Belonging Community: Being at home in an urban neighbourhood

Mixed picture on mixed income: Moving in on poor neighbourhoods

Early one morning this week, I drove a neighbour (and, of course, friend) to a downtown hospital for a medical test.

We were distracted from the quiet between us by the car radio. CBC’s Metro Morning was broadcasting from Regent Park, the downtown neighbourhood with a scope of need that is almost double any other part of the city. We zoomed right through it, along Shuter Street.

Metro Morning was exploring the community’s revitalization. The first stage was underway, and 1 Cole Place, the new condominiums, were opening. The morning’s interviews demonstrated the deep history and vitality of the neighbourhood and, also, the new interest that has been sparked in the community.

As I drove back home alone, I decided to stop the car and go watch the broadcast from Nelson Mandela Park school.

Host Andy Barrie was the efforts to create a mixed income neighbourhood in Regent Park. He was interviewing a young University of Toronto doctoral student and Trudeau scholarship winner, Martine August, and long-time resident and community organizer, Sandra Costain, about the impact of the looming arrival of higher income residents (and their homes).

It was a sobering interview, one which just whet my appetite. August cited studies from her literature review, and Costain concurred from experience, but they both painted a gloomy picture:

  • People segregate themselves according to their separate identities. In 14 studies August looked at, interactions between higher-income newcomers and lower-income residents show that interactions don’t occur.
  • Very often when people of higher incomes do move into a poorer neighbourhood and exercise their political muscle, it’s to push social services, which low income people need, out.
  • Community programs which were universal, free to local (low-income) residents begin to require documentation of need, fees introduced, and stigma grows.

What was left unsaid in the short interview is what might mitigate these colonizing forces.

For instance, in his work in school, Clyde Hertzman found that children from poor families did better when in a mixed income school. He attributed that to the “sharp elbows of the middle class,” which act to protect a full range of services.  By extension then, those who buy homes in a poor area need to see further than their property values, but to a common good.

Discussing this electronically with Brian Eng at the Wellesley Institute afterwards, he said that this tendency of mixed income neighbourhoods to push out poor people further underscores the importance of community development.

Eng gave the example of the co-ops around the St. Lawrence Market as a good example of a mixed income community that works. In fact, commentators on CBC’s website, gave the example of the Woodsworth Coop, in the same area, that has monthly business meetings to discuss community business, shared common task (such as cleaning) and regular celebrations with food.

Where opportunities for interactions are created and fostered, stronger communities emerge, a place with, as one American social justice organization called for Better Neighbourhoods, Same Neighbours.


“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 affects 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.


Toronto’s emotional map running hot & cold

Kevin Stolarick, Richard Florida’s “stats guy” at the Martin Prosperity Institute has been up to a bit of mischievous mapping in his spare time.

Using data from a UC Berkeley psychologist who publishes the Big Five Personality Test , Stolarick has mapped out the major emotional of characteristics of Toronto residents by neighbourhood (probably Forward Sortation Areas – the first three digits of a postal code).

The Toronto Star published the maps today: Toronto the Good – and bad and sad and mellow and … .

It’s a relief to see some maps that break the traditional “U” and “O” deprivation patterns. West-enders are extroverted, east-enders are neurotic. Suburban areas tend to be more agreeable, while those along the subway lines are less so. Most of the city is the conscientious type. Those closer to the lake tend to be more open to new experiences.

Now, because the survey is web-based, Stolarick says the sample is probably skewed towards the young (and tech-savvy), but it certainly is a bit of fun!


Neighbourhood De-fence

The De-fence Project is coming to Riverdale.

One of my favourite direct action groups is the Toronto Space Committee’s De-fence Project. With an obvious sense of fun, the group encourages homeowners to take down the front yard chain-link fences which were popular in many downtown neighbourhoods.

The fences were considered an improvement when they began their spread in the 1970s over the higher wooden fences of earlier times. The open links allowed air flow while maintaining security. Yet, as the De-fence crew says, our front gardens end up looking like jail yards.

I remember the delight my family felt when a former neighbour with a large, ill-mannered dog moved away. Our delight was compounded because the new neighbour was glad to have us take down the fence between us, and to simply allow the day lilies define our border.

The Globe and Mail’s Architourist’ Dave LeBlanc wrote a recent article the movement to neighbours sharing their yards rather than fencing them. His focus was on the suburbs.

Join the De-fence volunteers Sunday October 18th, and bring pliers and work gloves, if you’ve got them.

11am: 180 Riverdale Avenue
Noon: 173 Riverdale Avenue
1:30: 157 Withrow Avenue
2:30: 124 Wolfrey Avenue.

GOOGLE MAP: http://tinyurl.com/ylyr6b5

For further info, contact: defence@publicspace.ca


The Ontario HST: a counter-intuitive remedy?

Oct 08
1 Comment

The Ontario-based 25-in-5 Network for Poverty Reduction met in the basement of a community agency this week to hear some radical news. U of T’s Ernie Lightman and Andy Mitchell were at the front of the room. Economist Hugh Mackenzie had joined them. Policy wonk John Stapleton came in soon afterwards. Various funders, networks and advocacy groups sat around the room. Now Magazine’s Alice Klein sat at the side.

Lightman explained that this was a preliminary discussion rather than an off-the-record one.

We were there to discuss the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). Despite the hue and cry against it, Mitchell and Lightman’s analysis was showing that it is a progressive tax.

When the HST was announced, Lightman, habituated by a long history watching the Department of Finance and Treasury Board, was an early critic. Soon after he was interviewed one morning on CBC radio, Finance Minister Dwight Duncan followed with his own rebuttal: university professors shouldn’t speak about things they didn’t know about, Duncan said.

Lightman, to his credit, took up Duncan’s challenge. He and Mitchell, a stats master, met with Treasury Board staff, gathered some data and began the number-crunching. The preliminary results have induced them to rethink their original position and to broaden the discussion to this audience.

Mitchell’s analysis looked at the announced changes to the HST, personal income tax and Ontario Tax Credits and their combined effect on economic families (which includes singles too). The calculations did not include the transitional “bribe”. Here’s what they found:

  • While the overall effect on families is a wash, the HST’s impact is progressive. On average, low income families will benefit from the changes; middle income earners will come out neutral; and, high earners, over $100,000, will see an increase in their total tax burden.
  • Single parents should, on average, do better under the HST, whatever income bracket they are.
  • Couples with children should also do better with the HST. (Familes with children will likely do even better than projected because of point-of-sale exemptions on items such as books and children’s clothing.
  • Singles who earn under $50,000 – $60,000 should benefit from the changes.
  • Only seniors showed a more mixed result, probably because of a range of reasons.

Now, Mitchell and Lightman cautioned this was a projection using SPSM Stats Can data. It does not account for any changes in spending habits which may occur after the changes are brought in. So, for instance, if a consumer decides to a get a haircut less frequently because of the higher costs, then these numbers may shift.

As the gathered group began to thresh through what this meant, a few obvious advocacy positions emerged.

  1. If low income people are to face higher day-to-day costs through the HST, the tax credits will have to be paid more frequently throughout the year so that, as Voices from the Street Mike Creek, reminded us, they didn’t run out of money even earlier in the month. Small, regular payments are better than a few large lump sums paid months apart.
  2. Because more tax credits and income benefits will now be flowing through the tax system, community-based tax clinics will continue to be a vital means of ensuring low-income people are filing returns so that they can benefit from the credits they deserve. Community agencies will need additional resources to improve the take-up.
  3. As the changes are currently structured, young income-earners are more likely to come out better. The impact of these changes on seniors, particularly low-income ones, should be looked at more carefully to ensure they are not left behind.
  4. Ontario tax credits are now fully indexed and so are protected from inflationary erosion. They are however always be vulnerable to a government’s whim to move to partial or zero indexing. Full indexation is vital.

Hugh Mackenzie had the final part of the discussion, framing the importance of taxes because they boost “the robust fiscal capacity of government which allows government to drive services.” And, if services are boosted, as his work with Richard Shillington last spring in A Quiet Bargain showed, the poor were more likely to receive an equitable share. When it’s implemented, this “tax-grabbing” change introduced by the Ontario Liberal government may just raise enough millions and billions to do that.

The HST sounds like a good deal to anti-poverty activists, after all.


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 in their own silos.”
  • “David Frum is my Canadian Export.” (okay, Broadbent said this in his speech.)

What did you hear?


David Crombie on neighbourhoods and belonging

Quick notes from David Crombie, the former mayor of Toronto, speaking at the WoodGreen Community Services’ annual general meeting tonight:

Someone wise once said there are three questions everyone has to answer:

    1. Who am I?
    2. Where do I belong?
    3. How do I behave?

Neighbourhoods are where we do that.

Crombie also took a moment to reflect that he is the same age as the agency itself, 73 years old. Evoking the issues the agency faced at its start, Crombie reminded the crowd of  its founder Ray McCleary’s rallying call in the 1930s, “We need to reduce the power of poverty.”

Ever so. The work goes on.


Right to the City

This flyer came across my desk (well my computer) 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.


Crime hotspots across Toronto neighbourhoods

Today, Stats Can released a hot product: a report on crime in Toronto.  Even though we are one of the safer metropolitan areas on the continent, Neighbourood Characteristics and the Distribution of Police-reported Crime in the City of Toronto is sure to draw some attention.

Produced by Mathieu Charron at the Canadian Centre for Crime Statistics, the report looks at the location of reported crimes and the characteristics of the neighbourhoods in which they occurred.

The data, drawn from Statistic Canada’s Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR)  “reflect reported crime that has been substantiated by police.” 106,175 incidents were clustered and mapped across the city.

The reports differentiates between violent crime and property crime, finding different correlations. The pattern shows that low-income and nearby neighbourhoods are more likely to suffer spillover effects.

Dividing crimes into violent and property ones, the report found:

  • Neighbourhoods with higher violent crime rates tend to have less access to resources. Education level of residents was one of the best predictors of such access.These neighbourhoods also tended to be “densely populated and have a higher percentage of residents living in multi-unit dwellings” (the tall towers which are the focus of the Mayor’s renewal efforts.) These neighbourhoods are also more likely to have more children, more single-parent families, more renters, and more people of colour.
  • Property crime (theft, break & enter) is concentrated around shopping centres, both large and small, in commercial districts, and in neighbourhoods around these places. Areas with high levels of education or a high portion of manufacturing and office jobs were less likely to report property crime.

Criminologists recognize the spatial patterns of crime. Crime comes in hot spots around the city. Mapping out various criminal activities, the report’s spatial crime patterns follow the same deprivation “U” which marks less privileged areas of the city. Densely populated cores, transportation and shopping hubs, which all draw large numbers of people, tended to report higher crime rates.

The report does not rank or rate specific neighbourhoods, however it did describe “some hot spots…Danforth, downtown east side, and the intersections of Lawrence and Morningside, Jane and Finch, and Jane and Eglinton.”

Here, for those who like the gory details, is what I could see on the maps. The highest levels of crime clustered in the following places:

  • Breaking & Entering: Downsview, Bridle Path, Lawrence Park,Don Mills
  • Drug offense: Jane-Finch, York, Dufferin Grove, Parkdale, New Toronto/Mimico, Trinity-Bellwoods, Regent Park, Greenwood- Woodbine, Crescent Town, Birchcliff, Cliffcrest, Scarborough Village, Kingston-Gallow, Woburn.
  • Major Assault: Jane-Finch, Jane-401, York, Downtown west & east, Lawrence-Kingston Road.
  • Minor Assault: Rexdale, Jane-FinchDownsview, Jane-401, Dufferin-Bloor, Parkdale, Don River-Gerrard, Danforth, Kingston Road, Woburn, Malvern
  • Mischief:  Riverdale, Cabbage Town, York, Morningside/Highland Creek.
  • Motor Vehicle Theft: Etobicoke, Scarborough (where car ownership rates are higher)
  • Robbery: Rexdale, Jane-Finch, Jane-Sheperd, York, Danforth, Woburn
  • Sexual Assault: Rexdale, Jane-Finch, Jane-401, High Park, Bloor-Danforth, Kingston Road
  • Theft: Dispersed along waterfront and main roads
  • Theft from Motor Vehicle: Pearson Airport, Willowdale, High Park, Downtown (west & east), Riverdale, University of Toronto, Scarborough

In contrast, the city’s financial district and the north end of Yonge Street were identified as areas with lower rates of violence. In essence, the central neighbourhoods of the city are higher-income and safer areas, while neighbourhoods with poor physical infrastructure and social resources were more likely to have higher levels of police involvement.

So, the final word probably best belongs to Canadian housing activist Michael Shapcott who wryly noted in his Twitter feed about the study, “Plenty of crime in rich, white neighbourhoods (fraud, tax cheating, ‘white collar’), it just doesn’t get policed/reported.”

(more…)


Happy Blogday, Belonging Community!

A year ago, I started this blog with the classic rookie mistake of naming my blog differently than the URL. Despite my zeal outweighing my wisdom, I knew that interesting ideas were worth sharing and that others might be interested in some of the same issues I am.

The blog began as an exploration of the idea of how we live together in urban communities and the structures and institutions within hemt that shape our lives.

Author Dionne Brand once described Toronto as “a city that has never happened before.” It’s a favourite quote of mine and what I set out to explore in each post.

Since then I’ve published 58 posts (and drafted another 30). Readership has built to an average 18 hits a day and a total of 3,600 through the year.

The top ten most popular posts have been:

Title Views
Toronto swimming pools: Class in session 220 More stats
The TDSB’s Learning Opportunity Index 193 More stats
Ethnic enclaves in Toronto, 2001 – 2006 119 More stats
Toronto Police Services Board ordered to 103 More stats
A white resident’s dilemma: gentrificati 98 More stats
Crime and social cohesion in Toronto nei 95 More stats
Roots of Violence report 91 More stats
Ontario School Information Finder 89 More stats
2006 Toronto demographics 88 More stats
Mapping tools add new dimensions to soci 78 More stats

I’ve had a lot of fun sharing what I have learned, whether at community meetings, the release of new research reports, or thoughts “from my front porch.” (And I have stayed up way too late!)

Thanks for a good year!


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