Poverty By Postal Code

I have just moved back to Toronto after almost 20 years in Saskatoon. When friends from western and rural Canada come to visit they are sometimes overwhelmed by the noise, the speed and the wealth of this city. What they sometimes miss is how much poverty has grown here and how that didn’t always used to be the case.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I lived right downtown. It was crowded and busy then too, but one of the things I liked most about Toronto was the strong and coherent neighbourhoods. People didn’t live in the city so much as they lived in Cabbagetown, Chinatown, Little Italy and the like.

Toronto’s United Way Agency has now published a study that documents this growth in poverty and it focuses on Toronto’s once famous neighbourhoods. Called “Poverty by Postal Code” the study uses data from the Census taken over 20 years to show how poverty has become more concentrated in more and more neighbourhoods.

In 1981 the number of families living below the poverty line in Canada was 13%. Toronto mirrored the country with 13.3% of families living in poverty. Since that time Canada’s poverty rate has declined slightly to 12.8% while Toronto’s has jumped to 19.4%.

When more than 26% of families in a neighbourhood live below the poverty line, the United Way study calls that a higher poverty neighbourhood. In 1981 the study identified 30 such neighbourhoods in Metropolitan Toronto. In 1991, that number doubled to 66 neighbourhoods and in 2001 it doubled again to 120 neighbourhoods. In 2001, 43.2% of Toronto’s poor families lived in these higher poverty neighbourhoods. 66% of all Toronto’s neighbourhoods now exceed the 1981 national average for families in poverty.

There are now over 160,000 children growing up in these poor Toronto neighbourhoods. That’s almost the population of Regina (178,225) where the family poverty rate is only 11%. If you think all this poverty is a function of unemployment you’d be wrong. 90% of all employable persons in these neighbourhoods have jobs, which is only 3% less than the rest of the city. These people are hard working people in minimum wage or part-time employment. They live in rental accommodation and a high percentage are new Canadians.

The single biggest factor contributing to this rising poverty rate is the high cost of housing. This comes from the brutal elimination of government support for social housing and the failure of the market to provide a low cost alternative. 25 years ago I moved into a mixed income housing cooperative in Toronto that provided 10% of its units as rent-geared-to-income. This is an example of the kind of program that was “collateral damage” in the war against the deficit. The report calls this poverty by postal code. I call it poverty by policy. The United Way argues that “no one should be disadvantaged or excluded from the mainstream, based on where they live.” This is a point of view rural Canadians can understand.

First Published in October 2004