Being at home in an urban neighbourhood: Musings from my front porch
(For link to Toronto parking regulations, see bottom of this post.)
Absolutely, while the wisdom of keeping a car downtown is questionable, on-street parking is one area of social interaction which can be smoothed by congenial neighbours or can be a continual source of aggravation by ones who are not. Street parking is a reflection of how we live together.
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.
The police division in which Riverdale and the Beach lies has the second highest Break & Enter rate in the City. Only the downtown core/entertainment area outranked Division 55 during this period (January – October 2008). (See Toronto Police Service data and the Toronto Star crime maps for the source of this analysis. Another interesting website, allowing individuals to pool their collective knowledge is the Spotcrime website.)
So these high stats make one of the stories buried in the 2005 annual police report all the more interesting.
The Division’s Major Crime Unit developed a program to track serial offenders, out on bail for Break and Enter and other major crimes.
Through the program, police met with offenders and their sureties as they were released from jail and then tracked their bail conditions, making regular follow-up visits weekly.
A regular, rotating list of the Top 15 offenders was maintained. Police found, by tracking these few people, they were able to drop the break-in rate by 38%.
The pattern is reminiscent of the one described by Malcolm Gladwell when he wrote in the New Yorker about Million Dollar Murray, a homeless man who in the final years of his life absorbed a large portion of health, social and police services. Gladwell makes the compelling argument that the most effective use resources is not when they are spread across a population, but when they concentrated on the most needy.
It’s a focused tactic that runs counter-intuitively to our Canadian sense of fairness and universalism; however it’s one now seen in the Province of Ontario’s poverty reduction strategies, the City of Toronto‘s and United Way‘s Strong Neighbourhood Strategies, and TDSB’s Model Schools for Inner Cities. Each of these strategies brings additional resources to those identified as most in need.
At worst, this tactic prioritizes the vulnerable. As best, it just may work.
A packed house gathered last week at the Joint Centre for Excellence on Research in Immigration and Settlement. Building on their earlier work on ethnic enclaves in Toronto, professors Mohammed Qadeer (from Queen’s) and Sandeep Kumar Agrawal (from Ryerson) were speaking about the residential patterns of seven ethnic populations in Toronto: African Blacks, Caribbean, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Portuguese, and South Asian. (These are as reported at the census tract level by individual respondents to the 2001 and 2006 censuses living in the census metropolitan area (CMA) of Toronto.)
While the maps in their PDF presentation were the most interesting, Qadeer and Agrawal also laid out a few key elements about “ethnic enclaves”:
Using GIS analysis, Qadeer and Agrawal’s found that ethnic enclaves are extending (so that they are now more widespread) and consolidating (single ethnic groups were more likely to be a higher portion of a neighbourhood). This growth, they found, was often spurred by new immigration.
However, they also found a wide variation in the likelihood of people of various ethnic groups to live within their own neighbourhoods, and that no enclaves were exclusive. All city census tracts had some ethnic mix.
The study provokes further questions to explore, many which were asked that afternoon. Further research could be done to look at these trends over a wider range of years and among other Canadian geographies or at alternate geographic levels (dissemination areas instead of census tract). Also worthwhile would be a examination of the shifting residential patterns of the City’s largest ethnic group, those of British ancestry, and, and more compelling, whether there is a tipping point when “white flight” becomes a reality.
Finally, the study gave a quick look at the percentage growths among various ethnic groups; Russian and Ukrainian populations grew the most quickly. The largest groups are British, South Asian, and, then, Chinese. (For more a detailed description, see the City of Toronto’s 2006 census broad overview and the profiles of specific ethnic groups.)
For those of you who missed Sunday’s Toronto Star article with maps, The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization, 1970 -2000 is being updated by authors, David Hulchanski, with Richard Maaren, at University of Toronto. Their recent update brings us to 2005, and the 2006 Census data will be included by the research team later this year.
What the maps show is not a shifting middle class, as described by the Star headline, but a disappearing middle class. Toronto has become a city of growing inequality. Fewer and fewer areas of the city are “middle class,” defined at close to the average individual income of $40,000 in 2005. Areas of high income are remaining essentially stable geographically, concentrated in the middle of the City and along the Lake, while low income areas are consolidating where they were previously and spreading out through the suburbs.
Tonight the trustees of the Toronto District School Board will be looking at revisions (and here) to the Learning Opportunity Index, a measure which ranks schools according to the needs of their students and then focuses resources on the most needy ones. (The final rankings are available here.)
I had the pleasure over the past eighteen months in helping to revise and improve it, so I have two arguments to make: first, why the LOI is an important, and essentially Canadian, educational tool, and second, why this new version is an improvement.
The purpose of the Index is to support students who are falling behind in school because of challenges they face outside of school. This new Index will allow scarce school resources to be driven to those most in need, those who are facing some of the greatest barriers to academic achievement and who are, by our measures, doing poorly in school.
The LOI deserves continued support because:
The proposal going forward to the school board tonight should be supported because it shows an even stronger relationship between external challenges and academic achievement. The revisions should be supported because they:
In recent years, housing type has become a poor variable because of problems of under-reporting and because no distinction is made by Statistics Canada between high-rise rental apartments and condominiums. Housing type no longer shows a strong correlation to academic performance.
Immigration is also a poor predictor of how students will perform. For instance, students from some areas of the world outperform students from other parts of the world, including students who are Canadian born. So, immigration status alone does not accurately predict academic problems.
The removal of immigration and housing type will mean that school located in areas with high immigration and multiple story dwellings may not be as high on the LOI if those income levels are not comparable to other parts of the city. However, when we looked at the academic performance of these same schools, we found they were performing more closely to the level predicted by the revised LOI. In actuality, the LOI is now a more accurate predictor of those students’ academic potential.
Some critics have also raised the issue of race as one variable that is missing from the proposed LOI. Educational research shows this can also be a factor in academic achievement because it is a substitute measure for racism. (i.e. one’s race does not predict one’s academic potential, but it does predict the barriers to academic achievement). Even though I chaired the school board’s equity advisory committee for a number of years, I feel comfortable with leaving the variable of Race aside for the moment for two reasons. First, the Board is being asked to make a public commitment to look at the variable of race when Toronto data is available, and I believe this should and will be done. Second, and sadly, because visible minority status and low income are so closely correlated in Toronto, that by strengthening the poverty measures, the proposed LOI captures many of the same students that a race variable would. In effect, race is currently a fair proxy for poverty, and so the strengthened poverty measures capture many of these same populations.
In another post, I will explain the mechanics of the LOI that make it work so well.
(Update on the TDSB’s LOI, after its release: Belonging Community: School board releases new Learning Opportunity Index)
Belonging Community 