New report warns of growing income gap in Toronto

The Vital Signs 2015 report surveys the social and economic state of Toronto and the surrounding area

Thestar.com
Oct. 6, 2015
By Alex Ballingall

Toronto’s much-vaunted status as one of the world’s “most livable” cities masks the reality that a sizable underclass of people is missing out on the benefits of life in the Big Smoke, according to a new report on the social and economic standing of the city.

Published Tuesday by the Toronto Foundation, the “Vital Signs 2015” report surveyed recent data from Statistics Canada, academic research and other sources to analyze the quality of life in the city, based on factors such as access to transit, affordable housing, well-paying and stable jobs, sense of belonging and health.

“We’re becoming a divided city,” said Rahul Bhardwaj, Toronto Foundation president. “If we need to move forward and maintain our livability, we’ve got to become one place; we need to think in an integrated fashion about how we move this city forward around issues like transit, affordable housing, youth unemployment, child poverty.

“It’s only been 17 years since amalgamation,” he said. “We need to come together as one place.”

The report suggests that the presence of middle-income residents has eroded across much of the city, contributing to an ever-wider gap between the rich and the poor. Over the past 25 years, incomes for the poorest 10 per cent of city neighbourhoods have gone up by 2 per cent, while the richest 10 per cent have seen their wealth balloon by 80 per cent, the report says.

Moreover, in 1990, 68 per cent of census areas in Toronto were defined as middle income; in 2012, that number had shrunk to 32 per cent.

This means that, after Calgary, Toronto has the second-widest income gap in Canada. And it’s growing at twice the national average - 96 per cent since 1990.

The report also states that, while 20,000 new jobs were created last year, the proportion of people with “precarious work” has jumped. Temporary employment went up by 17 per cent from 2011 to 2014, and less than half of workers in the GTA and Hamilton have permanent, full-time jobs with benefits. At the same time, youth unemployment (defined as workers between 15 and 24 years old) rose from 18.1 per cent to 21.65 per cent in 2014, and average housing prices in the city have tripled since the 1970s.

“We see some of the unintended consequences of this,” Bhardwaj said. “Eighty thousand families on the waiting list for affordable housing, a million visits to the food bank” in 2014.

Bhardwaj noted the report isn’t entirely bleak. Violent crime has dropped for the ninth year in a row for instance, making Toronto one of the safest cities in the country, with a homicide rate and crime rate lower than the national average, the report says.

The city is also considered to be “greening,” Bhardwaj said, with 186 buildings that are LEED certified for their small environmental footprints (up from 59 three years ago). Business and personal bankruptcies were also down 10.2 per cent and 21 per cent respectively from 2013 to 2014.

But even so, Bhardwaj emphasized that the report highlights some glaring challenges that face Toronto and its environs, arguing that better planning across the region and with different levels of government would help address them and include more people in the success of the city.

Bhardwaj said there are many factors that relate to rising income inequality and that there isn’t one clear solution.

“These are very complex issues, and they’re very interconnected,” he said. “There’s never one silver bullet.”