The Khawaja family spend time in the backyard of their temporary Regent Park home with some neighbours.Della Rollins for The Globe and Mail
For the past five years, Toronto has poured millions of dollars into efforts to counteract widening income disparities by targeting its farthest-flung, most under-serviced neighbourhoods.
Just how these programs are doing depends on who you ask.
Proponents argue it's money well spent - but that results are hard to measure, it's too early to see drastic change and many of the positive changes are intangible.
Detractors - Toronto's new mayor among them - argue the money has been squandered and the city would be better off focusing its efforts, and its limited resources, elsewhere.
The future of these projects - a $40-million priority-neighbourhood initiative and the continuation of an ambitious pilot program to transform the city's high-rise slab apartment buildings - is far from clear in the new administration.
Mayor Rob Ford's new budget chief, Mike Del Grande, knows the challenges of what University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski calls the low-income "City Three" because his ward has one of them.
The Steeles-L'Amoreaux area of Mr. Del Grande's Scarborough-Agincourt ward is one of the city's 13 priority neighbourhoods. It had one of the most significant declines in income, relative to the city's average, over a 35-year period, said a report released Wednesday by the University of Toronto's Cities Centre that flags the disappearance of the city's middle class.
According to municipal statistics, the area is almost 80 per cent visible minority. As a priority neighbourhood, it's the target of funds from multiple sources and levels of government, with funds going toward such programs as settlement services and daycare.
Cyleta Gibson-Sealy got used to seeing well-intentioned organizations try to fix her neighbourhood. So it was with a degree of skepticism that she greeted the latest arrival a few years ago, in the form of the United Way's Action for Neighbourhood Change office -- "Oh here comes another group," the feeling was. "What is it going to be this time?"
But Ms. Gibson-Sealy was won over: "The idea was for us to decide what course we wanted the community to take. We were kind of speechless ... This was a very different approach."
The single mother of two now runs the group's after-school program on top of her own contract work. She has mixed feelings about the "priority neighbourhood" designation, which has acted as both boon and stigma.
Mr. Del Grande's feelings are similarly mixed: The investment in initiatives like extra day care spaces is all well and good, he said. But "that assumption is there are jobs for people to go and work."
"My view is that we're not creating wealth," he said. "If you don't break the cycle to allow people to work then it never gets better. In order for people to work, the government needs to invest in the economy, which is businesses. Businesses create jobs, not government."
It's a crucial moment for many of the city's early attempts at neighbourhood-based revitalization.
Former mayor David Miller's tower renewal project, an ambitious plan to refurbish the city's many slab high-rise apartment buildings, is ready to expand from pilot project to full-scale undertaking.
The priority neighbourhoods program, its money all spent or committed, is preparing to bring forward progress reports to council next year. The city's $37-million Partnership Opportunities Legacy Fund, which compounded an initial $13-million 2008 investment will have completed a total of 23 projects by the end of 2011.
Chris Brillinger, director of the city's community resources unit, said because most of the priority neighbourhoods fall within Prof. Hulchanski's low-income "City Three," it means they're targeting the right areas.
"There's lots of successes in the priority neighbourhoods," he argued. "There's physical and social services infrastructure that wasn't there before. So we're beginning to try to address those needs."
That said, "I'm not making any assumptions" on what kind of directions council will take when it comes time to deciding the program's fate.
"The work of my division is to provide good, solid, fact-based data to council, and then council would give direction on how it would like staff to proceed."
The United Way, too, is reviewing its past five years of localized programming and preparing to move forward with a new five-year plan. In the past five years, the United Way has invested $43.4-million in inner-suburb programs.
Susan McIsaac, for one, says she's optimistic those projects are helping.
"You look at three decades and, yes, it's stark," she concedes. "Particularly sobering is to look at the projection, right? ... Having said all that, a lot of the grounhdwork has been laid now. There is fantastic stuff going on. And we're starting to see some of that is seeding some change."
But it's also an awkward time to go to the city, cap in hand. As budget chief, Mr. Del Grande has been handed the daunting task of slicing millions from the budget as the city cuts or freezes taxes while pledging no service cuts.
Mr. Del Grande wouldn't speculate on what role he thinks the new administration should play in trying to bridge that growing divide. Mr. Ford wasn't available for comment yesterday.
"I really can't answer that, honestly, because we haven't had a good dialogue with respect to the issues," he said. "I think maybe it'd be best to refer that to the mayor."