Portland, Oreg. think tank City Observatory issued a report last month pointing to persistent poverty rather than gentrification as the key challenge cities face.
City Observatory takes a particular interest in the proliferation of neighbourhoods where more than 30 per cent of the households are living in poverty and the more prosperous precincts where just 15 per cent of households or fewer are below the poverty line.
Canada’s closest equivalent are households with low income after tax.
“The glare of media attention falls on those places that are gentrifying – previously poor neighbourhoods that have experienced investment and which have gained wealthier new residents,” the report states. “While such instances of change are striking, this study shows they are rare.”
With some activists critiquing the effect new developments have on property values and affordability, and others lamenting the loss of vintage homes to new mansions, the report raises the question: Is a similar phenomenon at play in Metro Vancouver?
Statistics Canada census data from 1999 to 2012 indicates that poverty in the Vancouver census metropolitan area is indeed both persistent and growing.
While gentrification transformed some neighbourhoods between 1999 and 2012, the proportion of census tracts with 30 per cent or more of tax filers living in low-income households increased to seven per cent from five per cent. Moreover, the number of prosperous census tracts – those where 15 per cent of tax filers or fewer are low-income — dropped to 25.5 per cent from 32 per cent over the period.
In addition, three key Metro Vancouver areas remain hubs for low-income tax filers: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as far east as Nanaimo Street; downtown New Westminster; and the tracts along Garden City Road in Richmond, from the Fraser River to Westminster Highway.
Yet if poverty is quietly spreading across the region, creating more tracts with high concentrations of low-income households, many tracts that formerly had high rates of low-income households are now faring better.
In fact, 20.8 per cent of families were deemed low-income in 2012, only slightly higher than the 20.2 per cent rate posted in 1999.
pmitham@telus.net
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