At the beginning of the decade, with rising inequality weighing on the North American mind, two researchers brought out an in-depth report about the economic splintering of Canada’s most “livable” city, concluding that the once-cohesive, middle-class metropolis was now really three cities, stratified by wealth.

“The middle-income city of the 1970s has become the polarized city of the 2000s,” they wrote.

If the diagnosis sounds familiar to Torontonians, the city in question might come as a surprise: the study was about Vancouver. “Divisions and Disparities in Lotus-Land,” written by University of British Columbia geographers David Ley and Nicholas Lynch, found that Vancouver’s middle-income areas had shrunk, while its rich and poor areas had grown. While roughly the same thing has been written about Toronto, the problems of division and inequality are not unique to the GTA. Indeed, a combination of structural forces in the economy and fiscal policies at the national and provincial level have made practically all North American cities more unequal and divided in the last 40 years, researchers say.

If the wounds haven’t been self-inflicted, they suggest, the cure to our urban fracturing may have to be administered by others, too.

That insight has at least one unlikely proponent: David Hulchanski, the University of Toronto researcher whose landmark “Three Cities” study sounded the alarm about growing economic polarization in Toronto.

“What you’re looking at has nothing much to do with the cities themselves,” Hulchanski said in a November interview. “These are big, macro-level trends.”

With the exception of Montreal, all major Canadian cities have followed the same general path as Toronto in the past 40 years, he notes.

For example, the proportion of low-income neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto has grown at roughly the same rate since 1970, as have their proportion of high-income areas, according to research by the Cities Centre at U of T. (Calgary’s oil-fuelled boom-and-bust cycle makes its progression somewhat choppier, but the trend line is the same.)

Of course, Toronto’s divisions aren’t just economic but also geographic. But growing geographic concentrations of wealth and poverty are also endemic to most other North America metros.

Income maps of Vancouver paint a stark picture of rising prosperity in the northern and western parts of the city, and increasing poverty to the south and east. Since 1970, 22 per cent of Vancouver’s census tracts have seen individual incomes fall by more than 15 per cent, relative to the growth of the metropolitan average.

Most of Winnipeg’s poorest neighbourhoods, meanwhile — also its most heavily aboriginal — are concentrated downtown, while affluent areas spread to the southwest.

In the U.S., Hulchanski notes, the sorting of rich and poor into distinct geographic enclaves has been happening for longer, but has accelerated in the past four decades. Chicago’s south side, for example, has been plunged into destitution since 1970, while the rich core has expanded.

Across the U.S., cities have begun splitting into roughly the same shape that Toronto has taken: high-income earners moving back downtown and the poor settling in the inner suburbs.

“There is a problem in the United States where cities are marginalizing middle- to lower-class people to the outer fringes,” said Michael Seman, an urban planning researcher at the University of North Texas.

Indeed, a U.S.-wide study by Richard Florida of the Martin Prosperity Institute found that the Toronto pattern of inequality was the country’s most common.

“Each city and metro area in our analysis has pronounced clusters of the creative class in and around the urban core,” he wrote in a September report, using his pet term for well-off university graduates working in fields from medicine to journalism. “It is most pronounced in post-industrial metros like San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York. But it is also evident in some form in every metro . . .”

In an interview, Florida — who works at U of T’s Rotman School of Management — insisted that Canada is a long way from being as economically split as the U.S.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“None of Canada’s cities are as divided as (America’s) most divided large metros, or even its least divided,” he said.

Indeed, Toronto’s 2009 Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality, was slightly higher (0.42) than Vancouver and Calgary (0.40), but lower than Seattle, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and New York.

Still, we shouldn’t take too much credit, Florida says. He points out that mayors ranging from New York’s conservative Rudy Giuliani to Toronto’s progressive David Miller presided over the same polarization in their respective cities.

“Look at a dear friend of mine, Ken Livingstone,” Florida continued, referring to the former left-wing mayor of London. “People called him Red Ken, suggested he was a communist. London is a far more polarized and segmented city than Toronto and even New York.”

Urban rifts are caused by structural factors in the economy — particularly the decline of North American manufacturing — not municipal politics, Florida argues.

“Just as our labour market is divided, so are our communities divided,” he said.

David Hulchanski agrees that when it comes to long-term inequality and polarization, cities are not in control of their destinies. But he ascribes more influence to federal and provincial budget cuts, which he believes have helped impoverish large swaths of Toronto.

The main culprits, in his telling, are Mike Harris and Paul Martin — respectively Ontario’s Progressive Conservative premier from 1995 to 2002, and Canada’s Liberal finance minister during most of the 1990s.

Both politicians slashed social programs, including funds for affordable housing, in the name of balanced budgets.

“It took us 20 years, year by year, to create the problem,” Hulchanski said. “No city could do all that to itself in a short period of time.”

Read more about: