Inner Suburbs at Stake: Investing in Social Infrastructure in Scarborough

It is now impossible to ignore that Toronto is becoming a divided city. Stacks of research confirm trends that are plainly visible in the urban landscape: social polarization, spatial segregation, and a deepening racialization of poverty are defining features of our city’s social geography. These trajectories come together in powerful ways in the city’s inner suburbs. Increasingly home to communities of people living in concentrated poverty, the residents of low‐income inner suburban communities are also increasingly people of colour. These trends are not new. As early as 1979, the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto reported these emerging patterns, sounding a call to government, service providers and researchers. These trends are also not operating in isolation. Despite the widespread concern for “suburban decline,” population change and disinvestment in the inner suburbs are part of metropolitan scale urban change that is also propelling the downtown core to become wealthier and whiter. This latter trend is rarely understood as a problem, even as it too is constitutive of a dividing city. Despite the longstanding nature of these patterns and their metropolitan scale, they have garnered a flurry of public and policy attention over the past few years that focus specifically on the inner suburbs. The most prominent initiative – crafted jointly by the City of Toronto and the United Way of Greater Toronto – is the “Priority Neighbourhood” (PN) strategy. The PN strategy has two central aims: to invest in underserviced communities and to transform the way in which local residents, city staff and service providers participate in community planning. Targeted investment is geared toward building physical and social infrastructure in underserviced communities, while the emphasis on community‐based planning and resident engagement aims to cultivate collaboration across non‐profit, public, and resident organizations, spur creative projects and initiatives, and empower residents. The PN framework has important goals and has achieved notable success, yet it is also infused with perennial problems. Architects of the PN strategy mobilize a controversial literature on “neighbourhood effects,” which brackets the broader context for neighbourhood change and may place responsibility for poverty on the residents of lowincome neighbourhoods. As critics of this literature have charged, the exclusive focus on the neighbourhood scale misdiagnoses poverty as a purely local problem rather than as a complex problem that manifests itself locally. Solutions to poverty that focus exclusively on the local scale sideline well‐documented causes of segregation, polarization, and racialization that stem from broader forces such as the economy and government policy. Ironically, approaches rooted in the neighbourhood effects literature often avoid addressing poverty directly, focusing instead on cultural or behavioural change such as the cultivation of civic engagement. Finally, spatially targeted policy oversimplifies the complexity of social networks and everyday life, creating arbitrary boundaries for residents and agencies in accessing resources. For targeted investment to be effective, it needs to be seen as one ingredient in a broader strategy for change and not an end in itself. Indeed, this report finds that some “neighbourhood strategies” are more effective than others. Drawing on a pilot study that contrasts the experiences of the Kingston‐ Galloway/Orton Park (KGO) priority neighbourhood, with Parkdale, a downtown community that faces similar social and economic challenges but which did not receive PN designation, the report demonstrates that how we diagnose the problems in neighbourhoods matters profoundly in how we respond. This research further suggests that there are different ways of understanding neighbourhoods active within the PN strategy. According to residents and community workers, some ways of making sense of neighbourhoods and making change in neighbourhoods are more effective and responsive than others, and this report explores these strategies and practices in some detail. It includes findings about both effective and ineffective strategies. Effective neighbourhood strategies cultivate social infrastructure. They stem from explanations for concentrated poverty that assign responsibility to government policy and economic change at the local, regional, national, and global scale. They restore investment in human services and facilities in areas that have been overlooked, but they also advocate change at scales much larger than the local in order to respond to social polarization, segregation, and the racialization of poverty. Effective strategies for neighbourhoods are tailor‐made for local conditions by local communities. They are accountable and inclusive, provide meaningful skills development that responds directly to identified gaps and needs, and they explicitly address persistent inequalities such as those that are manifest along the lines of race, mental health, class, and gender. Ineffective neighbourhood strategies in Toronto tend to drain local capacity. They often assume cultural explanations for concentrated poverty that assign responsibility to lowincome neighbourhoods or the people who live in them. Ineffective neighbourhood strategies download responsibility for problems experienced in neighbourhoods to the neighbourhood itself and yet extend little or no voice and authority to residents of those neighbourhoods. Ineffective strategies take a top‐down, cookie‐cutter approach to neighbourhood investment, undermining the agency and autonomy of the communities they ostensibly aim to support