discussions of mixed income neighbourhoods erupt, wealthier neighbourhoods often object to the idea of affordable housing being built in the neighbourhood. However, the response from one wise woman was, where do you want the woman who cares for your child at the daycare or serves you coffee in the morning to live? Is she a part of our community, or not?

Gentrification happens because of income inequality, an issue which is continuing to grow.  While these are issues, created at an entirely different levels, they are played out locally, within and between our neighbourhoods.

So my reply to my Twitter friend’s dilemma was, whether she stayed within the white enclave where she lives, or moves to a more diverse neighbourhood, I knew she would work to build an inclusive place. It’s the only fair thing to be done.

More:

Income polarization tracking racial divisions

“Are there limits to gentrification? Evidence from Vancouver”

Mixed picture on mixed income: Moving in on poor neighbourhoods

 

Posted in Diversity, Gentrification, Income, Neighbourhoods | 7 Comments »

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April 28, 2009

Disease and the regenerative power of cities

An appropriate quote, in these pandemic times, from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cites:

Vital cities have marvoulous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties. Perhaps the most striking example of this ability is the effect that big cities have had on disease. Cities were once the most helpless and devastated victims of disease, but they became great disease conquerors. All the apparatus of surgery, hygiene, microbiology, chemistry, telecommuications, public health measures, teaching and research hospitals, ambulances and the like, which people not only in cities but also outside them depend upon for the unending war against premature mortality, are fundamentally products of big cities and would be inconceivable without big cities. The surplus wealth, the productivity, the close-grained juxtaposition of talents that permit society to support advances such as these are themselves products of our organization into cities, and especially into big and dense cities.

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April 2, 2009

Urban or Suburban: Physical activities differ by kind, not amount

I have the daily pleasure of walking, to work, to shop, to visit my neighbours. In fact, at least once a week one of my neighbours and I will head out for an evening march, just to avoid too many evenings in front of a screen. I fit the profile of a central urban resident, as released in a Stats Can study looking at the physical activity levels of urban and suburban residents, Life in Metropolitan Areas.

My extended family live in less dense neighbourhoods, further out from the city core, with big lawns, wide streets, and impossibly long walks to a hardware store or a restaurant. The study shows however that their physical activity levels are still likely on par with mine because they do more outdoor yard work (much more!) and they are also more likely to engage in an active leisure activity.

So, the study’s analysis of daily activitity shows, however we do it, urban and suburban dwellers tend to spend about the same amount of time engaged in daily physical activities. (If you’re interested in some of the other demographic characteristics of active people, see a previous Statistics Canada study, Who participates in active leisure?)

There were, however, two exceptions to the comparable physical activity levels amongst urban and suburban residents.

Suburban dwellers who were less physically active were those who:

  • work or go to school more than 9 hours a day, and/or
  • live in the tall residential apartments and condominiums that sprinkle most of Toronto’s suburbs, those that live in the tall towers, far from easy transit or commercial activities. 

While New Urbanism (see also CBC’s video clips on the topic) addresses some of the issues of built form and more compact and walkable communities, targeted intitiatives, such as the Mayor’s Tower Renewal project, are more likely to make a difference to those who are not physically active. Introducing such things as commmunity gardens and mixed commercial activity, the Tower Renewal Project changes the landscape surrounding tall buildings, thereby providing further opportunties for local residents to be physically active, whether through walking to do their errands or yard work.

Today’s Stats Can study simply underscores how landscape offers different opportunities to be physically active.

 

 

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