My sister and her husband and daughter live in the middle of Scarborough. Until she finally caved in and got a driver’s licence and bought a car recently, her commute to work in the old municipality of York lasted two hours—each way—by public transit.

An Ipsos-Reid poll published by Global News this fall shows that 61 per cent of Scarborough residents feel their area of the city is the most neglected part of Toronto. But I don’t need polls or reports to show me that sentiment; I just need to talk to my sister about her commute.

Still, I bristle when I hear newly minted deputy mayor Glenn De Baeremaeker complain that his area of the city is doesn’t receive its “fair share” and that Scarborough is “last in line” when Toronto sets spending prioritiesas he told the York Guardian this week. Or to hear him say, as he did to Global after that poll was published, that it’s spiteful greed from other parts of the city that has caused this situation: “When I’m at the end of the line, and its finally my turn to get my share of the pie, not even an equal share of the pie, just a little bit of the pie, it’s very upsetting for Scarborough residents and politicians to hear politicians from downtown Toronto being very selfish, very self-centered, saying ‘nothing for Scarborough, everything for our people.’”

That’s just not true. As I was reminded recently by a blogger named @cityslikr on Twitter, in 2007, Councillor Norm Kelly (then the chair of the Scarborough Community Council) commissioned and published a report called Fair Share Scarborough to investigate the “wide-spread and deeply held apprehension that Scarborough was indeed not receiving its ‘fair share.’” The conclusions in that report did not show an area being shortchanged — in four of 10 service areas studied, included transportation, it conclusively showed the eastern inner suburb was getting a fair or better than fair deal. In the remaining areas, rather than finding it got less than a fair share, it said the fairness was “uncertain.” In many cases, the uncertainty was caused by having fewer locations of a service, but more of the service or more per-capita funding for the service.

There were fewer libraries than in other areas of the city, for instance, but more books per person in libraries than any other area of the city, and more funding per person for libraries than any area except downtown. It had fewer outdoor ice rinks (just one!) than any other area of the city, but had more indoor ice rinks than the old city of Toronto, and larger ice rinks than any other area of the city.

That report is now seven years old, but since then, if anything, more resources have gone to Scarborough, not fewer. Seven of Toronto’s original 13 “priority neighbourhoods,” identified for extra service and investment between 2006 and 2014, were in Scarborough. A bunch of libraries there have been renovated or rebuilt in the past decade, and a new Scarborough Centre branch is scheduled to open early next year.

Looking at transit plans currently on the books, approved (and sometimes re-approved) by city council in the past two terms, Scarborough will be the site of part of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, virtually all of the Sheppard East LRT, and the Bloor-Danforth subway extension so beloved by De Baeremaeker, giving it the site of more planned new rail stations than any other part of Toronto.

The problems faced in Scarborough do not come from the City Hall crew on Queen Street neglecting it—Toronto has been investing in Scarborough, and making improving life in Scarborough a priority. The problems stem from an earlier era, especially the decade beginning in the mid-1950s, when most of what is now Scarborough was built on what had been farmland. The decisions made then — by an independent Scarborough government elected by the people who lived there — are the reasons it is underserviced.

The one chart in Kelly’s 2007 report that makes sense of almost all of Scarborough’s service difficulties is the one that shows its population density (as of 2001) as the lowest in the city — home to less than half as many people per square kilometre than the old city of Toronto. People in Scarborough are spread out. That is how it was planned. Public transit doesn’t make much sense (practically or financially) in low-density areas, but Scarborough’s planners built it specifically to be a place for people with cars.

Retail stores were built on a mall model and strip-mall model, and community services were planned the same way. Instead of a community centre within walking distance of every home, Scarborough built large regional recreation centres with vast gyms, Olympic-sized pools, and sometimes multiple ice rinks inside them—that’s why Scarborough, with slightly fewer rec centres than old Toronto and East York combined, has more than one-third more square footage of community centre space.

The approach is evident even when it comes to green space. Scarborough has about 100 fewer parks than the old city of Toronto, but they cover about 1,000 hectares more area (and generally have massive parking lots for those who want to visit them).

This regional power-centre model for everything was perhaps a rational decision when it was made by the old city of Scarborough for what was then a middle-class community of car owners. In 1970, according to University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski’s research, Scarborough’s demographics were universally middle-income—it contained not a single low-income neighbourhood. By 2005, the vast majority of Scarborough consisted of low-income neighbourhoods. Which means things like transit service and community centres you can walk to are urgently more important.

When middle-class car owners have to drive 10 minutes to the local rec centre, it looks convenient. When low-income residents need to take two buses for more than half an hour to make the same trip, it looks like a massive lack of service.

The people of Scarborough today are suffering from the choices the people of Scarborough past made.

It’s up to the amalgamated City of Toronto to address the dire circumstances that resulted from poor planning and unanticipated demographic changes. And by all appearances, the City of Toronto has been trying, gradually, to do so since amalgamation, and the need for even more investment has become an ever-bigger part of our debate since about 2006.

Both losing mayoral candidates in the recent election made addressing Scarborough’s challenges a key part of their campaign. Mayor John Tory appointed Glenn De Baermaeker a deputy mayor in part to signal how seriously he takes Scarborough’s challenges.

Fuelling that debate, as the new deputy mayor and some other politicians are prone to do, by feeding the perception that Scarborough’s key challenge is overcoming the greed of downtowners is spiteful and stupidly unproductive. It’s also untrue.

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Stirred-up resentment isn’t going to help people like my sister, stuck on the bus four hours a day. Urgent talk about the need for reasonable solutions to real problems might. Let’s get on it with it.