With a high-stakes election just two months away, it’s increasingly clear that Toronto, circa 2014, offers up a tale of two cities, and seemingly many more.

In recent months, realtors have reported that average home prices have topped $1 million. At the same time, local politicians and social activists warn that one in four Toronto young people can’t find work. The downtown hums with Manhattan-style construction, tech startups and trendy restaurants. Some suburban enclaves, meanwhile, grapple with child poverty rates as high as 50 per cent, according to a report released this week.

While affluence and poverty collide in gentrifying neighbourhoods like Parkdale, the reality is that these disparities have become more pronounced, and more localized. As University of Toronto sociologist David Hulchanski has shown in his Three Cities study, Toronto neighbourhoods in the past two generations have seen increasing concentrations of rich or poor residents, while middle class communities are rapidly disappearing.

The result is a paradox. While Toronto is one of the world’s most heterogeneous cities — almost half the residents were born outside Canada — and prides itself on its reputation as a city of neighbourhoods, a more precise description of our urban condition is that Toronto is now a city of enclaves.

We are more likely to remain in our own self-contained zones — home, work, shopping, recreation — than to directly experience the city’s social diversity. As one MIT urbanist said in a speech in Toronto this week, city dwellers stick to their “tribes.”

Urban diversity, of course, extends beyond the proliferation of interesting ethnic restaurants. These days, it’s also about class, and the stark social chasms writ large on the city’s geography. This is a far less edifying picture than the one we show the world when we congratulate ourselves about how Toronto fares on international livability rankings.

Those divisions are etched deeply on the city’s politics. While Mayor Rob Ford went out of his way to exaggerate suburban anger at the “downtown elites,” the underlying social dynamics are difficult to deny: the postwar suburbs now have more poverty than the inner city, as well as inadequate services, crumbling infrastructure, and zones of high unemployment and stubborn commercial stagnation. Despite a common area code, it’s hard to reconcile the economic fragility of communities like Kingston Galloway with the showy affluence of Lawrence Park or the urban buzz of downtown.

It’s no wonder that the politics of division has become a more compelling pitch to voters than calls to bolster civic empathy.

Anyone who has visited a Toronto school in recent years will understand that there are few places that mirror the city’s social complexity quite like a classroom or the auditorium on the night of the school concert. The children come from every corner of the Earth. In most schools, the ethnic and racial diversity is a fact of life. There’s no longer such a thing as a “foreign-sounding” name or a “strange” accent. An array of cultural holidays and festivals are carefully observed, not out of political correctness but in recognition of the fact that the students come equipped with so many traditions.

While Toronto’s educators do a fine job encouraging students to partake of one another’s rituals and cultural histories, they have more difficulty with the pricklier side of the diversity picture, which has to do with income. How does a teacher manage a classroom where some students live in expensive homes while others are stuck in basement apartments? The kids who ski and travel sit next to children whose parents rely on city-run day camps and can’t afford holidays.

There’s no question such intermingling is enormously healthy. Middle and upper-middleclass families have all but abandoned the public system in many U.S. cities.

Toronto has ducked that bullet. But while they may share a classroom, what do children from sharply divergent socio-economic backgrounds learn about one another’s circumstances? Sure, they may have play dates when they’re young. But do their parents reach across those divides to form friendships, or are the economic gaps — expressed in terms of housing and lifestyle choices — simply too vast to be bridged?

There’s another, far more sensitive question — one that speaks to the future cohesiveness of the city: How do our educators confront the issue of class, that elephant in the classroom?

Children may emerge from Toronto’s elementary schools with a working knowledge of Diwali and Chanukah customs. But what do they learn about the way income inequality imprints itself on 21st-century cities like Toronto? It’s not difficult for young people to absorb the fact that city living is costly and that good jobs are hard to find. Less straightforward is understanding what income inequality actually entails. A 16-year-old at Yonge and Lawrence has a different perception of the city and its affordability than her peer in Lawrence Heights, just a few minutes drive away. Outside school, their paths may seldom, if ever, cross.

Do they understand why some parents earn a lot of money and others earn very little, even after putting in long hours? And how do they come to appreciate the relative nature of money, or, put another way, why $60 — the cost of the vehicle registration fee cancelled by Ford early in his term — may be little more than spare change for the parents of one student but a Christmas season’s shopping budget to another.

These are uncomfortable, though essential, questions for the classroom. Indeed, in terms of real-world learning, Toronto’s dramatic income diversity represents a crucial starting point for preparing young people to live in a complex urban future.

With school resuming this week, one way to begin a conversation about civic empathy is to tackle it at the most basic level: how do people from different income levels manage household budgets in Toronto? It seems like a promising way to unpack these questions. After all, most teens think about money. They may have allowances or part-time jobs. They want to buy things, and go out with their friends. They may even do some rudimentary budgeting. So why not ask them to figure out how families in Toronto make ends meet?

During this summer’s Maximum City program, a two-week urban-issues program at the University of Toronto Schools, students from across the GTA were given the challenge that thousands of households face every week: budgeting food, housing, transportation, recreation, clothing, the works. They had to figure out how to live reasonably comfortably — whatever that means — in a city with world-class living costs?

The crux of the project was to tackle these ordinary budgeting problems for everyone from the working poor to the 1 per cent. The class broke into groups, and each had to devise a plausible all-in budget for households at various income levels ($20,000 to $220,000), compositions, employment and locational requirements (see sidebar).

Each group began by building an identity for their household, choosing demographic variables such as religion, hobbies, professions and other factors, e.g., logistical headaches, such as having one parent working downtown and the other working in Mississauga. Some groups had singles — a young adult living alone, or a senior — while others had extended families, with grandparents living under the same roof. Each group was given a fixed annual income to work with, and they had to make it last.

To develop their budgets, the students had to use the sort of online resources available to anyone — mortgage calculators, rental listings and son on. They travelled around the city, looking at neighbourhoods with a range of housing costs and comparing available services — community centres, transit access, etc.

They quickly discovered just how relative money is. The monthly condo fee in an upmarket building can easily exceed the entire household budget for a family living in a low-income community.

Food costs also brought revelations. The students visited various supermarkets and created grocery lists for a family of four for a week. From there, they calculated monthly and annual food costs, and estimated what percentage of a family budget should go to these staples: was 20 per cent a realistic amount? And what about the cost of an occasional restaurant outing or the expense of hosting friends or family for dinner?

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Accounting for sales taxes, the students came back with a range of grocery bills, which varied from $200 to $400 per week — or $10,000 to $20,000 annually. Those outlays got them talking — just like adults — about when and where they could save on food: eggs or granola at one west-end store, or inexpensive produce in Chinatown.

The heftiest expense for most Toronto families, however, is not food. Housing gobbles up the largest chunk of any pay cheque, with many Torontonians spending up to half of their household income on this category.

The students scoured Craigslist, Kijiji and MLS listings for shelter solutions that didn’t cripple their family budgets. After some due diligence and fact-checking, they discovered that if a listing looked too good to be true, it usually was. Some found that owning could be cheaper than renting, provided they had enough of a down payment to make the mortgage payments manageable. They also had to add utilities, Internet, Netflix subscriptions and property taxes (for the half of the city who own their homes).

After they’d completed the research, each group had to present — and in some cases defend — their chosen family’s household budget to their peers.

What did they learn? One group had looked at the needs of a single 27-year-old tech worker renting in St. Lawrence Market who was struggling with student loan payments. They reckoned she could get by on an entry-level salary of $45,000, despite high food and entertainment expenses.

Another group modelled the experiences of a retired teacher taking on some supply-teaching gigs. He gave up his golf membership when he had to miss some part-time shifts due to health reasons. Yet he could live securely in the Annex condo he’d bought outright after selling his house.

Things got tougher for the single dad without a car who worked in the Discovery District and had to find an apartment in a central location large enough for him and his two teenaged daughters. Using an online rental listing service, that group found a cramped two-bedroom walk-up in Harbord Village so they could all walk, transit or bike to work and school. But to cover the cost of overnight camp for one daughter, they had to sacrifice restaurant dinners and take on a part-time job.

The households at the extremes of the income range yielded the most revealing insights. A family of five earning $20,000 found a rent-geared-to-income apartment in Regent Park. But they needed additional informal income, so the grandmother cleaned houses a few times a week while the family’s 16-year-old worked part-time at a fast-food restaurant. They covered food and child-care bills using help from relatives and subsidies.

The students calculated that it is mathematically possible, though extremely difficult, to live on $20,000 a year. More importantly, they learned there was no margin of error. If something went wrong — an illness or unplanned expense — the family had nothing to fall back on.

While it may seem counterintuitive, there were also financial challenges at the other end of the income spectrum. One group had to plan for a family of four earning $220,000. Using a $200,000 down payment from the sale of a starter home, the students searched for a new home. But they rapidly discovered that finding a suitable replacement has become tough and competitive. They looked at a High Park semi but realized they couldn’t afford the mortgage and still have enough for transportation and education.

They settled instead for a three-bedroom condo with low fees so they could afford to send one child to a private school on a partial bursary while the other attended the local public school. The family had enough to buy an SUV and take a trip to Florida. These kinds of trades-off may seem like minor problems if you’re making do with a 10th of that income and saving nothing. But after crunching the numbers, the group with the affluent family realized that even a seemingly impressive income doesn’t go quite as far as the gross figure might suggest, especially in an era of skyrocketing housing prices.

On one level, Maximum City’s household budget project offered a new way to get students to think about numbers. In a province suffering from a sharp slide in high school math scores, it could be argued that this kind of real-world exercise provides a compelling and practical alternative to standard numeracy curriculum.

This kind of learning, however, goes well beyond financial literacy. The budgeting exercise was designed to get these students to think and feel like young people and families living in unfamiliar Toronto neighbourhoods contending with sharply different economic and social conditions.

In a city as vast and varied as Toronto, it is difficult yet possible to live on a wide range of budgets. What’s missing is civic empathy — a shared appreciation about the specific challenges facing individuals and families at different points along the city’s income spectrum. Their budgeting exercise — steeped as it is in mundane details about the price of milk or the location of an apartment — prompted the students to think and talk about daily life beyond their own families experiences.

Indeed, by spending time walking in someone else’s shoes and confronting thorny financial problems beyond their own experience, they found themselves grappling with a fundamental question: What kind of city do they aspire to live in?