The nice thing about issuing a report card on the state of our city for more than 10 years running is the long-term trends that Toronto’s Vital Signs Report reveals. A small shift in food bank use or homicide rates from one year to another turns out to be a big change over five years and a major trend over 10.

So in 2007, when we first reported that Toronto showed definite signs of becoming two cities, one of the rich and one of the poor with a middle class that was disappearing, we didn’t know if it was a blip or a disturbing pattern.

By 2011, that shift had proved to be a great divide. As I reported at this year’s Toronto’s Vital Signs launch: “We are well along the way to becoming a divided city. Not by race or religion, the way Belfast and Johannesburg are, but by income.”

Far back in 1970, only 2 per cent of our neighbourhoods were “very low income,” but by 2010 that became 14 per cent, while over the same time frame “very high income” neighbourhoods grew from 9 per cent to 16 per cent of the city.

Every year, our Toronto’s Vital Signs Report would flag the change, warn of the dire consequences of having a two-class city, and then we watched to see what happened next.

Meanwhile, middle income neighbourhoods continue to disappear, dropping from 58 per cent of all neighbourhoods in 1970 to 29 per cent last year.

But the most disturbing number here, one that’s crept up slowly year after year, is that more than one million Torontonians now live in low or very low income neighbourhoods.

In much the same way, we were stunned to find out that youth unemployment in the city reached a staggering 20.75 per cent this year. But the truly disturbing fact is that this rate has been above 15 per cent for the past 10 years. That’s a pattern, not a blip.

This is the nasty downside of Toronto’s stunning growth, and if we’re to remain one of the world’s most livable cities, we can’t just wait as these problems inevitably get a little worse every year until one day . . . Well, we’re not sure what will happen. But if other cities’ history is any guide, it won’t be pretty.

What can we do?

Well, it’s a reality of civic politics that urgent issues always get more attention than important ones. And asking one level of government to solve an issue like the vanishing middle class or soaring youth unemployment is asking too much. This kind of problem can’t be solved by a single player or by the kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place.

The only way we’ll solve these big, slow-to-boil problems is by changing the way we think about them. That’s why in this year’s Toronto’s Vital Signs Report, I called for us to stop thinking about Toronto’s issues in a linear and unconnected way. The issues we face are so integrated, complex and fast-moving that only system-wide innovations are going to attack them at their core.

Only this kind of network thinking can halt other disturbing trends that may emerge slowly and subtly from year to year. Trends such as a divided city and rising youth unemployment or growing childhood obesity and the lack of affordable housing started out as what looked like little blips years back. We didn’t take action to solve them for two reasons: either they weren’t big problems or we knew they’d become big problems but no one government or interested party had the perspective, power or tools to solve them.

We don’t need a revolution to solve these hard, slow-to-grow problems. We need an urgent evolution. That will start when each of us understands that we’re all part of the problems Toronto faces — and the solution. Lily Tomlin summed this up best when she said: “I often wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.”

Next year’s Vital Signs report will come out just days before Toronto’s municipal election.

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My advice is to get engaged with a big issue — any issue; there are more than 2.7 million of us — and work toward finding new ways of solving it. Our big problems have been creeping up slowly but surely over time. We mustn’t ignore them any longer. The time has come for us to get to work to preserve one of the world’s most livable and resilient cities: our own.