and if yes, why the deafening silence?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August  5, 2000

Researchers fear segregating rich from poor will bring the ghetto to Canada

By Margaret Philp

[the article has pictures and charts -- http://www.globeandmail.ca]

Karoline escaped but Emmy hasn't been so lucky. 'You can't marginalize and
forget about a large segment of Canadian childre n,' says one specialist,
'and expect them not to come back when they grow up and make life miserable
...they're not going to disappear.

Temple Avenue is pure, distilled Parkdale, a street of big old brick houses
that have faded from glory. Some have been carved into rooming houses, others
muddled by cheap renovations. All are cast in the shadow of rundown apartment
buildings on nearby streets that stand like walls, fracturing the
neighbourhood.

This is the street where Jesse Ashrafzadeh bought his first house as a
newlywed four years ago. It is where Karoline, his first child, took her
first tottering steps. Just around the corner is the house he shared with a
handful of friends in his gloriously unencumbered bachelorhood.

But Mr. Ashrafzadeh was grateful to leave Temple Avenue once he started to
consider where his daughter might go to school. A neighbourhood rife with
poverty, drugs, and prostitution was no place for a child to grow up. And so,
two years ago, with his sights on pricey Havergal College for Karoline, he
traded Parkdale's grittiness for the suburban sanctuary of a big house and
sprawling backyard in middle-class North York.

"People with kids, like me, move out because they don't want their kids
growing up with all the bad stuff in the schools," he says.

"Many of the people are poor and most of the kids come from broken families.
Single moms. Absent dads. The kids bring their anger to school and start
hanging around in gangs. It's not a very healthy environment for kids."

Farewell to broken glass and wild screaming on the street at night. The
prostitutes strolling down the sidewalk. The drunks splayed on the grass.

One middle-class family's decision to pull up stakes may not seem like
earth-shattering news, but it is part of a vicious circle that has serious
consequences -- and is anything but confined to Parkdale.

A major study just completed for Statistics Canada shows that the gap between
rich and poor neighbourhoods is growing to such a degree that it threatens to
alter the nation's urban landscape. The booming economy has bestowed fabulous
wealth on many parts of the country, but other parts have missed the boat and
are rapidly beginning to resemble a feature of U.S. cities that Canadians
have long reviled: the ghetto.

Canada's growing poverty zones have yet to replicate the degree of social
disintegration seen in the ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, with their
staggering levels of crime and hopelessness, bleak images of graffiti-covered
buildings and buses, second-rate schools equipped with metal detectors.

"But the arrows are pointing in that direction," warns Larry Bourne, a
University of Toronto professor of geography and urban planning who
researches neighbourhoods and income inequality.

"The poor are becoming more concentrated and we're cutting social services.
If you want to know what you end up with, take a drive on 63rd Street in
Chicago, and you'll get a sense of extremely high concentrations of very low
income with almost no services left, virtually no retail facilities left, and
no jobs left."

The Statscan study found that over the past two decades the gap between rich
and poor neighbourhoods has widened in eight Canadian cities -- Quebec City,
Montreal, Ottawa-Hull, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
The researchers linked the trend to rising unemployment as jobs have left
poorer districts and to cultural segregation, as middle-class families pull
up stakes and move in growing numbers.

The trend is most pronounced in the inner cities, but not restricted to them
-- it is spreading as well to patches of suburbia. And nowhere is it
happening more rapidly than in Toronto.

Parkdale harkens back to a bygone era. In the decades before the Second World
War, it was an upscale neighbourhood of three-storey mansions overlooking
Lake Ontario, a pleasant stroll to the beach, lakeside bandstands, and the
Canadian National Exhibition.

The glory days ended in the late fifties with the construction of the
six-lane Gardiner Expressway on its southern fringes. Stately Victorian
mansions were demolished and replaced by stark, modern high-rise apartment
buildings.

By 1996, the south end of Parkdale, once home to the city's wealthiest
families, had become one of Toronto's four poorest neighbourhoods. According
to the latest census, its average annual income was $27,965, an 11.5-per-cent
drop in the previous five years.

The story was the same in every poor area of Toronto -- in the public-housing
maze of Regent Park, the high-rise jungles of St. Jamestown, and the
Jane-Finch corridor -- household incomes plummeted in the first half of the
nineties at a time when prosperity reigned in the city's middle-class and
well-to-do quarters.

Then there were the wealthy enclaves such as Rosedale, long the preserve of
Toronto's old-money families, where incomes climbed 18 per cent in five
years, to an average of $231,570.

But even in ordinary neighbourhoods, where middle-class people juggle
mortgages and credit-card bills and child-care fees, fortunes were on the
rise.

>From 1994 to 1997, median family incomes in the renovated brick rowhouses of
east-end Riverdale jumped 14.5 per cent to $53,700. In High Park, a
neighbourhood of spacious old houses and tree-lined streets, incomes rose 11
per cent, to $44,500.

At the same time, just blocks away in Parkdale, the median family income
inched up 3 per cent, to $27,200, an amount that would be far lower were the
neighbourhood's poor single population included. Over in Regent Park, family
incomes continued to slide.

So the divide has also swelled between poor and middle-class areas, like a
wedge splitting the needy from everyone else.

"When we talk about poverty ghettos, the implicit comparison is not with the
richest neighbourhoods, but with the neighbourhoods where the middle class
lives," says John Myles, a Canadian sociologist at Florida State University
who conducted the latest study with Statscan economists Garnett Picot and
Wendy Pyper.

"When Regent Park is falling relative to High Park, where the average
Torontonian lives, the poor neighbourhoods are really getting to be quite
different socially from the average. The social distance between people at
the bottom and the middle is rising."

This growing disparity is found across the country, in all eight cities
studied, from Montreal to Vancouver.

In Montreal, for example, the neighbourhoods in the bottom 10 per cent of
wealth had an average income of $21,364 in 1980 -- 66 per cent of the income
that middle-class neighbourhoods (averaging $32,744) had. By 1995, the gap
had widened so that the poorest had just 57 per cent of the earnings their
middle-class counterparts had.

"I hate to use the word 'polarized' here," Prof. Myles says, "but you get the
sense that the well-to-do are much more concentrated and clustered together.
They live together and the poor live together."

This ghettoization is abundantly clear at Parkdale Public School's parenting
centre -- a fixture for the poor, mostly young immigrant families living in
the area's dilapidated apartment towers.

On a brilliantly sunny day just before the summer break, the children are
dressed in their finest attire, flouncy dresses on the little girls, vests on
a handful of the boys, for a party to celebrate the end of the school year.

But the party clothes mask the fact that most parents collect welfare or work
two or three low-wage jobs. All but two of the children are from families who
abandoned their native countries -- mostly Sri Lanka and India -- for the
promise of a brighter future.

"We used to see more middle-class parents, but the numbers are down," says
Grace Johnston, who has run Parkdale's parenting centre for years. "Five
years ago, we had a greater multicultural mix of parents. Now, the truth is,
my [overall] numbers are very high, and the majority of my parents were not
born in this country."

Often, she has noticed that her white, middle-class parents stick together in
a clique apart from the mothers in flowing robes and fumbling with English.
Not long ago, a mother brought flyers for a parent-and-tot drop-in at a
nearby church that she distributed exclusively to the other white mothers.

"I suppose if some people are earning a certain amount of money, they're not
comfortable around people who earn less. It's hard for people to look and see
[poverty] all the time, so they choose the easy way out."

Jeeuakanthan Sathyananthy came to Canada from Jaffna province in Sri Lanka
two years ago with her then year-old son, declaring refugee status after her
husband was arrested and jailed by the Sri Lankan army.

Like hundreds of immigrants over the past few years, she moved into a shabby
one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise notorious for its rodent infestations,
poor repair, and soaring rents.

The family is destitute. While she reunited with her husband a few months
ago, he studies English and has no job. The family collects $1,030 in welfare
every month, but most of it immediately vanishes to cover the $700-a-month
rent bill.

Three-year-old Ahash races around the parenting centre, freshly scrubbed and
decked out in oversized PokE9mon sandals and brand-new T-shirt and shorts
that his mother picked up for $10 at a nearby discount store. "My son's life
here is good," she smiles.

And indeed, when Ahash begins Grade 1 at Parkdale school in a few years, he
will be attending one of the most richly funded facilities in the Toronto
District School Board.

As an inner-city school with more than half its students speaking a mother
tongue other than English, it receives special support for additional
teachers, educational assistants, and enriched programs. There are three
dedicated literacy teachers on staff. A state-of-the-art computer network.
And every imaginable sports team and extracurricular club.

But social scientists warn that no school, no matter how exceptional, can
compensate for poor children growing up in segregated neighbourhoods. And it
is not just the poor kids destined to pay the price.

"The salvation for a better life for all Canadian children is to not have
these kids segregated in these neighbourhoods but to have neighbourhoods with
a mixture of kids," says Dan Offord, director of the Canadian Centre for
Studies of Children at Risk in Hamilton, Ont.

The consequences of a segregated society, he says, are dire for everyone.
Even if middle-class communities cut themselves off from the less privileged,
the poor will come back to haunt them.

Some middle-class parents "don't understand you can't marginalize and forget
about a large segment of Canadian children and expect them not to come back
when they grow up and make life miserable for the kids that they love.

"Because [poor kids] are going to be at risk for antisocial behaviour. They
not going to be as well trained as they could be for the work force. And
they're not going to disappear."

Not only are poor neighbourhoods getting poorer, but the number of urban
areas that have spiralled into poverty has been on the rise.

In 1980, 334 neighbourhoods in Canada were considered poor, with a poverty
rate double the national average. Nearly 12 per cent of all families with
incomes below Statscan's unofficial poverty line lived in these areas.

Fifteen years later, the number of poverty-ridden neighbourhoods had jumped
to 567, and with it, the proportion of poor Canadian families residing in
them rose to 18 per cent.

Poor people in Montreal were more segregated than anywhere else. According to
recent research by the Canadian Council on Social Development, 40 per cent of
the city's low-income population lived in impoverished neighbourhoods such as
Saint-Henri and Hochelaga-Maissonneuve in 1995.

Toronto's poor were less ghettoized, but the number of poor people in poor
neighbourhoods rose 16 percentage points to 31 per cent over those 15 years.
Only in Saskatoon did segregation increase more sharply.

"It's like a spreading stain," says Michael Hatfield, a senior researcher in
Human Resources Development Canada's applied research division.

The stain is spreading in Canadian cities like this: The populations of
traditionally poor, inner-city neighbourhoods are falling as families leave
and single people move in. The people staying behind are poorer than ever.

The residential neighbourhoods nearby, areas that not long ago hovered
comfortably above the poverty line, are becoming the new stomping grounds for
the poor.

And more and more, as has happened in the United States, the inner city is
becoming the domain of people who have little choice but to live there.

"These are areas people don't want to stay in. So everybody who can move out,
does move out," Mr. Hatfield says. "But there are people who have to stay
there, or have to move there, because these are the only areas that people
can get rents cheap enough to meet their budgets."

In Toronto, the stain of poverty is seeping into the suburbs.

For decades, suburbs such as Etobicoke, Scarborough, and North York existed
as peaceful, middle-class refuges from the noise and traffic and dubious
dealings of downtown.

But the suburbs have suffered a fall from grace -- nowhere have incomes
dropped more precipitously over the past two decades than in the older
suburbs of many Canadian cities.

The area in Toronto that has suffered the steepest decline in income since
the recession of the early nineties is Thorncliffe Park, a post-war
neighbourhood of wide avenues and apartment high-rises several kilometres
from downtown Toronto.

In the fifties, the former Borough of East York -- which encompasses
Thorncliffe Park -- was one of the city's more affluent areas, with household
incomes sitting at 107 per cent of the city's overall average. By 1995, it
rated second poorest.

Even Etobicoke, the richest part of Toronto in the fifties, and North York
have slipped. Both now have average incomes below the average for greater
Toronto.

These days, better-off families flock to more distant developments in
Oakville, Burlington, Newmarket and Aurora -- all of which have prospered as
Toronto suburbs' fortunes have

Some of the migration of the poor to the suburbs has to do with wealthy
homeowners returning to pockets of downtown that are resurging as fashionable
addresses for the well-heeled. Particularly in Toronto, ritzy condominiums
are springing up on vacant lots or patches of weeds where dilapidated rooming
houses once stood.

As they do, poor people are being pushed out of parts of the downtown and are
heading for cheaper housing ever farther from the entrenched network of
drop-in centres and soup kitchens that have traditionally served the
concentration of disadvantaged people living downtown.

This is what happened with the gentrification of Cabbagetown in the
seventies, a metamorphosis turning a down-and-out rooming-house neighbourhood
into several blocks of multimillion-dollar Victorian mansions oddly squeezed
in between some of the most destitute and crime-ridden streets in urban
Canada.

"Cabbagetown has less than half the people it used to have," Prof. Bourne
says. "Heaven knows where they've gone."

To be sure, there are fewer and fewer places for the poor to go. Waiting
lists for social housing across Ontario are nearly a decade long, and almost
no new housing is being constructed in the province. Rents are soaring in an
era of vanishing rent controls. Politicians in power are obsessed about tax
cuts, at the expense of social services. And the poor are scattering into the
far reaches of suburbia, becoming increasingly isolated in communities
designed for people who own cars.

"What is disturbing is there is no policy thinking directed toward this,"
Prof. Bourne says.

"I'm not suggesting we throw megabucks at it, but there doesn't seem to be
any strategic policy thinking that says we should be using public funds and
services to make sure that we don't have certain neighbourhoods going down
the tubes. All I hear about is tax cuts."

If these neighbourhoods are flirting at becoming a Canadian version of the
ghetto, then they are poised to cultivate an urban underclass in Canada
segregated by race.

There is a growing stack of new research showing that poverty afflicts people
with darker skin -- blacks of African heritage, south Asians from countries
such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and aboriginal Canadians -- out of all
proportion to whites with European roots. And when it comes to finding a
place to live, these people routinely face racial discrimination from
prospective landlords who hold unflattering stereotypes about visible
minorities.

University of Toronto sociologist Eric Fong, in research slated for
publication later this year in the U.S. journal Demography, found that the
forces of gentrification have pushed blacks more than any other racial
minority into troubled neighbourhoods of run-down housing in cities across
Canada.

Poor blacks, he observes, are disproportionately concentrated in low-income
neighbourhoods in most Canadian cities, much as they are in the big-city
ghettos of the United States.

In all but a few cities, blacks rank as the poorest of the poor, and the
cities where poverty is most concentrated are the areas where there are more
poor blacks.

In 1991 in Montreal, while 33 per cent of the population was poor and more
than half the city's neighbourhoods had a poverty rate of more than 30 per
cent, 44 per cent of blacks were poor. (On average, 9 per cent of
neighbourhoods in Canadian cities are poor, defined as having poverty rates
of at least 30 per cent). Forty per cent of blacks were poor in Halifax,
compared with 17.5 per cent of the general population in a city where 13 per
cent of neighbourhoods were poor. In Ottawa, 41 per cent of blacks lived in
poverty, against a rate of 19 per cent in the population and where 17 per
cent of neighbourhoods were poor.

"We always think that Canadian cities when compared to U.S. cities are
racially distributed in the sense that we don't see much racial and economic
segregation," Dr. Fong says, "but here we find this is not the case. Poor
blacks experience much higher levels of segregation as compared to other poor
groups."

And what does the future hold for Parkdale? Some think that it may be the
next Cabbagetown. That its Victorian architecture and growing stock of
renovated houses make it a prime candidate for gentrification.

The local real-estate market is a long way from the heated battle seen in
more prosperous parts of the city, but property prices are rising. The sight
of an elegant reno next to a rundown rooming house is increasingly common.

"The prostitutes and drug dealers certainly exist. You can't get away from
that. They're part of the landscape," says Lucy Sanford, a real-estate agent
in the neighbourhood.

But, she says, artists are moving in, antique dealers have opened up shop,
and the neighbourhood shows signs of change.

"The architecture down there is some of the best in the city. A greater
degree of people are wanting to be down there. A lot of people are changing
their tune about Parkdale."

Rents are on the rise. And some of the old mansions that were sliced into a
multitude of apartments are now being converted back to homes for only one or
two families.

Until a few months ago, for example, Stephanie Bennett lived in a house that
had been carved into small apartments that, like hers, rented for $800 a
month. Then the house changed hands, she and daughter Emmy, 2BD, were
evicted, and the place was renovated into two spacious apartments that now
each rent for $1,200 a month -- well beyond her means as a single mother on
welfare.

"A lot of poor people want to live here, but a lot of us are having to move,"
says Ms. Bennett, 23, who grew up poor in a small town in Nova Scotia.

"Parkdale is a place where people live because it's close to the services
everyone needs. It's close to the hospital. It's close to the grocery store.
But people are finding they can't afford to live here anymore."

 Margaret Philp reports on social policy for The Globe and Mail.

BIRTH OF A GHETTO?


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