Which is best, east end or west? The debate about which side of Yonge Street can claim cultural superiority in Toronto is longstanding, and often a lot of fun, and we’ve seen it revived in a few articles this week in the Star.

As a South Riverdale boy who moved to Scarborough in his teens, I have a deep bias toward seeing the east represented well. But as an adult who made a marital home in the Annex and is now raising children in the Junction, I obviously have a lot of love for the west. I can take either side in the argument, depending on the day.

But today I’m not that interested in arguing either side, because as fun as it is as a subject of cocktail conversation, it reminds me a bit of an argument about higher education in which people debate whether Harvard or Yale is the better place to go to school. It mostly compares two similar things — and two similarly affluent, obviously excellent things, at that — and ignores the bigger, more concerning divide.

The east-west conversation in Toronto usually focuses on a set of “Great? Or greater?” propositions: Kensington Market or the Gay Village? Sunnyside Beach or Kew Beach? Riverdale Farm or High Park Zoo? Dining in Greektown or Little Italy? Wheeling strollers past salvage shops in Leslieville or The Junction?

More on thestar.com:

Why living in the west beats the east

Here's why the east trumps the west end in Toronto

Toronto's east or west? Comedians gear up for battle

You can notice a few things about all the places that come up in these conversations: they’re all pretty great, first of all; they’re all in neighbourhoods where a detached home would cost approximately a bajillion years of savings for the average family; and most of them are south of Bloor or Danforth.

The thing is, that’s not really a cross-section of Toronto city life. In a very diverse city, the stretch of high-profile glamour spots south of Bloor along the lake, from the Scarbrough Bluffs to the shores of Mimico, is fairly homogenous: these wards all voted for John Tory (with a few exceptions, where they voted for Olivia Chow); these areas generally have increasing incomes to go with their skyrocketing real estate prices; and according to David Hulchanski’s famous Three Cities within Toronto research, most of this is “City 1,” where 82 per cent of people are white (though some of it is “City 2,” where only two-thirds of people are white).

Meanwhile, there’s a whole big city to the north that is generally invisible to the east-west rivalry conversation, and often invisible to people who don’t live there. Forget the Bloor St. psychological marker. Look up, way up, north of the 401, where at least a third of Toronto’s land area lies and hundreds of thousands of people live. There are attractions up there — Black Creek Pioneer Village, the Toronto Zoo, Downsview and Rouge Park — but they are the kind of places you visit on school trips, or once every few years with the kids if you don’t live nearby. There is amazing food to be had, good malls for shopping, and some good communities, but if you don’t live in them, it’s a good bet you seldom have reason to visit them. These are the places the subway mostly doesn’t reach.

In the east and the west, this north end of the city is where poverty is growing the fastest and remains most concentrated — in both Etobicoke and Scarborough, more than 90 per cent of neighbourhoods north of the 401 are classified “low income” by Hulchanski’s report. This is “City 3,” where a solid majority of residents are immigrants and more than two-thirds are visible minorities. And this, in the northeast, and the northwest, is where they still recited the pledge of allegiance to Ford Nation during the last election.

It’s less fun to have a south-versus-north debate in Toronto, for the same reasons it’s less fun to debate the merits of Harvard against those of any given community college: because one end of the comparison has all the advantages and privileges, ones only some people can afford. It winds up being a discussion about haves and have-nots. And as we know from city hall, that debate can wind up full of resentment and bitterness.

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But whether it makes good party banter or not, that’s the real divide in Toronto, between the north and the south. What we need is not actually a debate between them at all, but a discussion. Not a rivalry, but an acknowledgment of differences that need to be addressed. A collective to-do list of city building tasks that we can focus on accomplishing.