Exactly what was lost, and what has changed, is there on the maps.
The first, a snapshot of income distribution in Metro Vancouver in 1970, shows a uniform expanse of middle class neighbourhoods. They blanket all of Metro. Small enclaves of rich and poor areas exist within that expanse, but they are anomalies. It was a middle class world then, as close, maybe, as we’ve ever been to income equilibrium. Seen from the vantage of the present, there is in that map an element that is comforting.
The second map, of Metro Vancouver in 2005, shows a city transformed. It is not one city now but three — a city of the increasingly affluent, a city of the increasingly poor and a city of the middle class losing territory to both. Where the first map showed a unified city, the second shows one fracturing into pieces.
The maps are the work of a research team headed by Prof. David Ley of the University of B.C.’s geography department. Their study — Divisions and Disparities: Socio-Spatial Income Polarization in Greater Vancouver, 1970-2005 — is the first stage of a six-year research project looking at six Canadian metropolitan areas (each with its own research group).
“The objectives are to examine the causes, consequences and policy responses to these changes,” Ley wrote in an email. “We plan to examine such factors as the emerging post-industrial urban economy with its dual labour market of good paying professional/managerial jobs but also minimum wage service jobs, part-time jobs, seasonal jobs and no jobs. Of related importance is the decline of good-paying unionized blue-collar jobs (and unionization in general). The declining contribution of the welfare state is also relevant. The difficulty that immigrants have in entering good-paying jobs is also a concern, and new immigrant status is becoming an important predictor of poverty areas.”
In other words, how did we come to this, and what, if anything, should we do about it?
Using data from the Canadian census over the 35-year period, Ley and his group found a startling acceleration toward income disparity.
“In 1970,” the study states “the majority of tracts (71% of them) were ‘middle income,’ with an average individual income within 20% of the CMA average of $5,220. Only 16% of tracts were above the mean, clustered primarily in West Vancouver and Vancouver’s west side neighbourhoods, and in contrast 13% of tracts fell more than 20% below the mean, dominated by a centralized cluster of tracts coinciding with Vancouver’s deprived Downtown Eastside district.”
Thirty-five years later?
“But the middle-income city of the 1970s has gravitated toward a polarized city by the 2000s. By 2005, the share of the middle-income neighbourhoods had fallen to 53% of the region’s census tracts. A substantial increase has occurred in the prevalence of the two poles, above and below middle-income status. The share of low- and very low-income neighbourhoods increased from 13% to 23% and the proportion of high- and very-high income neighbourhoods increased from 16% to 24% respectively.”
And that trend of polarization, Ley wrote to me, is more likely to affect the middle class adversely.
“The low income proportion has grown faster than the high income proportion. So as districts leave middle income, they are more likely to drop into low income status than high income.”
The polarization of high and low income earners, and the hollowing out of the middle class, has a distinct geographic expression in Metro Vancouver.
In another map, not shown here, Ley’s team tracked areas by changes in individual income. Where once high-income neighbourhoods were confined to their traditional enclaves in West Vancouver and Vancouver’s west side, Ley’s research showed an significant expansion in areas where incomes have risen above the median, including almost all of the North Shore, much of the downtown peninsula, more than half of the city of Vancouver, parts of Richmond, Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, east and south Surrey and Langley Township.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen an increasing suburbanization of the metro area’s poor and less-affluent — with just more than half of that component made of up immigrants. The truly destitute are still concentrated in the Downtown Eastside, but many lower-income residents have been forced out of the affluent inner city in a kind of diaspora, flung to the older urban and suburban fringes.
“In particular,” the report stated, “clusters of neighbourhoods with declining average individual incomes relative to the metropolitan average include the SkyTrain transit corridor in the southeast of Vancouver, through parts of the suburban municipalities of Burnaby, New Westminster, and Coquitlam, and especially in Richmond, North Surrey, and Langley City.”
Ley’s conclusion is not a pretty one. He sees a city that continues to move toward one divided dangerously along widening inco me and racial lines.
“Further analysis of the three cities shows sharp distinctions involving immigration and ethnic status. City #1 (those parts of the city above median income) is overwhelmingly the home of the native-born. In contrast there has been a marked increase in immigrants in the remainder of Metro Vancouver, and especially in City #3 (those parts of the city below median income), which has shifted from a majority native-born in 1971 to an immigrant majority in 2006. City #3 also includes a plurality of visible minorities (61 per cent) while City #1 does not (23 per cent).
“To paraphrase W. B. Yeats, ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.’”
That centre continues to shrink. What happens if it disappears entirely, and we’re left with nothing but two sides and a divide between them?