cities neighbourhoods housing

Rob Ford, Wayne Roberts, Hans Blumenfeld & Toronto's Mayoral Election

2010-11-06T14:50:00.011-04:00

This is the first and likely last time that the combination of Rob Ford, Wayne Roberts and Hans Blumenfeld will appear together in a title or even in a sentence. The reason they do starts in the late 1970s and ends with Toronto's recent municipal election.

In the late 1970s I was a graduate student living in Alexandra Park Housing Co-operative near Queen and Bathurst. Wayne Roberts was also living there. He had just finished his PhD.

Wayne Roberts is a well-known and highly respected food policy and environmental activist who writes a weekly column for Now Magazine.

After not seeing each other for more than a decade we were twice almost connected this year via the media. First by CBC's Metro Morning. I was about to leave for the CBC studio one morning to be interviewed and there was Wayne on-air being interviewed. I was hoping to see him but he was long gone by the time I was in the studio.

Then, this week, in his NOW Magazine column, Wayne mentioned something he recalls me saying long ago, probably in the early 1980s. He mentioned that during the municipal election campaign this year

"city-oriented activists tend to emphasize issues of the city, and not issues in the city, to use a distinction I learned many years ago from a remark tossed off by housing expert David Hulchanski."

He then provided one of the more insightful analyses of why the vast majority in the City's inner suburbs (mainly the former Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough) voted for Rob Ford for mayor, while most of the people in the former (pre-amalgamated) City of Toronto did not. His column is attached below.

That helpful insight, that we need to distinguish between problems in cities from problems of cities, is not mine but my dissertation supervisor, Hans Blumenfeld.

Hans Blumenfeld, one of the leading figures in 20th-century urban and regional planning, wrote the following:

"Poverty, unemployment, violent class and race conflicts, 'alienation,' and 'anomie' are certainly problems in the city , but they are not problems of the city. They are problems produced by the social, economic, and political structure of our society. They would exist whatever our pattern of settlement -- even if we, instead of congregating in metropolitan areas, all dispersed into small towns or hamlets. In fact, they do exist there. They are more visible where they are concentrated; this is all to the good, because recognition of a problem is the first step toward dealing with it." (Hans Blumenfeld, preface to the Canadian paperback edition of his The Modern Metropolis: Its Origins, Growth, Characteristics and Planning, Selected Essays (edited by P.D. Spreiregen, Harvest House, Montreal, 1971).

The key point here is that there are common problems faced by many Canadians, problems that have nothing to do with the City of Toronto's administration but with, as Blumenfeld notes, "the social, economic, and political structure of our society." With a population of 2.6 million, there is a concentration of people affected by macro-level economic and political policies and conditions.

Thus the unexpected happened in Toronto's mayoral election. The sections of the city that are still middle income and the much more numerous sections that are increasingly low and very low income (referred to as City #2 and City #3 in my "three cities" analysis of Toronto), voted together for Rob Ford.

The portion of the city that is wealthy and high income, as well as, in places, socially mixed, with a range of incomes (City #1), voted for other candidates, most of whom had detailed platforms about municipal issues -- the problems of Toronto.

This election, in large part, was likely not about municipal issues (problems of the city) but a reaction to how hard life has become living in an expensive city where all the obvious public and private sector investment, including use of municipal resources, is taking place in City #1. Yet municipal taxes and special fees keep going up.

Rob Ford was an almost accidental candidate for mayor. Most in the media and among the elite chattering class initially thought he was an odd-ball fringe candidate -- until the first major independent poll was released. He had no real platform other than to cut wasteful spending and save taxpayer money. He talked about traffic congestion -- a terrible problem particularly in the inner suburbs where transit service is poor and distances great. The more frequent rapid transit services (subways and streetcars) are mainly in City #1.

If polled, most voters could likely repeat the two main themes, and the only topics, Ford talked about during the campaign: stopping the waste and getting spending under control; and eliminating unnecessary taxes. This would, if feasible, help out folks being squeezed by the high cost of living in Toronto.

Given the conditions of our times, all the societal problems that manifest themselves in concentrated form in Toronto, Ford just sat back as so many of the alienated, the disenfranchised, and the angry, together with traditional hard line conservatives that form his base, parked their votes with him. He quickly became the populist candidate.

As Wayne Roberts concludes in his column, the issues of cities indeed require urgent political attention, but so do the issues in cities relating to overall social and economic well-being. Though these are the staples of federal and provincial politics they cannot be ignored at the local level -- the level at which they are "lived."

The Rod Ford administration is going to have four difficult years. Toronto has many problems, few of which he addressed during the campaign. His simple slogans that focused on the anger and resentment of voters will have little impact on societal problems -- the problems in the city that likely explain his electoral success this year.

Traffic will continue to get worse each of his four years in office; transit will not become much better (especially in City #2 and City #3 where the Premier has decided to postpone transit improvements); and any severe cuts in core city services will mainly hurt the part of the city that voted for him, where services are, for the most part, not very good to begin with.
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News
The dish on what’s eating populists
By Wayne Roberts
Now Magazine, Toronto
   Strange to think it, but the parallels between last week’s local election and the U.S. midterms are too close for comfort.
   The core issue in both, to my mind, is the fact that governments have moved anti-recession intervention right off the table, turning the vulnerable in the population into easy pickings for right-wing populism.
   In general, progressives are spending less time pushing public realm solutions because many have lost heart, much like Tea Partyites, that governments will or can deliver.
   In Toronto, for example, city-oriented activists tend to emphasize issues of the city, and not issues in the city, to use a distinction I learned many years ago from a remark tossed off by housing expert David Hulchanski.
   Poverty, hunger, unemployment and housing problems exist everywhere – the countryside, exurbs, suburbs and city alike. But problems of the city – traffic congestion, overcrowding, public transit, garbage – live in a non-parallel universe.
   Think of the airtime given to things like bike lanes or TTC issues and the flared-up resentment generated by them.
   Compare that to the political attention paid to problems in the city like runaway housing costs, high rents, joblessness and food insecurity.
   Social movements are in danger of losing sight of the in/of balance. That throws the entire political spectrum off-kilter and allows ultra-conservatives to lay claim to allegations that public money on the local level is being misspent. This is especially true in the burbs, where residents face more in the city problems.
   City money, in fact, only goes to less economically driven programs like swimming pools, the arts and equity strategies.
   It’s the feds and province that administer EI and job creation, and they’re doing it badly.
   As well, as is true in both our city and the U.S., many people who have progressive views on social and economic issues have conservative views on cultural and lifestyle questions – a paradox neo-conservatives are adept at exploiting.
   People who feel their freedoms are being curtailed while their socioeconomic needs are ignored and their culture and lifestyle dissed often become “angry white men” of both genders. Hello, Tea Party.
   If politics veer too far toward cultural and lifestyle issues wrongly branded “left,” “elitist” or both (as in the case of despised “latte liberals”), particularly in hard times, the populist right has a field day.
   People who feel economically forgotten are going to get triggered by all kinds of surprising issues and be sensitive to all kinds of disparities. Expect anger when it takes longer on a computer or touch-?phone to fill out a government application for a service than for a developer to gain approval for another condo that excludes families with moderate incomes.
   With Fox-like cunning, this political turmoil has been subject to manipulation because of the general distortion of government agendas since the 1990s on both sides of the border.
   Corporations have been all but deregulated. A foreign corporation bought one-?time steel giant Stelco in Hamilton, for example, and recently shut it down without a murmur. Foreign owners are at the point of buying up Canada’s potash reserves, crucial for soil fertility, without a peep. In such ways, governments give large corporations almost total licence.
   Instead of recognizing government as an equalizing force that can stand up to big corporations, many experience government as an intrusively regulating but not protective force. All the forms and procedures that have to be filled out and followed for simple matters, often by people with limited computer knowledge, are enough to make anyone join a Tea Party rebellion against thoughtless bureaucrats.
   Food multinationals do what they please when promoting junk, yet someone who wants to sell fruit and veggies or healthy snacks off a cart on the street gets the third degree in our own city. At some point, someone will scream like Elvis, “Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.” (In other words, “Don’t overtax my car.”)
   Regulation has come undone in its disproportion. What seem like personal and private behaviours of ordinary people are regulated, e.g. smoking, while corporate giants are allowed to pollute communities, often with government subsidies and tax breaks.
   If progressives are not livid about this unravelling of proportion, they shouldn’t be surprised when some on their right steal their thunder and get away with presenting themselves as populists instead of elitists.   The of issues of cities require urgent political attention, but so do the in issues of social and economic well-being – jobs, housing and food access being the most obvious, and once the staples of politics.
   That, I believe, is the cautionary tale of our local election and the U.S. midterms as well.
news@nowtoronto.com

Toronto’s 2010 Mayoral Election: A product of deep seated resentment about economic realities and trends?

2010-10-28T11:28:00.012-04:00

Two days after Toronto's municipal election Michael Valpy and Daniel Leblanc in the Globe and Mail (“Federal political parties take notes on Rob Ford’s strategy,” Oct. 27, 2010) made passing reference to what is perhaps the best explanation of the results of the mayoral election.

Rob Ford was able to tap into and hold onto a broad and deep vein of resentment and hostility arising from tough economic times for the vast majority of wage earners in the city.

Valpy and Leblanc wrote:

"political strategists were near-unanimous in discounting any ideological shift in Toronto’s electorate as the reason the right-wing Mr. Ford was catapulted into the top political job in Canada’s largest city. Rather they talked about hostility as the driving force behind his victory, a hostility produced by growing inequality in Canada and aimed at people seen by Mr. Ford’s supporters as the well-educated privileged elites commanding huge salaries in the marketplace while their own incomes have gone nowhere in the past quarter-century, their household debt has sharply increased and they’re sandwiched between looking after elders and paying off their children’s education and they can’t see any way to get ahead.”

One increasingly well known graph about income trends in Toronto is the one below which charts the decline of the number of Toronto neighbourhoods in which people have, on average, “middle incomes” (defined simply as people with individual incomes 20% above or below the average for the Toronto metropolitan area for each of the census years in the graph).

Toronto was once a middle income city. The post WWII trend was one of more and more households having incomes that were on average in the middle (thus the widespread use of the term “middle class").

This trend began to reverse in the mid-1970s. Now, instead of Toronto being a city with a vast majority of middle income neighbourhoods (66% in 1970) it is a city with a vast majority of low and very low income neighbourhoods (53%). The number of very high income neighbourhoods doubled over the same period (from 7% to 15%).

This is referred to as income polarization – the two poles (high and low) growing at the expense of the middle. This is no way to build a cohesive, inclusive city or society.

Perhaps, however, this is only a city of Toronto problem. Is the trend different in what is deemed to be the "middle class" municipalities surrounding the city (i.e., the "905" area, the outer suburbs)? A good question. The answer: no.

The matching graph for the outer suburbs (the census metropolitan area of Toronto minus the City of Toronto), shows the same trend. Middle income neighbourhoods comprised 61% of the outer suburbs in 2005, compared to 86% in 1970. Nearly all of the decline of the middle shows up as low income neighbourhoods (from 0% to 20%). The income polarization trend in the outer suburbs is the same as in the city.

Three Cities: How Toronto has become such an economically divided city; Housing advice for the next mayor & council

2010-10-15T12:21:00.008-04:00

Article by David Hulchanski in Spacing Magazine, Fall 2010

"Well, it is better to know this than not to know it." This was one of Mayor David Miller's observations a couple of years ago when he saw an early draft of the research into Toronto's "Three Cities."
This initiative highlights the fact that just over one million people, or about 43% of the city's population, live in what we call "City #3" – the once middle-income, mainly car-oriented and under serviced neighbourhoods of northern Etobicoke, parts of North York, and most of Scarborough that were first built in the 1950s but have been declining in average income and socio-economic status since the early 1970s.

As many commentators point out, Toronto is ethnically and culturally diverse. But much of this diversity is in City #3, where the population is two thirds non-white – compared to City #1, the city's wealthiest and primarilycentral neighbourhoods, which is 82% white. Over the past quarter century there has been a doubling in the number and a substantial geographic consolidation of the City #1 neighbourhoods. At the same time, the in-between city, City #2 – once a vast middle-income majority of Toronto – isshrinking in size as its neighbourhoods either filter upward or, mainly, filter downward in average income.

A major outcome of this shift in the city's social and economic landscape is the problem of more people – especially those who have to rent – not being able to afford adequate housing appropriate to the size of their families. Many of the city's renters live in overcrowded conditions. Half of the renters in City #3 are spending 30% or more of their income on rent. And yet the federal and provincial governments have no ongoing commitment to supplying additional social housing units or rent supplements.
The City's social housing waiting list includes 138,000 people – that's greater than the populations of Guelph, Brantford. or Peterborough. The waiting list includes 29,000 children and 12,000 single parents. Many thousands of people are homeless every night, either as "visible" homeless on the street and in emergency shelters, or as "hidden" homeless and at serious risk of losing their homes.Over 4,000 people in Toronto use overnight shelter beds and related daytime services. There is money spent to help maintain people in their unhoused state; much less is spent on keeping people from becoming unhoused or quickly rehousing them. These are well-known housing problems. Not much is currently being done about them, which is bad enough. On top of this, looming large (and tall!), is a housing problem most Torontonians still know little if anything about.

Toronto has more residential highrise buildings than any other city in North America, except for New York. Among these residential towers are 1,100 built between the late 1940s and early 1980s. They are mainly rental and house over 25% of the city's households: 280,000 units. Almost half of the city's rental housing stock is in these aging and often overcrowded buildings. Half of the households in City #3 live in high-rise apartments (compared to 30% in Cities #1 and #2).
With its limited funds, the City has established a small Tower Renewal program. It is the start of something that should be a major federally and provincially funded initiative. Most of the towers are in clusters, with unused land around them. A building rehab program with energy retrofits, including some additional development on the unused land, carried out as a grassroots community development initiative, with a job training component, all add up to community renewal – both physical and social.

Though it is indeed better to know than not know, there are growing housing- related social and economic trends that the new mayor and city council can only ignore at great peril. Toronto is a divided and increasingly polarized city, and there is nothing on the horizon to reverse this trend. The number of people facing housing quality and affordability problems is huge. It is a problem that is highly concentrated in neighbourhoods that urgently need investment and renewal.

The federal and provincial governments must be prodded by civic leadership into doing what they know they ought to be doing. All great cities need help with affordable housing, and there is no excuse for widespread homelessness. Mayor Miller initiated and promoted the Tower Renewal program. This is the key to addressing the growing divisions and the decline within the city. A ten-year major program would renew the aging rental stock, be a big economic stimulus, and produce many environmental benefits, remaking the post-war suburban landscapes into desirable places to live. Tower Renewal requires improved public transit in City #3. Of the TIC's subway stations, 60% are in City #1, and only 30% are in City #3 (mainly the Scarborough RI).

When the Premier announced that the Province would break its funding promise for implementation of the Transit City plan, it was not too surprising that it was the City #3 part of the plan was "postponed." Without improved transit it is difficult for those neighbourhoods to ever improve. Money buys choice. People with options stay away from poorly served neighbourhoods, leaving these landscapes for people who have little choice.

The segregation of the city by socioeconomic status and ethno-cultural origin need not continue. It is not inevitable. It can be slowed and reversed. The jurisdiction and financial capacity of the federal and provincial governments are sufficient to reverse the trend. A wealthy society can use its resources to make a difference. The City administration must make this task its focus – with its own limited resources and by seeking the necessary support from senior governments.

On day one, Toronto's new mayor will already have on hand an affordable housing plan (Housing Opportunities Toronto), the Tower Renewal initiative, the Transit City plan, and a priority neighbourhoods initiative in the inner suburbs (a joint effort with The United Way). These are key components of a complementary renewal strategy for the entire city with a focus on City #3. They are a nice legacy of the current mayor and council. These need to be implemented. They are not optional.

The invention of homelessness

2010-09-18T12:55:00.004-04:00

David Hulchanski, op-ed in Toronto Star, 18 September 2010

As of late 2009, the English language contained one million words, and new words are being added every day. With such abundance in the language, we tend to forget how powerful words can be, and that the names we give to ideas can shape our world view. Consider a word that we take for granted, but that has far-reaching implications. The word is homelessness.

A search of the New York Times historical database covering 1851 to 2005 reveals that the word “homelessness” was used in 4,755 articles, but 4,148 of them (87%) were published in the 20 years between 1985 and 2005. Before the 1980s, it is rare to find “homelessness” used to designate a social problem. What happened in that decade that made the difference?

In 1981, the United Nations announced that 1987 would be the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. The United Nations wanted to focus on the fact that so many people in less developed countries were unhoused. There was no mention of developed countries like

Canada

in that 1981 UN resolution. Moreover, the 1981 UN General Assembly resolution did not use the word “homelessness,” because the term as the name of a social problem was not in common use at the time. The 1981 UN resolution was intended todraw attention to the fact that many millions of households in developing countries had no housing. They were unhoused, homeless. They needed adequate housing.

But by 1987, the focus of the International Year had shifted to include homeless people in the developed nations of the world, including

Canada

. In that year, several academic and professional conferences focused on the growing number of unhoused people in

Canada

, not those in developing countries.

Before the 1980s, people in developed countries did not know what it was like to be unhoused. They had housing, even if that housing was in poor condition. Some transient single men in cities were referred to at times as “homeless.” But the term had a different meaning then.

For example, in 1960, a report by the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto called Homeless and Transient Men, defined a “homeless man” as one with few or no ties to a family group, who was thus without the economic or social support a family home provides. The men were homeless, not unhoused. They had housing, albeit poor-quality housing − rooming houses or accommodation provided by charities. But they had no home.

Canada at that time thus had homeless individuals, but no problem called “homelessness.”

The word “homelessness” came into common use in developed countries in the early and mid-1980s to refer to the problem of dehousing – the fact that an increasing number of people who were once housed in these wealthy countries were no longer housed.

Before the 1980s Canadian urban planners, public health officials, social workers and related professionals had focused on rehousing people into better housing and neighbourhoods. During the Depression and the Second World War, very little new housing was built and many people were living in poor-quality, aging, and overcrowded housing. After the war, Canadians revived the housing market, created a functioning mortgage system with government mortgage insurance, built social housing, and subsidized private-sector rental housing. About 20,000 social housing units were created every year following the 1973 amendments to the National Housing Act.

In introducing the 1973 housing legislation, the Minister of Urban Affairs − a federal ministry we no longer have today but which existed during most of the 1970s − asserted that our society has an obligation to see that all people are adequately housed. The Minister, Ron Basford, said, “When we talk … about the subject of housing, we are talking about an elemental human need – the need for shelter, for physical and emotional comfort in that shelter. When we talk about people’s basic needs – the requirements for survival – society and the government obviously have an obligation to assure that these basic needs of shelter are met.”

Undoubtedly we would not have the social problem of homelessness today if this philosophy had continued through the 1980s and 1990s to the present day. By the 1980s, however,

Canada

had a social problem that was and has ever since been called homelessness.

The cutbacks in social housing and related programs began in 1984. In 1993 all federal spending on the construction of new social housing was terminated and in 1996 the federal government further removed itself from low-income housing supply by transferring responsibility for most existing federal social housing to the provinces.

Over the past two decades we relied on an increasingly deregulated society in which the “genius of market forces” would meet our needs, in which tax cuts, made possible by cuts to programs that largely benefited poor and average-income people, were supposed to “trickle down” to benefit those in need. The competitive economy required, we were told, wage suppression and part-time jobs with no benefits.

By the early 1980s countries like

Canada

needed a new term for a new social problem. The word homelessness filled the gap. Adding the suffix “−ness” turns the adjective homeless into an abstract noun. As such, it allows readers and listeners to imagine whatever they want. It tosses all sorts of problems into one handy term.

In short, we have not used the word “homelessness” for very long. It is a catch-all term for a host of serious social and economic policy failures. Its widespread usage reflects what has happened to Canadian society – the way we organize who gets what, and our failure to have in place systems for meeting basic human needs in a universal, inclusive fashion.

--------------------------

The electronic book on Canadian research on homelessness, Finding Home,
is available on the Homeless Hub.

Report documents the extent of housing subsidy discrimination between homeowners ($15.8 billion annually), private renters ($1.3 billion), and social housing ($2 billion); Most of Canada’s housing-related subsidies do not assist those in need

2010-09-11T12:22:00.019-04:00

A report, Government Subsidies to Homeowners versus Renters in Ontario and Canada, by housing economist Frank Clayton, estimates the size of the imbalance in the way that owners and renters are treated by Canada’s various housing subsidy programs. Housing-related subsidies include both direct budgetary expenditures and tax benefits (commonly referred to as tax expenditures).

When any household seeks a place to live there are two basic starting decisions: to own (buy a house or condo), or rent. Canada’s small social housing sector, about 5% of all housing, means that 95% of Canadian households must seek housing in the private sector – either buy a house or condo, or rent from the private rental sector.

A housing system ought to be neutral in terms of subsidies provided to owners and renters. Why should one form of housing tenure be more subsidized, and thereby favoured, than the other? Many households have no choice but to rent because they do not have a down payment and/or do not qualify for a mortgage (their income is too low; their job is not secure enough, etc.).

The report estimates the size of the imbalance in the way that owners and renters are treated. It carefully documents the magnitude of each of the subsidies provided by the federal government, the Ontario government, and municipalities in Ontario to homeowners and private renters.

In terms of the $8.9 billion of total annual housing-related subsidies for both owners and private renters in Ontario in 2008/09 the federal government providedthe largest share , $6.6 billion or 73.7%, followed by the Province of Ontario, $1.7 billion or 18.5%, and municipalities, $697 million or 7.8%. Most of this taxpayer money, 93.7% (or $8.4 billion) went to homeowners while the remaining 6.3% (or $562 million) assisted renters in the private rental sector. This is, on average, an annual $2,629 subsidy per Ontario homeowner.

For Canada total federal spending for homeowners and private renters was $17.1 billion in 2008/09, 92.6% (or $15.8 billion) assisted homeowners while the remaining 7.4% (or $1.3 billion) went to private renters. Owners received an average of $1,823 in subsidies per household while private renters received an average of $308 per household.

“The split in subsidies by tenure,” Clayton notes, “is the reverse of the disparity in income – the largest portion of subsidies went to households with the highest average incomes in 2008/09.” Homeowners have average incomes that are double those of renters. In Ontario, for example, the 2008 average household income for homeowners was $93,000 while the average household income of private renters was $45,500. For Canada: $91,000 and $44,000.

Why should homeowners receive about six times the annual subsidy that renters receive? We have no answer from any level of government. The system of private sector housing-related subsidies evolved over time and reflects a cultural and political bias in favour of owners.

What about social housing?

These ownership and private rental housing subsidies are separate from the category of subsidies that support non-market social housing (public housing, non-profit housing, and non-profit co-operatives). Social housing is targeted at lower income households who cannot, or have difficulty, accessing and affording housing in the private sector.

Given the approximately $17 billion in annual federal government subsidies for homeowners and private renters, how much does the federal government allocate to social housing – helping lower income households in need, households who cannot own or access private sector renting? It is just under $2 billion. This is the subsidy bill for all federal government assisted social housing ever built in Canada – the approximately 5% of Canada’s housing stock that is not market housing (about 550,000 units).

All these expenditure figures come from the report by Frank Clayton which includes a detailed appendix that provides a great deal of helpful information about each individual housing spending program and each tax expenditure provision. The study was commissioned by the Federation of Rental-Housing Providers of Ontario and the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations.

Clayton provides two conclusions:

· “Housing subsidies in Ontario and Canada encompassing both direct spending programs and tax expenditure provisions massively favour private homeowners over private renters; and

· “This favouritism to homeowners occurs even though private renters on average have household incomes about one-half the average income of homeowners.”

This report is important in the context of the nation’s aging rental housing stock and the fact that very little new rental housing, market or non-market, is being built.

This is not a new problem, but it is the most serious and the most ignored housing problem the country faces. What the report demonstrates is that there is no such thing as a pure private sector in housing. The one housing tenure that ought to be able to stand on its own, ownership housing, is the most heavily subsidized.

There is nothing wrong with supporting the home ownership sector. The approximately 65% of Canadian households that own their own home know that the system works reasonable well for them.

What homeowners generally do not know is the subsidy information provided in the Clayton report. Government plays a major role in not only subsidizing ownership housing but maintaining a stable mortgage system, including public sector mortgage insurance. Mortgage insurance enables many to become homeowners earlier (i.e., they do not need a 25% down payment to get a mortgage if they insure their mortgage against default via the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporations mortgage insurance program.

It is not uncommon to hear complaints from many voters, including homeowners, that they do not support housing subsidies – a reference to social housing subsidies – not knowing they are the major beneficiary of housing subsidies.

The difficulties in Canada’s private rental sector are not limited to the lack of subsides for renters relative to home owners. It is also the termination in 1984 of direct subsidies for the construction of new rental housing.

From the late 1940s to the 1984 decision by the Mulroney government to terminate private sector rental supply subsidies, most private sector rental housing was built with government subsidies: the limited-dividend program, 1940s to 1970s; the Assisted Rental Program, mid-1970s; the MURB (multiple unit residential building) tax shelter program, late 1970s; and the Canada Rental Supply Program, early 1980s.

Given that renters have on average half the income of homeowners private sector rental housing cannot be built profitably nor do many tenants have enough money to support the rents that would be required to fully upgrade the aging rental stock they live in.

A range of public financial support, direct spending and tax expenditures, for both private and social rental housing and its residents is required. There is no choice. It is provided for homeowners but not or renters.

In homelessness, diversity does not mean complexity; Another ten chapters added to Finding Home eBook

2010-09-09T13:04:00.004-04:00

by Philippa Campsie & David Hulchanski

When you hear the word “homelessness,” what comes to mind? If you are like most people, you probably think of the men who sleep on the hot-air grates in downtown Toronto. That is the image that so often accompanies media stories about homelessness.

Several things about that image hide the reality of homelessness for many Canadians. The first part is the person’s gender and age. There are many homeless women and children too, although in their case it seldom takes the form of sleeping on the street. That is another problem with the image – it equates homelessness with street life. In reality, homelessness can take multiple forms, including moving from shelter to shelter or “couch-surfing” (that is, staying with friends when one loses one’s own home).

The image usually features a solitary figure, which obscures the fact that entire families may become homeless. Indeed, some of those who appear to be alone may simply be separated from their families by homelessness. Finally, the setting (downtown in a big city) is a cliché. Homelessness exists in towns and cities of all sizes, in the suburbs and in rural areas, and in all the provinces of Canada.

Last year, we helped edit an online book collecting the best Canadian research available on homelessness. The thirty chapters encompassed the experiences of women and their children, Aboriginal people, frail seniors, youth, immigrants (some of whom become homeless shortly after arriving in Canada). They included research on food insecurity, social stigma, moneymaking strategies, child custody, the physical and mental health problems of homeless people, and the intersection of homelessness and crime, as well as promising efforts to reduce homelessness or alleviate some of its effects.

Did we cover the full spectrum of the problem? Not even close. This week we added another ten chapters to fill the many gaps.

One important new chapter is about homelessness among women in Canada’s North, a particularly urgent issue. Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut share a high cost of living, limited employment opportunities, underdeveloped infrastructure, and a shortage of social services. Women who lose their housing have few places to turn. Yet we hear very little about their plight in the rest of Canada.

Another chapter deals with homelessness among Aboriginal peoples in the Prairie provinces. This group spends a lot of time on the move, and many go back and forth between urban centres that offer work, services, and a wider range of housing options, and their home communities, which offer a connection to family and traditions. Yet in neither place are these people completely at home.

A third chapter looks at homeless women in small cities and towns in Ontario, social isolation, low-quality social services, and weak public transit infrastructure create barriers to seeking help.

We also consider the ethics of research into homelessness. It is important to understand and communicate the experiences of people who often have no voice in society, but it is equally important not to appropriate their voices. Many of the chapters contain the words of homeless people, men and women, young and old, describing their stories and tryng to make sense of an arduous life in a hostile world.

In presenting these diverse perspectives on homelessness, we hope to remind Canadians that homeless has not disappeared, even though the recent economic downturn has meant that many people are too worried about their own futures to pay attention to the plight of those even less fortunate.

At the same time, we stress that although homelessness affects a diverse group of people, it is not a complex problem. Yes, you read that correctly: it is not a complex problem.

After all these years of research and policy analysis and documenting the lived experience of those affected and those who provide support services, we know what the causes of the problem are. That means we know what the solutions are.

When individuals or families run into serious difficulty in one or more of the three key areas that support a decent standard of living, they may find themselves unhoused and potentially on a downward spiral. The three areas are: housing, income, and support services. Groups already facing inequities, discrimination, and violence are often the first to face difficulties in these areas when the economic tide changes.

An adequate standard of living means not only that good-quality health care is available to everyone, but also access to adequate housing, employment at a living wage, and essential support services must also be available for everyone, not just those who can afford them – and that systemic inequities are addressed in social policy.

We know what we need. We need social protections that prevent people from becoming unhoused. We need programs that ensure that no one will be unhoused for more than a very brief period should a crisis of some sort arise. We need policies that correct historic and systemic inequities, and that provide adequate, affordable and secure housing, an adequate income or income support when needed, and adequate support services if these are required (for addictions, mental health, and so on). Only then will we begin to solve the problem of homelessness.

Finding Home is available on the Homeless Hub.

Affordable Housing: Global Trends -- a presentation by Christine Whitehead

2010-08-25T17:02:00.003-04:00

For a very clear and helpful review of the notion of “housing affordability” see the PowerPoint presentation by Christine Whitehead (professor of economics, LSE & Cambridge) – from a keynote address at a recent housing conference of the Asia Pacific Network for Housing Research.

· What is meant by affordable housing?

· Rationale for government intervention

· Main policy approaches

· Major factors determining policy trends

· Major global trends: privatisation; targeting; contributions towards housing from land values; rehabilitation and redevelopment; tenure

TRANSIT CITY: More Broken Promises – McGuinty Fails Toronto Transit this Time

2010-08-20T13:24:00.013-04:00

Mayor Miller is correct when he refers to the Ontario government’s recent budget decision to postpone $4 billion in GTA transit expansion as “disgraceful,” “thoughtless” and “beyond short-sighted,” a decision that makes “absolutely no economic sense” and “it makes no sense from a social policy perspective.”

This most recent broken promise, however, should not be a surprise.

The Ontario Liberal party, ever since the inexperienced dark horse candidate for leader surprised even himself in not only winning his party’s leadership but winning majority governments with a minority of the vote, promises anything at anytime to anyone if it serves the moment. This is an easy and even natural outcome of a broken electoral system – untouchable majority governments put in place by a minority of voters. Decisions don’t have to make sense from an economic or social policy perspective.

The greatest concentration of the greatest contributors to the future of Toronto's and Ontario's prosperity live in the poorest 40% of Toronto's neighbourhoods. Very few of these 1.1 million people live near rapid transit. This is close to 10% of the province’s population.

Many are starting their lives, and raising their families as new Canadians. All are struggling to make ends meet in this expensive city, filling most of the low-paying jobs that are essential, but not appreciated. They clean our offices, maintain our hotels, stock the shelves in our stores, and prepare the food and clean the dishes in our restaurants, in order to raise themselves and their children as good and productive citizens.

Commuting times on busses that are overstuffed in rush hour and infrequent the rest of the day take a huge toll on both family time and employment opportunities. Fostering resentment in this and the next generation is not a good way to build a great city.

In Toronto, all you need in order to have easy access to our subway and streetcar system, and many other important public services, is enough money to live in the expensive housing in the well served neighbourhoods.

The 1.1 million of the city's 2.5 million people who do not have the range of neighbourhood choices that money buys, live in the parts of the city that are left over. These areas were generally built after the 1940s on the assumption that all families would have a good paying job and a car, if not two cars.

In the last census, the average household income in that 40% of the city was one third below the GTA average household income. About one in five households have after-tax incomes that are below the statistics Canada low income cut-off. Only one third of the population is white in “that” part of the city, compared to 82% in the high income and best serviced 20% of the city’s neighbourhoods.

The continued failure to adequately serve 40% of the city and about 10% of the province’s population is a bold statement by our political leaders as to who matters and who does not.

That 40% gets promises when it serves some short-term political situation, including a poverty reduction strategy that is going nowhere. They also get some excellent reports that take a long time to produce and then are ignored.

First and foremost among these reports is the five volumes produced by the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence, a commission Premier McGuinty appointed a few months prior to the last election to get that issue of the election agenda.

“Today, there is simply no reason to accept that poverty should mean fewer and poorer parks, recreation facilities, community centres, arts opportunities, local stores or public services, nor should it mean inferior public transit service.”

Who can disagree with this statement from McGuinty’s commissioned review, ably led by Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling? Yet, what is being done? Very little. And now the promised improved transit will be delayed indefinitely.

“Transit planners should take into account the impacts of isolation on youth and the impacts of long and difficult commutes on parents struggling to find time to spend with their children.” Well, transit planners have done this. We have the Transit City plan and, until Thursday, the promise to fund it.

“When services are scattered and transit options few, people with limited resources, many needs and little time are actively discouraged from accessing them, whether for themselves or their families.” None of this is rocket science.

Our 19th century electoral system, called first past the post, allows a minority of voters to put in place majority governments. This is not democracy.

Mike Harris, elected by a minority of voters, unfortunately for many, kept his promises. Dalton McGuinty, also in majority power by a minority of voters, unfortunately for many, does not keep his promises.

Both know how to work the undemocratic electoral system in ways that allow for significant needs to be left unaddressed, something proportional representation, used by most democratic countries, makes difficult. More voices are at the table and they have a greater opportunity to be listened to. Fairer compromises can be reached.

Our problem, affecting the future prosperity and great potential of Toronto, is the lack of effective democracy which results in the lack of leaders who will serve all residents. One of the world’s great cities is unable to make and finance decisions it knows are in the best interest of all its residents. A system that allows one politician to promise anything and then at anytime to ignore the needs of so many with no input, negotiation or recourse, is broken.

UofT EDGE Magazine: Goodbye, middle-income neighbourhoods -- Profile of the Neighbourhood Change Community University Research Alliance

2010-07-10T13:43:00.006-04:00

Goodbye, middle-income neighbourhoods
by Paul Fraumeni

Social work professor and housing expert David Hulchanski and his research team at U of T’s Cities Centre (formerly the Centre for Urban & Community Studies) woke the world up to a different view of Toronto in 2007 when the centre released a report called The Three Cities within Toronto: Income polarization among Toronto’s neighbourhoods, 1970-2000.

The Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail created special sections based on the elaborate maps Hulchanski’s team had drawn to indicate how the number of middle-income neighbourhoods had decreased over 30 years, only to be replaced by a growing number of low-income areas mainly — and surprisingly — in the city’s inner suburbs.

“People now have a much better idea of what is happening in this city in terms of the widening income gap and neighbourhood polarization by income and ethnicity,” says Hulchanski, who adds that similar changes are happening in large Canadian cities like Vancouver and Montreal.

“Our goal was to illustrate how change over three decades in social and economic policies, and the economy in general, had played out on the ground. We ourselves were shocked at what we saw. I can still remember our data analyst bringing out a map and saying, ‘Look at this!’ The number of the city’s middle-income neighbourhoods haddeclined from 66 per cent in the early 1970s to 29 per cent in 2005. You always expect some up and down, but to have that kind of consistent decrease was amazing.”

Hulchanski credits a five-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council with enabling the researchers to delve deeply into the analysis. The multidisciplinary nature of the team from the Cities Centre and partnership with St. Christopher House, a Toronto social service agency, were also instrumental in providing a rich research perspective.

What’s the next step? “Do something about this. Research by itself doesn’t make for social change. But this is the kind of information policy makers can use to make urban living more equitable for more citizens.”

In fact, Hulchanski can already see positive social innovation happening to counter the findings of Three Cities with Toronto Mayor David Miller’s Transit City plan, the Tower Renewal initiative and his emphasis on making Toronto one inclusive city. “He is pursuing ideas and policies that are opposite from the three cities trend that we identified.It’s a very positive way of reacting to our analysis.” – Paul Fraumeni, UofT Research Services

New Research Grant Awarded: Neighbourhood Trends in the Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver City-Regions, 1971 to 2006

2010-04-25T14:08:00.013-04:00

In April 2010 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) awarded a Public Outreach Grant to the research team working on the Neighbourhood Change Community University Research Alliance.

SSHRC's Public Outreach Grant program is designed to mobilize and leverage existing and ongoing research for a range of audiences beyond academia. Through this funding SSHRC encourages researchers to find effective ways to disseminate, transfer, exchange, synthesize and broker research results to wider audiences.

The research team is lead by professors Damaris Rose (INRS, Montreal), David Hulchanski (Toronto) and David Ley (UBC, Vancouver).

SUMMARY of the Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver Outreach / Dissemination Proposal

This proposal is designed to inform a broad audience about our ongoing research in documenting and explaining changes in neighbourhoods in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas – Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. These changes are the result of many combined forces, including globalization, economic shifts, public policies, gentrification, and immigration.

They affect people and the neighbourhood institutions and services they use and depend on, but most people do not fully understand why the changes are occurring, or what they mean. Neighbourhood change affects who lives where, the type and quality of housing, what businesses prosper in certain places and why others fail, the quality of schools, the distribution of social and municipal services, and access to other parts of the city. In short, everything connected with living in a specific neighbourhood.

We have studied these changes in three Canadian cities over a span of 35 years, using census data, as well as many other sources of information. We have produced a series of maps that illustrate changes in everything from income distribution to housing to immigrant settlement, supported by reports and presentation scripts that are intended to explain the changes to other academics. But since the changes have immediate effects for about a third of all Canadians (the combined population of the Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver city-regions, often referred to as “second tier” global cities), we need to explain them to a much broader audience. Furthermore, these changes have implications for policy and government programs and the allocation of resources, and decision makers and their staff at all levels of government need to know about them.

In particular, we are concerned about the divisions and increasing inequities among neighbourhoods, about deepening poverty in some areas and concentrated wealth in others, and the decrease in the number of middle-income households and middle-income neighbourhoods in all three cities. We have already achieved some success in disseminating our findings about Toronto in Toronto newspapers, but we have not yet started to raise awareness in Montreal and Vancouver, and we need to do much more to ensure that policy makers understand these trends and their implications for Canadian society.

We are proposing a year-long effort to make our findings widely known in the three affected cities, by transforming our academic products into plain-language publications, presentations, web-based materials, and information packaged for use in various ways by the media. We also plan to hold public events to raise awareness, and to develop policy proposals to address some of the concerns we raise.

The project includes community outreach and working with community partners to spread information through their networks and communications vehicles.

Rationale for this public outreach dissemination proposal

“Until we begin to face up to the reality of rising inequality and its geographic expression, no solution will be possible.” (Massey, 1996:410)

In their book on urban trends in the era of globalizing cities, Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen ask, “Is there a new spatial order in cities?” In answering no, they note that cities have always been divided in various ways, but conclude with the warning that today these “changes may be summarized as an increase in the strength of divisions in the city and the inequality among them.” Marcuse and van Kempen suggest that we can expect to see:

· “strengthened structural spatial divisions among the quarters of the city, with increased inequality and sharper lines of division among them;

· “wealthy quarters, housing those directly benefiting from increased globalization, and the quarters of the professionals, managers, and technicians that serve them, growing in size and in the defensiveness of the walls erected against others;

· “quarters of those excluded from the globalizing economy, with their residents more and more isolated and walled in; …

· “continuing formation of immigrant enclaves of lower-paid workers both within and outside the global economy, with a continuing and often increasing emphasis on ethnic solidarity within them;

· “a more integrated and much larger regionalization of economic activity, with new outer centers of activity increasing in importance;

· “ghettoization of the excluded, developed in the United States, but a visible tendency in many other countries.” (Marcuse & van Kempen, 2000:272)

-----------------------

Marcuse, P. & van Kempen, R. (2000). Conclusion: A changed spatial order. In P. Marcuse & R. van Kempen (Eds.), Globalizing cities: A new spatial order? (pp. 249-275). Oxford: Blackwell.

Massey, D. (1996). The age of extremes: Concentrated affluence and poverty in the twenty-first century. Demography, 33(4), 395 - 412.

Housing as a Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction: Homeownership ideology & self-interest trump responsible housing for low-income households

2008-12-21T10:26:00.047-05:00

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing...” -- Paul Krugman, NY Times, Dec. 22, 2008

'What an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality... Everyone has one. You have to - to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not."
-- Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, from 1987 to 2006, at the Congressional House oversight and government reform committee on 23 October 2008

Who would think that housing speculation, aided by government subsidies and tax policies, would be one of the "financial weapons of mass destruction"?

Something so simple as ensuring that all people have an adequate place to live became a financial weapon, a means for some to get rich quick, for some to collect votes, and for some to collect consulting fees for spouting conventional wisdom.

There is no "magic bullet" financial formula to close the gap between the cost of adequate housing and the low incomes of many households. Housing is expensive. There is no such thing as cheap housing -- unless it is unfit and in declining unsafe neighbourhoods.

Given that housing is expensive, why pursue policies that make housing even more expensive - measures that inflate house values by encouraging speculation?

All warnings were ignored. The unfettered, free-market ideologues, the money-grubbers and

the ignorant in positions of power and influence went with the conventional wisdom of not only relying upon but also deregulating housing and related financial markets.

Encouraging homeownership is popular and profitable (for some). Advocates for directly helping low-income households were ignored. These "fuzzy thinking folks" favour the "inefficient" and "failed" method of providing housing subsidies directly to those in need rather than relying on market trickle down.

To save money Liberal Fiance Minister Paul Martin ended the social housing supply programs in 1993, a move the defeated Tories promised to do. His party promised to do the opposite. Since then, the neoliberal market ideology ruled in a knee-jerk fashion.

One Canadian example: In his September 30, 2002 column, “For rent: a tired out policy, no view, high price,” the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson complained that the federal government was about to spend some money on social housing. “Saints preserve us. The feds want to get back into public housing… the lessons of past failures forgotten.”

What is the answer for Canada? Follow the United States.

“So how should the state help these people? Build an apartment building, and charge them below-market rents? That may be best for a politician's ego, but not for the people in need.
“They need to find a way to buy a home, to start building equity and financial independence. They need tax credits or loan guarantees. One idea might be a federal program compelling banks to issue mortgages without down payments, amortized over 40 years, say, instead of 25, with Ottawa guaranteeing the mortgage in its early years.”

Fortunately, Canada did not follow the United States, though it did not provide much new social housing either.

Instead of trapping people in house payments they cannot afford in poor quality neighbourhoods in which people with options choose not to live, as in the United States, new social housing housing directly meets needs and helps build communities and neighbourhoods.

The crucial problem with social housing, which its opponents do not use in their policy arguments, is that it is non-market housing. No one can speculate with it or play financial games with it. It is simple. Build it and people live in it. Its purpose is to house people, not to be a financial investment -- other than as a long term societal investment in infrastructure, as good places to live for those who canot afford what the market has to offer.

The United States increased its homeownership rate temporarily by more than five percent, with Canadian government and private sector actors encouraging similar policies. It did so by turning every conceivable aspect of the house into a market commodity.

The New York Times is publishing a series of helpful analyses on the financial collapse. One conclusion is that during the Bush years all warning signs were ignored in order to push the deregulation let-the-market-alone ideology. In addition, the warnings about giving special tax breaks to homeowners, as Clinton did in 1997, proved to be correct.

Every step down the road to the financial collapse was taken in spite a clear warnings to the contrary. Canada only went part way down the road and may escape some of the worst outcomes.

(1) NY Times: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire

"Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.... But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure...

"Today, millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, homeownership rates are virtually no higher than when Mr. Bush took office, Fannie and Freddie are in a government conservatorship, and the bailout cost to taxpayers could run in the trillions." NY Times, December 20, 2008

In June 2002, President Bush unveiled a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million. Instead of directly engaging in a prograam to assist lower income people his administration relied on market incentives and special mortgages, such as no money down and adjusable rate mortgages. This was during a period in which the incomes of most families remained relatively stagnant and house prices skyrocketed. We now know the outcome.

(2) NY Times: Tax Break May Have Helped Cause Housing Bubble

“Tonight, I propose a new tax cut for homeownership that says to every middle-income working family in this country, if you sell your home, you will not have to pay a capital gains tax on it ever — not ever.”

This was Bill Clinton at the 1996 Democratic Convention, making a campaign promise to counter a tax cut proposal of his opponent.

The housing tax break, exempting most home sales from capital gains taxes, was approved by Congress in 1997. It did not apply to other investments such as stocks or bonds, which were all taxed at rates of up to 20 percent.

This special tax treatment of the nation's housing stock exphasized the house as a investment vehicle. Again, we now know the outsome.

By itself, the change in the tax law did not cause the housing bubble, economist say. Several other factors — a relaxation of lending standards, a failure by regulators to intervene, a sharp decline in interest rates and a collective belief that house prices could never fall — probably played larger roles.But many economists say that the law had a noticeable impact, allowing home sales to become tax-free windfalls.

A recent study of the provision by an economist at the Federal Reserve suggests that the number of homes sold was almost 17 percent higher over the last decade than it would have been without the law.

Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel laureate and economics professor at George Mason University, has said the tax law change was responsible for “fueling the mother of all housing bubbles.”

By favoring real estate, the tax code pushed many Americans to begin thinking of their houses more as an investment than as a place to live. It helped change the national conversation about housing. Not only did real estate look like a can’t-miss investment for much of the last decade, it was also a tax-free one.

Together with the other housing subsidies that had already been in the tax code — the mortgage-interest deduction chief among them — the law gave people a motive to buy more and more real estate. Lax lending standar and low interest rates then gave people the means to do so. NY Times, December 18,2008

Toronto: Poor city beside rich city

2008-11-20T17:27:00.004-05:00

PAUL LACHINE/NEWSART

The now well-documented rise in income inequality, income polarization and ethnocultural and skin colour segregation are city-destroying trends, writes David Hulchanski.

Loss of middle-income jobs creates urban map with swathes of poverty and pockets of wealth

By David Hulchanski, op-ed in Toronto Star, Nov 20, 2008

"We heard as well about parents whose struggle to hold down two or three jobs leaves them with no time or energy to parent, of youth being humiliated by the obviousness of their poverty, of the impact of precarious and substandard housing on their ability to study and learn and engage with friends, and about the numerous other daily stresses of living on the margins of a prosperous society." – Review of the Roots of Youth Violence, Vol. 1, p. 31.

We learned last week that among the roots of youth violence is the lack of good jobs – jobs that support a family, jobs that support an average lifestyle, jobs that support good quality housing. Though we already knew this, as a society we need to stop moving in the opposite direction.

It wasn't too long ago that our language did not include terms like "good jobs," "bad jobs" or "the working poor." How could you work and be poor?

Many people today are working more than full-time and are poor. They have no choice but to live in the growing number of very poor neighbourhoods. Money buys choice. Many neighbourhoods are becoming poor in the sense that most of the residents are living in poverty, and poor in the sense that housing, public services and transit access are all inferior relative to the rest of the city.

The growing polarization between rich and poor is happening in part because of the loss of average, middle-income jobs.

There used to be far fewer concentrations of disadvantage in Toronto. In the early 1970s about two-thirds of the City of Toronto's neighbourhoods (66 per cent) were middle-income – within 20 per cent of the average individual in-come of the metropolitan area. By 2005, the middle income group of neighbourhoods had declined to less than one-third (29 per cent).

The trend is the same in the communities around the city's boundaries – the 905 area. The number of middle-income neighbourhoods declined by 25 per cent, from 86 per cent to 61 per cent, during the same period. Now 20 per cent of the neighbourhoods in the 905 area have very low average individual incomes, compared to none in 1970.

This income polarization – the decline of the middle group with growth in the two extreme poles – is not only a general trend among Toronto's population, but it also is the basis of where we live.

The City of Toronto is now divided into increasingly distinct zones. One zone of tremendous wealth and prosperity, about 20 per cent of the city, is located mainly along the Yonge corridor and stretching east and west along Bloor and Danforth. Average household income was $170,000 in 2005, 82 per cent of the population is white, only 4 per cent are recent immigrants (arriving 2001 to 2006), and only 2 per cent are black. Some of these neighbourhoods are more white and had fewer foreign-born residents in 2005 than in 1995.

In contrast, there is a huge zone of concentrated disadvantage. It is still located in part in the traditional inner-city neighbourhoods, but now is also in the inner suburbs, the car-oriented areas built during the 1960s and 1970s. This is 40 per cent of the city, about 1.1 million people. Close to one-third of residents live in poverty (are below the low-income cut-off measure used by the federal government). Only 34 per cent are white, 15 per cent are recent immigrants, and 12 per cent are black.

Federal and provincial economic policies, while seemingly abstract and high-level, play themselves out on the ground in our neighbourhoods. Paying a growing segment of the population wages that do not support individuals, let along families, at a basic standard of living and a fundamental level of dignity is not sustainable.

The now well-documented rise in income inequality, income polarization and ethnocultural and skin colour segregation are city-destroying trends. They are trends produced by commission and omission, by public and private sector decisions.

We need to use our regulatory power for the common good to focus on improving the labour market through measures like a living wage and providing people with a voice in working conditions via a fairer path to unionization. One-sided policy-making is not only generating greater disadvantage, it is destroying the city as a great place to live and work. Nothing is trickling down. The city is increasingly segregating itself as the social distance between rich and poor increases.

Immigrants are arriving in a very different economy than they did 30 and 40 years ago. A recent Statistics Canada study concludes, for example, "that the wage gap between newly hired employees and other employees has been widening over the past two decades," the "relative importance of temporary jobs has increased substantially among newly hired employees," and that compared with "the early 1980s, fewer male employees are now covered by a registered pension plan." In short, policies have allowed fewer jobs to pay a living wage with good benefits.

This did not happen by accident.

It is not only possible but essential that we have an economy with good jobs with at least a minimum living wage for all. We need public policies that support the goals of a just and inclusive society, and we have to ensure that the use of political power benefits the common good. These are key goals of the Good Jobs Coalition and form the agenda for Saturday's Good Jobs Summit. They are essential to reversing the city-destroying trends at work in Toronto today.

David Hulchanski is a University of Toronto professor and author of the report The Three Cities within Toronto. This is one of a series of essays created for the Good Jobs Summit, which takes place Nov. 22 in Toronto.

www.goodjobscoalition.ca

Toronto’s Persistent Neighbourhood Polarization Trend: One-third of neighbourhoods on a 25-year income spiral, 9% going up, 25% going down

2008-11-10T10:28:00.003-05:00

by David Hulchanski and Richard Maaranen, Cities Centre, University of Toronto, November 2008

One-third of the City of Toronto’s neighbourhoods (census tracts) have a consistent pattern of either increasing or decreasing in average individual income over the past 25 years compared to the Toronto area average. This trend leads to the creation of more higher income and more lower income neighbourhoods, at the expense of average or middle-income neighbourhoods.

For PDF of map, click here.

On the way up.

Nine percent of Toronto’s census tracts have been increasing in average individual income. These 46 areas are joining or have joined the ranks of the city’s higher income areas. Most are also located adjacent to Toronto’s already higher income neighbourhoods – a further clustering and consolidation of a demographic that is not only financially well of, but also mainly white with a relatively small share of Toronto’s celebrated ethnocultural diversity.

On the way down.

Many more neighbourhoods, however, 128 census tracts (25% of the city), have been consistently declining in average individual income for the two and half decades. These formerly poor and middle-income areas are now much poorer. Most are in the car-oriented inner suburbs built in the 1950s to the 1970s. These areas are mainly and increasingly non-white with a disproportionate share of newcomers.

Still in the middle.

Two-thirds of the city’s neighbourhoods (341 census tracts) do not have a persistent direction of change but many are still better off or worse off now compared to 25 years ago. Of these, 88 are 10% or more better off in 2005 than 1980 (17% of the City) and 130 are 10% or more worse off over the same period (25% of the City). Relative stability, that is, income is neither 10% higher or lower in 2005 than 1980, only occurred in the remaining 123 census tracts (24% of the City).

The map shows only persistent change among Toronto’s census tracts over the past 25 years. It is not a map of rich and poor areas. It is a map of change.

What is significant, in addition to the fact that fully one-third of the city has a consistent upward or downward income trajectory over such a long period, is that there is a high degree of geographic concentration within the trend. The pattern is not random. Wealthy and poor areas are consolidating. Those who have choice – enough money to choose their neighbourhood, are abandoning parts of the city.

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Note on Method

How was the change calculated? The map is based on an analysis of census average individual income for five census years (1981, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006).

For each census tract in each of the five years, the extent to which the census tract’s average individual income was above or below the Toronto CMA average was calculated. We use the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) average rather than the City of Toronto average as an income baseline because the urban labour and housing market has grown much larger than the City itself over the past 25 years. In addition, there is very little difference between the CMA and City average individual income.

Census Tracts that were geographically larger in years prior to 2001 have had their income estimated to their smaller subdivided 2001 census tract boundaries assuming equal incomes in each part. This is necessary in order to hold the number of census tracts in the City of Toronto fixed over time. From this set of census tracts we produce and map the list of the census tracts that consistently went up or down.

Individual income is the census category for income of persons 15 and over from all sources. It has an advantage over household income for determining the socio-economic status of people living in an area as it controls for differences in household size. The number of persons in each household with income is increasingly uneven across the City with a large divide between the downtown area and the suburbs. Median income is not used here because it has the disadvantage of hiding the extent of the high and low incomes, since most neighbourhoods have at least a few high or low-income people. Use of any of the income categories in the census, however, produces similar results. This is discussed further in: J.D. Hulchanski, The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income polarization, 1970–2000, CUCS Research Bulletin #41, December 2007.

from ... The New Yorker: When owning isn’t better: What was a savings plan is now pushing some into indentured servitude

2008-10-01T19:26:00.002-04:00

By James Surowiecki The New Yorker, March. 3, 2008

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In March 2008, about half a year before the global economic crisis broke, caused in part by the US housing bubble and all the bad mortgage lending practices, The New Yorker published the following brief note.

It correctly pointed out that owing a house is a risky way to have a savings plan and that long term mortgages were a form of indentured servitude. It failed, as we all did, to see how thoroughly the housing market could wipe out the savings of so many millions of lower income American homeowners. --jdh

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Americans may disagree about nearly everything, but few contest the idea that owning your home is a good thing. Paeans to homeownership are a commonplace for American politicians, and, since the nineteen-thirties, public policy has been designed to make home buying cheaper and easier. Homeownership, the argument goes, has tremendous social benefits, stabilizing neighborhoods and making people more willing to invest in their communities. And it has economic benefits, too, serving as a forced-savings program that allows people to leverage their incomes and build wealth. Homeownership “provides financial security for families,” Mel Martinez, the former H.U.D. Secretary, has said, and it “generates economic strength that fuels the entire na

tion.”

That never seemed more true than in the years from 1994 to 2005, when the percentage of Americans who own homes rose by almost ten per cent, and the amount of wealth tied up in property soared. But our veneration of homeowning has blinded us to the fact that, along with the benefits, it has some very real costs — costs that only get bigger as the ranks of homeowners swell. The housing boom undoubtedly helped the economy’s growth rate and made lots of first-time home buyers happy. Unfortunately, it may also end up prolonging and deepening the current downturn.

In part, this is due to the nature of the boom, which was stoked by cheap credit and lax lending standards. Buying a home used to require a sizable down payment: in 1976, the average for a first-time buyer was eighteen per cent. By contrast, a National Association of Realtors study of first-time buyers between mid-2005 and mid-2006 found that almost half put down nothing at all, and that the median down payment was just two per cent. If you earn eighty thousand a year, no one will lend you four hundred thousand dollars to buy stocks, but plenty of people were willing to lend you that money to buy a house. As long as home prices were rising, all this leverage seemed like a good thing: it let people buy homes that they couldn’t otherwise afford, and maximized their return on investment. But, with home prices sinking — in the final quarter of 2007, they were down almost 9 percent from the year before—the downside has become clear: as many as fifteen million homeowners now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Homeownership isn’t building wealth for these people; it’s locking them into indentured servitude.

The problem was exacerbated by an explosion in home-equity loans, fuelled by our faith that house prices can only rise. According to a recent study by the Federal Reserve, homeowners took out more than six hundred billion dollars in home-equity loans between 2004 and 2005 alone — ten times as much as they had a decade earlier — and are spending much of it on personal consumption. That destroys the forced-savings aspect of homeownership, since people are using up their home equity instead of saving it for the future. And it means that many homeowners have to devote more and more of their income to paying off home-equity debt, contributing to the current slowdown.

Even without lending and borrowing excesses, though, our high rate of homeownership would likely create problems as the economy slows. To recover from recession, economies need prices to fall until they reflect genuine supply and demand. With certain kinds of assets, like stocks, these adjustments take place quickly, sometimes viciously so. Buying and selling houses, though, is a far slower process. The good thing about this is that housing prices never suffer crashes on the scale that you sometimes see in the stock market. The bad thing is that it can take a long time for housing prices to reflect reality. Homeowners, as economists have shown, tend to remain unreasonably optimistic about the value of their homes, and they hate to drop their asking price. As a result, existing-home sales in the U.S. are now at a nine-year low.

Home ownership also impedes the economy’s readjustment by tying people down. From a social point of view, it’s beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, it’s good for people to be able to leave places where there’s less work and move to places where there’s more. Homeowners are much less likely to move than renters, especially during a downturn, when they aren’t willing (or can’t afford) to sell at market prices. As a result, they often stay in towns even after the jobs leave. That may be why a study of several major developed economies between 1960 and 1996, by the British economist Andrew Oswald, found a strong relationship between increases in homeownership and increases in the unemployment rate; 10 percent increase in homeownership correlated with a two-per-cent increase in unemployment. (In the U.S., it may be worth noting, the states that have the highest unemployment rates — states like Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi — are also among those with the highest home ownership rates.) And reluctance to move not only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it hard for businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow.

This doesn’t mean that the U.S. should become a nation of renters—even if both New York City and Switzerland show that high rates of renting are compatible with great prosperity. With the bursting of the housing bubble, though, it’s time not just to scrutinize the excesses of our home-buying process but to recognize the risks and costs inherent in owning a home. Sometimes the price—for the home buyer and for the economy as a whole—is too high to pay.

Australia’s Housing Affordability Crisis -- Similar to Canada's: What to do about it?

2008-07-15T12:27:00.003-04:00

Australia’s Housing Affordability Crisis

by Judith Yates, professor, economics, University of Sydney

The Australian Economic Review, June, 2008

This very helpful and insightful overview, written just before the global financial crisis, provides an excellent analysis of what is meant by the popular / media term "housing affordability crisis" and what should be done aout it.

The Canadian and Australian housing systems are very similar. Much, if not all of what Professor Yates writes about Australia is relevant to Canada's housing situation.

While some home owners face financial hardship due to the large gap between their incomes and housing costs, it is mainly renters who have difficulty accessing appropriate and adequate housing within their household budgets.

"Although affordability problems for purchasers tend to receive most media attention, the largest group of households experiencing affordability problems are not purchasers but are households in the private rental market. For many of these households, home ownership is not something they can even aspire to." p.201

"While 16 per cent of all households had high housing cost ratios in 2002–03, more than 28 per cent of lower income households were in housing stress.For lower income private renters, however, the incidence of stress was 65 per cent. For lower income purchasers it was 49 per cent." p.207

While the problem is not new, it is worse now than in the past. The global financial crisis will likely make it even worse for most renters and for recent house purchasers.

The key part of the solution is to deemphasize the investment use of residential real estate. Providing special tax breaks for ownership helps inflate the housing market, harming many, especially lower income households.

Housing policy in most countries has not been tenure neutral -- which means that ownership and rental are not treated equally by the regulatory, tax and subsidy systems of all levels of government.

Housing policy needs to focus on inceasing "the supply of wel located affordable rental housing to meet the needs of those on lower incomes who are likely to be long-term renters." Profesor Yates concludes: "A strategic rental housing policy framework is essential to foster adequate and stable levels of investment in rental housing."

The full article is available on the internet.

From the conclusion:

"This suggests that the most effective long run solutions to housing affordability problems lie in addressing the underlying determinants of demand and supply. With continued pressures from increased population growth and real per household incomes, demand is likely to be reduced only by reducing the attractiveness of housing as an investment asset. Demand side subsidies, such as the untargeted first home owners grant to first homebuyers are unlikely to be effective.

"The second key observation is that the media tendency to define affordability problems by high or increasing housing cost ratios for purchasers is largely misplaced. Most home purchasers have relatively high incomes and are not forced into the undesirable trade-offs that lower income households face when their housing costs increase. There are significantly more renters than purchasers in housing stress and the incidence of housing stress is significantly greater among private renters. Many of these households face the prospect of never being able to gain access to the economic an social advantages provided by home ownership.

"This suggests that a change is needed in the direction of Australia’s housing policies away from those that focus on home ownership and towards those that increase the supply of well located affordable rental housing to meet the needs of those on lower incomes who are likely to be long-term renters. A strategic rental housing policy framework is essential to foster adequate and stable levels of investment in rental housing."

The Ghettoization of "Toronto the Good"?

2008-05-24T10:19:00.034-04:00

The "elephant in the room" during discussions of most any socio-economic and demographic trend relating to Toronto is the growing geographic, ethnocultural, and skin colour (white, non-white) polarization of the city.

Is Toronto creating its own version of ghettos? If so, they will not be American style ghettos. Those arose from U.S. specific historical circumstances and at a different time.

A ghetto, as urban planning professor Peter Marcuse (Columbia University) notes in his studies of divided cities,

“is a spatially concentrated area used to separate and to limit a particular involuntarily defined population group (usually by race) held to be, and treated as, inferior by the dominant society.”

A careful definition of ghetto, then, would necessarily include three elements: spatial separation; discrimination; and an involuntary (imposed) definition of identity, usually as racial.
Ghettos must be distinguished from voluntary enclaves. An enclave is a spatially concentrated area in which members of a particular population group, self-defined by ethnicity or religion or otherwise, congregate as a means of enhancing their economic, social, political, religious and/or cultural development.

Enclaves are healthy and normal aspects of urban growth and change. Though they represent concentrations of a particular group, they are voluntary, they are not based on an imposed definition of identity, and they are non-exclusionary (the majority in an area does not discriminate against others). Others can and do chooe to live in the same area.

Toronto Star columnist Royson James helps raise the issue of the potential ghettorization of Toronto is his column (below).

With the recent release of most of the 2006 census data we can begin detailed analysis of Toronto's neighourhoods and reach some conclusions about areas that are voluntary enclaves and areas that may be on their way to becoming ghettos of exclusion.
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Alarms ring in tale of three cities
The Toronto Star by Royson James, urban affairs columnist, 24 May 2008

For many years, urban thinkers have opined about the "hole in the doughnut" – a condition particular to America where the downtowns of major cities are abandoned by the middle class and left to criminal elements, the poor and urban decay.
Except for a central business district and the daytime vibe it brings, the core becomes a wasteland as the middle class, usually white, moves out to the suburbs.
Accompanying this flight is the capital of taxes and school funding, and the repetitive, predictable outcome: abominable inner-city schools, denuded infrastructure, and huge pockets of Third World conditions.
Throughout our history, Toronto's managed to avoid this trend. Waves of ethnic groups moved through working-class neighbourhoods downtown, out to neighbouring boroughs and cities, then to the 905 region. But living in the city was kept viable and attractive thanks to social housing, strong social agencies and a safety net.
There were also good-paying manufacturing jobs close enough to sustain the dream.
The upwardly mobile of the 1950s and 1960s found homes in the new suburbs. Ontario Housing and Metro Housing projects sprang up for low-income folks, with little protest and concern. Senior governments were paying for them, so the individual municipalities shrugged and approved the plan.
While the social housing endures – much of it crying out to be remediated, a la Regent Park – a disturbing trend demands attention. David Hulchanski, director of urban and community studies at the University of Toronto, calls it the "elephant in the room that no one is talking about. Everybody knows it is the lived reality of the city."
Middle-income earners are a dying breed in the city of Toronto as income polarization takes root. Not only are the poor losing ground, so is the middle class.
It's not that they are pulling up stakes and moving out – though some do. Rather, the natural progression from apartment to house in Scarborough or North York is no longer the norm.
Newcomers can't afford the move because their incomes have stagnated or regressed. Those who can afford it and want a suburban lifestyle are choosing the 905 region and beyond instead of the inner suburbs.
As the old guard of middle-class suburban residents dies off, they are being replaced by residents who have little or no economic choice as to where they live.
One Hulchanski study shows Toronto has become three cities. City One has residents who are wealthy, live close to the subway lines and have watched their income rise by 20 per cent or more in real terms between 1970 and 2000. They occupy 20 per cent of the city.
City Two has seen little change and represents 43 per cent of the city's neighbourhoods.
City Three comprises 36 per cent of the city. Residents here have seen incomes decrease over the last 30 years. Where are these? Primarily in the inner suburbs, north of the 401, away from the subway.
Not surprisingly, City One is predominantly white; City Three is predominantly non-white.
South of the border, wherever there are concentrations of non-whites under economic distress, there is a term for it: ghetto.
We haven't had to use that term in Toronto the Good. Somebody ought to be obsessed with this issue so we never need to use it.
Email: rjames@thestar.ca

What is "social mix"? Why are "inclusive" neighbourhoods desirable? Are they desirable?

2008-05-19T08:38:00.018-04:00

On May 15, 2008 a public forum and a specialized seminar were held on the theme of “Social Mix” & Inclusive Communities, International Perspectives: A Discussion of Experience & Recent Research from Australia, England, France & Canada.

These events were organized by the five-year neighbourhood change community university partnership between St Christopher House and the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre (formerly Centre for Urban and Community Studies). See: www.NeighbourhoodChange.ca

A research team (described below) happened to be meeting in Toronto. For the forum and seminar, they were joined by one of Australia’s leading researchers on social mix and public housing revitalization, Kathy Arthurson.

The following is taken from the presentation the visiting team made at a special seminar of the Toronto Neighbourhoods Research Network (see : www.TNRN.ca).
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Project title
‘Social mix’ and neighbourhood revitalization: linking globalized policy perspectives to locally embedded experiences – towards a transatlantic comparison

Funding
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, International Opportunities Fund Research Grant (2006-2008)

Research team
Tom Slater and Gary Bridge, School of Policy Studies, Univ. of Bristol
Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Yankel Fijalkow and Lydie Launay, LOUEST, CNRS, Paris
Annick Germain, Amy Twigge and Damaris Rose, Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, INRS, Montréal

Project rationale
Since mid-1990s, marked resurgence in attention and apparent international convergence around value of ‘social mix’ / ’mixed communities’ as urban policy tool

Why has this happened?
Is there a shared vocabulary and similar rationale and goals?
Are there differences in values and objectives between national contexts, and between local actors in a given context?

Research Objectives

Explore international circulation of ideas regarding the merits of ‘social mix’ / ’mixed communities’
Explore links between national, sub-national and local scales of policy thinking
Decode different local actors’ narratives of social mix in inner-city neighbourhoods undergoing ‘revitalization’: what does ‘mix’ mean? what is a ‘mix’ policy meant to achieve? how do ‘mixed neighbourhoods’ work out in practice?

Progress
The team is currently producing their findings.

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Preliminary Conclusions

(1) The changing paradigm of social mix?

Historically, 2 phases of advocacy for social mix:Phase 1 (c.1900): utopian vision of social class reconciliation through sharing of urban space
Phase 2 (post-WW2 welfare state): egalitarian ideal of spatial justice

Today, a seeming international convergence toward…

Phase 3: a neoliberal tactic for shifting responsibility for aiding the poor onto non-state actors; e.g., funding affordable housing via private-sector dominated developments; poverty deconcentration to achieve social integration by ‘the community’ or via middle-class influence

(2) Themes for further exploration

Implicit or emerging agenda: social mix = ethnic mix?
Ethno-cultural cohabitation issues?
The commodification of cosmopolitanism?

Is social mix ultimately a real estate compromise?

This conceptualization opens up space for exploring competing discourses, in particular, the gap between romantic visions of social mix and the reality of negotiations ‘on the ground’

Op-ed: Violent Schools in Divided City -- Toronto school board's report on school violence

2008-01-13T12:49:00.011-05:00

Violent Schools in Divided City

School Board has little real power to overcome social divisions based on economic inequality

Toronto Star, January 13, 2008

David Hulchanski

The murder of a student in one of our schools caused, at best, if we want to be honest with ourselves, a modest amount of concern in the City of Toronto and very little beyond Toronto. "The fact of the matter,” according to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, “is that there are millions of children who attend school every single day in Ontario and they do so safely and without incident.” This is only a problem in “some communities.”

The Toronto District School Board appointed a panel whose recently released report is as good, if not better, than one might expect in such a situation. Yet, as the panel mentions in passing, the problem is bigger than the school and the school board. The context matters. And the context is not pretty.

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 focussed 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 ever want to live in those neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods, in what I call City #3 in my research, are now 60% 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 #3 fell by 34% since 1970 relative to the Toronto average. In comparison, in City #1, the 20% of neighbourhoods where people with enough money choose to live, average incomes over the same period increased by 71%.

The panel’s report makes an unfortunate starting assumption: “While the TDSB did not create poverty, racism, sexism or classism, it has the power and opportunity to shelter youth from its harshest effects." Is this true? Where is the evidence to support the claim that a school board has the "power" to effectively "shelter" students from these very big and very bad contextual issues?

On racism the panel found “strong evidence that racism is a major concern of many black students” and that “the majority of black students perceive racial bias with respect to grading and disciplinary practices and feel that teachers treated some students better than others.” In addition: “Many black students also perceive racism outside of the school environment – especially with respect to policing activities and employment opportunities."

In contrast, their survey found the opposite among the teachers: “few teachers feel that unfair grading, unfair punishment and racial discrimination by teachers against students is a problem” and “few teachers support the hiring of more racial minority teachers.”

So what should be done about perceived and real racism in the schools? Here the panel fails us. The word racism appears only a few times in the 126 recommendations. I wonder what students think about recommendation #24: “Student and teacher surveys should be conducted every five years” to gather information about “perceptions of racism at school.” Or recommendation #31: “Multicultural, anti-racism staff development should be provided to teachers, administration, and school staff at every school.”

All of the most important recommendations require one thing: money. The panel recognizes the failure thus far of the provincial and federal governments to do more than sit on committees and help coordinate efforts. “Coordination and planning without resources are not only ineffective, they hold out the false hope that governments are making significant progress toward addressing the conditions of marginalized youth and communities." Yes, but … how and when will this change?

The denizens of Toronto’s City#1, where all the power, not just the money, resides, have a decision to make. Will 40% of Toronto be abandoned, as the research literature predicts, to become Toronto’s vast “ghetto of the excluded”? Will parts of Toronto begin to become similar to parts of Detroit and Paris?

The panel members should have been more explicit in their reference to the contextual problems of poverty, racism, sexism and classism. These issues explain why the range of very serious problems that exist in City#3, including the shocking reality of murder in our schools, but do not exist in City #1 or even City #2.

Though the TDSB cannot effectively address this bigger societal issue, the provincial and federal governments have both the power and, now, another opportunity, thanks to the panel’s recommendations, to begin making a difference. This is not simply a Toronto problem. This is a Canadian problem. Progress will be made when Canada’s senior governments make progress on narrowing the income gap, implementing a national housing strategy, which will help build better neighbourhoods, and begin funding the “urban agenda.”
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David Hulchanski is director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies and the author of The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto’s neighbourhoods, 1970 to 2000 (see: http://www.gtuo.ca/).