COLUMN: Growing poverty, precarious employment require regional solution
United Way expands to include York, Toronto, Peel

Yorkregion.com
Daniele Zanotti
Nov. 13, 2017

 

Growing up as an immigrant kid in North York, I lived in a great neighbourhood and had strong family support.

It was support that provided a vital network of care: an uncle who worked the night shift who babysat, an aunt and grandmother who always made sure I had a hot plate of pasta waiting and neighbourhood friends who broadened my world and access to opportunities -- good people who connected me to my first job interview and extended invitations to family cottages.

My parents worked hard to make ends meet, hard enough to send their son to university. I worked hard too and knew that if I stayed the course, I’d have access to opportunity and eventually I did. I studied, I worked, I slowly made my way.

Today, the access to the opportunities I had is shrinking.

And today, as someone who calls York Region home, the growing trends about our neighbourhoods and communities are more than a little worrisome.

Our report, the Opportunity Equation in the Greater Toronto Area, looks at recently released census data and confirms that right across the GTA, the gap between rich and poor is widening. High-income neighbourhoods are getting richer and middle-income neighbourhoods are vanishing.

While Toronto continues to hold the inauspicious title of being the country’s “inequality capital,” income inequality is now widening right across the GTA. In 1980, the GTA was dominated by middle-income neighbourhoods. This pattern has completely reversed: the majority of GTA neighbourhoods are now either low or high income.

In York Region, middle-income neighbourhoods have dropped from 94 per cent to 65 per cent over the course of the last 45 years. Today, 16 per cent of neighbourhoods in York Region are low-income -- in the 1970s and 1980s there were none. And for the first time ever, the majority of neighbourhoods in Peel Region are now low-income.

These trends are disheartening and this is why it’s so important that we continue to take a regional approach to our work. These persistent issues like growing poverty and precarious employment are borderless and require a regional lens.

At United Way, we’ve been able to broaden our scope and this is why United Way York Region merged with United Way Toronto two years ago, and why we’ll be extending our reach into Peel Region, officially merging with United Way Peel Region in April 2018. It represents our continued commitment to go beyond borders, build regional scale and deal with widespread issues at a local level.
It represents our commitment to continue to protect and build local “access.”

Why? Because access to opportunity plus hard work should equal success for everyone -- in Toronto, in Peel, and right here where I live in York Region.