Toronto: Income polarization over 35 years
In our last post we linked the recent shooting in Toronto to a previous post on the development of income inequality in Toronto. Without surprise this provocative statement sparked some discussions and as a result we will now take a closer look into the situation in Toronto.
A long-term research project of the University of Toronto Cities Centre looked at the neighborhood change in Toronto in the period of 35 years and published an extensive report.
The study looked at trends for a 35-year period, and found most of the changes to be persistent. The polarization of the city into wealthy neighbourhoods and greater numbers of disadvantaged neighbourhoods is continuing and middle-income neighbourhoods are disappearing.
In great detail is shown how the middle income neighborhoods in Toronto deminish over time and the city gets polarized between low income and high income neighborhoods as you can see by the image above.
They summarize their results as follows:
In short, the City of Toronto, over a 35-year period, ceased to be a city with a majority of neighbourhoods (66%) in which residents’ average incomes were near the middle and very few neighbourhoods (1%) had very poor residents. Middle-income neighbourhoods are now a minority and half of the city’s neighbourhoods are low-income when compared with the Toronto CMA average.
The development of Toronto can be seen in cities all over the North American continent and in our next posts we will look more detailed into the report and the results. One questions for the weekend: How do you think will this rising inequality affect the safety of Torontos citizen? Feel free to comment on Facebook or our other social media sites.
