It's high time to deal with the crisis of its inner city. For too long, local leaders and opinion makers have preferred to ignore alarming developments in the very heart of Toronto, clinging instead to the old ideologies of multiculturalism and mixed incomes. Let's get real, folks.
The plain truth is that our inner city is now a virtual ghetto dominated by a single ethnic group - one that is increasingly cut off and isolated from the rainbow-hued paradise we all hoped to build in the new century. Once merely embarrassing, it has become a bolus in the craw of our enlightenment.
To be sure, Toronto is still a remarkably diverse city - and getting more so all the time, according to the 2006 census. But diversity does not settle evenly, like manna from heaven. While Toronto as a whole has become a world-historical immigrant reception centre, the inner city remains a realm apart, inhabited almost exclusively by Canadian-born white people.
The new census does record some progress toward achieving greater diversity in the inner city. "These very wealthy neighbourhoods were 82 per cent white in 2006, down from 85 per cent in 1996," David Hulchanski and Richard Maaranen of the University of Toronto's Centre for Urban and Community Studies observed in a recent analysis. But the problem remains.
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Although clear enough, the picture shifts slightly depending on how one defines "inner city." Defined as an income ghetto, the bolus assumes a vertically ellipsoid shape centred on the intersection of Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue. Viewed as the one zone of Toronto with a steadily decreasing concentration of immigrants, it becomes the familiar inverted "T" of the old city.
How naive the reformers of the past century were when they attempted to wipe that Rorschach blot from our primal map by amalgamating the privileged old city with the have-not suburbs. As is so often the case, the free market overrode the social engineers. Massive private investment in the inner city since then, producing all those towers, has only widened the divisions. The old map is ineradicable. (For the full picture, visit urbancentre.utoronto.ca/gtuo.)
You can see it everywhere. It's in the locations of the school pools, stubborn relics of the old days, arrayed in an inverted "T." Or consider the map released by property-tax activists at Queen's Park this week, which identifies the neighbourhoods where house prices have risen fastest over the past three years - and where even more of the overall tax burden will shift following reassessment this fall. It's the same one.
The real-estate map, based on a professional analysis commissioned by the Coalition After Property Tax Reform, could be the most starkly revealing of all. The median house price in the neighbourhoods on either side of Yonge Street south of the 401 increased by 45 per cent over the past three years. House prices doubled in the most desirable inner-city pockets. The market, as every inner-city inhabitant will attest - ad infinitum at cocktail parties - is white hot.
In Scarborough, by contrast, the median house price increased by 13 per cent over the same time. While the inner-city market raged, property values in many outlying neighbourhoods failed to beat inflation.
The frustrated social engineers will appreciate one result of this growing division: increasing fiscal transfers from the wealthy centre to the struggling periphery. But as everybody knows, that's not the way Toronto is supposed to work. Fiscal transfers don't heal wounds. This is one we ignore at our peril.
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