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rfmcdonaldThe article of this post's title, written by David Hulchanski, was published in a recent issue of the Toronto Star. Last year's shooting of a Toronto student, Jordan Manners, in his school prompted a recent report on school safety that has alleged that the personal security of many students is in jeopardy thanks to student violence and the inaction of school administrators. Hulchanski, author of another recent report alleging the trifurcation of Toronto into privileged, middling, and increasingly poor districts, argued that this division is the root cause for these social dysfunction.
Hulchanski goes on to argue that the ongoing decay of many regions of outer Toronto, like most of Etobicoke and Scarborough, from mid-20th century suburban paradises to low-income districts profoundly isolated from the rest of Toronto is set to create very serious issues. Might Toronto will end up looking, he wonders, like Detroit or Paris? This thesis is lent a certain plausibility by the fact that, in Toronto, there is a concentration of poverty in some ethnolinguistic groups. For that matter, Toronto poverty rates are relatively high by Canadian standards.
The City of Toronto, as a huge municipality created through forced amalgamation with a population of 2.5 million, is not one uniform city. It never was and is much less so now thanks to two decades of federal and provincial budget cuts affecting the poor, tax cuts helping the well off, and the downward shift in wages in a new economy that provides precarious employment at the bottom end of the wage scale. These trends are dividing us. A divided society produces divided cities.
There are three major partitions--three distinct cities--within what is officially called Toronto. People with choice in the housing market do not choose to live in the neighbourhoods like the ones the school board panel focused on.
Very few of the teachers in those schools, the panel found in its survey, live in those neighbourhoods and, by a wide margin, do not want to live in those neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods, in what I call City Number 3 in my research, are now 60 per cent non-white and very, very poor.
In the 1950s and 1960s, they were new suburban middle-income family neighbourhoods. It is an area that today we generally view as a sprawling bleak and desolate landscape. It lacks appropriate social services and even rapid transit. The average income in City Number 3 has fallen by 34 per cent since 1970 relative to the Toronto average.
Hulchanski goes on to argue that the ongoing decay of many regions of outer Toronto, like most of Etobicoke and Scarborough, from mid-20th century suburban paradises to low-income districts profoundly isolated from the rest of Toronto is set to create very serious issues. Might Toronto will end up looking, he wonders, like Detroit or Paris? This thesis is lent a certain plausibility by the fact that, in Toronto, there is a concentration of poverty in some ethnolinguistic groups. For that matter, Toronto poverty rates are relatively high by Canadian standards.
