By SANDRO CONTENTAFeature Writer
Monday October 1, 2018
U of T professor David Hulchanski has done a lot of work on the city’s demographics, especially relating to income. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star file photo)
In Toronto, the colour of money is mainly white.
New demographic charts show a strikingly segregated city, with visible minorities concentrated in low-income neighbourhoods and white residents dominating affluent areas in numbers far higher than their share of the population.
The new charts come from University of Toronto Prof. David Hulchanski and his research team, known for using census data to illustrate growing income inequality in the city. Their latest effort flags the role of discrimination in that inequality, with lopsided racial breakdowns that surprised the researchers.
“It’s starker than we would expect,” Hulchanski said in an interview.
Hulchanski revealed the new charts last week in the Netherlands at a conference called “Urban poverty and segregation in a globalized world.”
Using the 2016 census, his team calculated that 48 per cent of Toronto’s census tracts are low-income neighbourhoods, where the average individual income is $32,000 before taxes.Fully 68 per cent of residents in these neighbourhoods are visible minorities while 31 per cent are white. (Whites make up 49 per cent of Toronto’s population.)
The main ethno-cultural communities in these low-income neighbourhoods are all overrepresented compared to their share of the city’s population. Black residents, for example, are 9 per cent of the population but make up 13 per cent of residents of low-income neighbourhoods.
High-income neighbourhoods are almost a reverse image. They make up 23 per cent of Toronto’s census tracts, with average individual incomes of $102,000 before tax. Fully 73 per cent of residents in these neighbourhoods are white, far higher than their share of the city’s population. The rest are visible minorities, of whom only 3 per cent are Black.
Whites are also overrepresented in middle-income neighbourhoods, where the average income is $49,000.
“Money buys choice. And people with the most choice are choosing to live in certain areas,” Hulchanski says, explaining the disproportionately high concentration of white residents in high- and middle-income communities.