Scarborough has long complained of its second-class status as part of the Toronto megacity.

And when it comes to poverty, a new report suggests the city is indeed shortchanging some of Scarborough’s neediest communities.

None of Toronto’s 31 so-called Neighbourhood Improvement Areas — communities earmarked for special support to tackle youth violence, poverty and social service gaps — are in north Scarborough, says the report by social policy expert John Stapleton.

And yet, when average incomes after shelter costs are calculated in each of Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods, seven in north Scarborough, north of Highway 401, have higher levels of poverty than those designated as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, or NIAs, according to the report.

“Even though northern Scarborough has seven of the poorest of Toronto’s 140 neighbourhoods, not one has an NIA designation: not Malvern, which comes in 9th poorest; neither Agincourt North (29th) nor Agincourt South-Malvern West (32); not L’Amoreaux (34th),” the report says.

Milliken, where Stapleton has owned a home for more than 40 years, is the city’s 12th poorest neighbourhood, according to the report, written in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership using 2016 census data.

Thorncliffe Park, Flemingdon Park and Black Creek — all designated NIAs — rank as the top three poorest neighbourhoods, in Stapleton’s analysis.

U of T professor David Hulchanski, who heads up the research partnership, says he hopes the analysis “helps to improve the way we target communities” for extra support.

“John is the first to acknowledge there is not enough money for those who get it,” he said. “But let’s make sure we do it a bit better.”

City staff responsible for the NIA program acknowledge current tools to assess neighbourhoods in need don’t capture the full picture and will use Stapleton’s report as part of a broader review over the next few years.

But Councillor Jennifer McKelvie, whose Scarborough-Rouge Valley ward includes part of Malvern, says she plans to bring a motion to council asking city staff to consider designating the area an NIA now.

“In the 10 months since I have been elected, I have witnessed the aspiration and resilience of the Malvern community,” said the first-term councillor in an email from Copenhagen where she is attending a municipal conference.

“However, the inherent challenges associated with having the longest commute times in the entire city, and the 9th lowest after-tax and shelter income, make it very difficult for Malvern residents to get ahead.”

For Stapleton, the numbers in his report confirm his experience in Milliken, once a thriving middle-class part of the city which runs east of Midland Ave. to Middlefield Rd., south of Steeles Ave. to McNicoll Ave.

“I see this daily: in its roads, its parks, its stores, its malls,” Stapleton says in the foreward to his report.

“I see the mail service, the sanitation, snow removal, the transit, and the infrastructure and I know what that looks like and how it feels,” says the retired provincial social services bureaucrat who has advised federal, provincial and municipal politicians on how to fight poverty.

As Toronto’s inner suburbs became less attractive, less expensive and more stigmatized, they also become less able to advocate for themselves, he says.

“Whether the issue is transit, bike lanes, city jobs, infrastructure development, poverty reduction, educational institutions, or affordable housing, Old Toronto is much better at taking care of itself than Scarborough,” he says.

“To me, the lack of public policy advocacy in northern Scarborough is stunning. And being a public policy advocate, I know that when policy advocacy is done well, it gets results,” he says. “Unfortunately, north Scarborough does not take care of itself. It is ineffective when it tries to fight back.”

The northern part of Scarborough had the lowest voter turnout in the last civic election. It has the highest concentration of residents who commute over an hour to work and the highest percentage of residents who don’t speak English or French at between 10 per cent and 49 per cent, Stapleton adds.

Toronto’s NIAs grew out of the Priority Neighbourhood strategy launched by the city and United Way Greater Toronto in 2005 to address an alarming growth of poverty and lack of social services in the city’s inner suburbs.

Thirteen areas were targeted for special attention. City staff were assigned to co-ordinate local services and community planning. And community groups were funded to work with residents to develop neighbourhood action plans, create community gardens, start youth programs and launch other community-building activities.

In 2014, under mayor Rob Ford, the Priority Neighbourhood designation was changed to Neighbourhood Improvement Area, largely due to concerns from some residents that the original label created a stigma.

At that time, the city and the United Way also introduced a new tool to designate NIAs called Urban HEART, which looks at six areas including physical environment and infrastructure, social and human development, economic opportunity, governance, population health and disease-specific concerns.

But by looking at income — and not shelter costs — Stapleton argues the Urban HEART tool underestimates poverty in struggling parts of the city without large concentrations of social housing. And this has led to neighbourhoods such as those in north Scarborough being left out.

That is because low-income residents living in private accommodation often spend much more than 30 per cent of their income on rent and therefore have less money to get by. This is particularly true of the working poor and those living on social assistance, Stapleton says.

It creates a “double or nothing” profile for poor neighbourhoods because areas that already benefit from an abundance of subsidized housing are more likely to get NIA status. Meanwhile, large areas of the city that need NIA resources — such as north Scarborough — don’t have them “simply because they have very little subsidized housing.”

North Scarborough has the lowest level of subsidized housing per capita in the city, the report says. And it has the lowest level of subsidized housing of all NIAs.

“After-shelter income is so obviously the key metric for determining need and vulnerability in a large city with extremely high private-market rents and extremely low public rents,” Stapleton said in an interview.

Bee Lee Soh, an Agincourt rooming house resident who lives on less than $300 a month after paying rent, says her address has excluded her from participating in the Toronto Strong Neighbourhood Strategy 2020, a multi-year effort to improve the health and wealth of the city’s poorest communities.

“It is really frustrating,” said Soh, 58, who says she has tried for years to become a member of a local resident advisory council for the strategy.

Trauma from falling into homelessness over a decade ago and the daily struggle to survive on meagre Ontario Works benefits has made it difficult for Soh to find a stable job. She fills her days volunteering and helping politicians understand poverty, most recently as a member of former federal social development minister Jean-Yves Duclos’s national advisory committee on poverty.

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Despite her extensive volunteer work in northwest Scarborough, Soh says city staff have told her she can’t be a member of the advisory council because she wasn’t nominated by her “local planning table.”

“But we don’t have a local planning table because we aren’t an NIA,” she said. Soh, however, is persistent and after much badgering learned just last month that she would be permitted to participate.

“I am happy to be part of the advisory council. But it just doesn’t seen right how I was treated,” she said.

Stapleton’s report shows that 17 of Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods get no special attention by City Hall. Ten of those communities are in Scarborough, including seven in north Scarborough — north of highway 401 and east of Victoria Park Blvd.

In July, at the request of Toronto Centre Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, city council voted to review the NIA status of North St. James Town, near Bloor and Sherbourne Sts., the 23rd poorest neighbourhood, according to Stapleton’s report.

Scarborough North Councillor Cynthia Lai said she also plans to raise Stapleton’s findings with city staff “to see if any action is warranted.”

But in the meantime, Lai said she has been advocating for more neighbourhood police officers.

“I agree north Scarborough has been neglected,” said Lai, who was first elected a year ago. “It is one of the things that motivated me to run for council.”

Community Development manager John Smith, who oversees 10 community development officers assigned to work with the city’s 31 NIAs, says the city will “definitely” be looking at Stapleton’s report along with other data and focus groups to broaden the Urban HEART assessment tool.

Staff will report to council in the fall of 2020 to get the ball rolling, Smith said.

However, he noted this doesn’t preclude more immediate action in communities such as North St. James Town, where council has already approved increased support in the wake of devastating apartment fires and power outages in the area over the past year.

But there is no question NIA status is an advantage. More than 220 city community grants of between $1,000 and $3,000 have been issued to NIA residents over the past three years. And $12 million has been spent on community infrastructure, such as meeting rooms, community gardens, sports pads and parks, Smith said.

The United Way invested about $17 million in the 31 NIAs and eight other high-need areas including Malvern and Steeles-L’Amoreaux in north Toronto.

Smith says the NIA model helps to co-ordinate a “multi-layered web of community supports, including federal, provincial and local funding investments.” He is hoping to quantify those investments in his report to council next fall.

Lee Soda, executive director of Agincourt Community Services Association, has seen the impact of her area losing Priority Neighbourhood status in 2015 when the NIA model was adopted.

“For us who work in these communities and are on the ground, we have to recognize there has been improvement over the years,” Soda said. “But the Urban HEART tool didn’t factor in everything — particularly the housing piece. And I think it puts this part of Scarborough at a real disadvantage without the status.”

Devika Shah, executive director of Social Planning Toronto also welcomes Stapleton’s report.

“I absolutely agree that north Scarborough is an area of the city that is underserved,” she said in an interview. “Expanding on Urban HEART as an assessment tool for more equitable measures is needed.”

Neighbourhoods that need the support shouldn’t have to be competing against each other, trying to prove who is in greatest need, she said. The city could find the necessary funds by cancelling the “ill-conceived” $1 billion Gardiner Expressway rebuild or spending less on policing, she added.

While the city works to expand it assessment tool, Stapleton’s report would be a good place to get started now, Shah said.

“Just looking at the after-tax income, after-shelter costs alone give you a good indication of which (areas) need additional support,” she said.

The United Way, which partners with the city on NIAs, is also reviewing Stapleton’s analysis.

“Reports like these are important to help us understand the full picture, the diverse contexts and changing dynamics of poverty in the GTA,” said Nation Cheong, the United Way’s vice-president of community opportunities and mobilization.

“In a region as diverse as ours, poverty looks different in different places,” Cheong added. “What’s important is that as a region, we are continuously examining it, naming it, adapting and working together to tackle these challenges.”