A Golden Age for the Golden Mile? — Lessons from America
This week, which marked our final week of instruction, we were introduced to the civil society perspective of municipal governance. The subject quickly evolved into a surveying of the controversial matter of urban renewal, particularly with how it applied to an ongoing revitalization project in the Greater Golden Mile neighbourhood of Scarborough. This stretch of suburbia has a storied history of industrial exaltation that heralded a period of prosperity for the area. The seeds were sewn in 1941 when the General Engineering Company of Ontario opened a facility to mass produce ignition devices for numerous implements of war, overseen by the federal government. After WWII, the Golden Mile enjoyed rapid industrial growth with the coming of Svenska Kullagerfabriken (ball bearings), Thermos, John Inglis (Whirlpool), Warner-Lambert (pharmaceuticals), and General Motors. Mass housing soon followed and commercial space took root, most notably with the opening of Golden Mile Plaza which her Royal Majesty herself dedicated ten minutes to in 1959. Discussions of revitalization for this neighbourhood were happening as early as the 1980s in the wake of a continuous de-industrialization of the area, with little industry left remaining today and the commercial landscape now dominated by retail. It is clear that for decades there has been continuous interest on the part of all stakeholders (viz. residents, developers, firms, and politicians) to see the Greater Golden Mile return to glory, escalating to new heights with the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.
Observers of this ongoing revitalization project will notice tensions among interested parties on the consequences of whatever development takes hold in the neighbourhood, namely on the inclusiveness of the ongoing, presumably radical change. Civil society actors such as United Way point out that the GTA’s income distribution among residents across various neighbourhoods is becoming increasingly polarized between the most well off and the worst off. In other words, the middle-income group and its neighbourhoods have been disappearing since the 1980s. If one looks at Scarborough’s distribution map in 2015, zooming in on 1880 Eglinton Ave. East where the Golden Mile strip mall is located, one can get a sense of the economic conditions in the area even along the periphery of the commercial landscape. There are other considerations that go beyond income, such as the proportion of ethnic minorities and immigrants residing in the surrounding area, along with the proportion of elderly residents. There is little question that these residents potentially have the most to gain and the most to lose from the revitalization effort.
Discussions of urban renewal in almost any context inevitably involves some mention of the word gentrification. While the literature on this phenomenon varies widely, they all converge on notions of exclusion from the process of urban change and the results of said change. The class element of this concept is palpable but it is not limited to just residents, but the local firms that serve them as well. One theoretical story of the process of gentrification is that property values soar as investment pours into the area. The consequence, largely as a result of a regressive municipal property tax system, is that the lower income residents and businesses can no longer sustain those costs and are eventually driven out of the neighbourhood. Higher property prices only serve to attract better resourced migrants, whether they be individuals or firms, and so contribute to a profound shift that is all too evocative of a class conquest where the rich invade the domain of the poor (in some parts of the United States, racial discrimination is often embedded in this theoretical story). What’s left is taken over by high-income minded developers or better resourced firms, and so the whole area is transformed into a realm where the worse-off are denied the benefits of urban renewal in their neighbourhoods. Policy-makers and other stakeholders are interested in not having the Golden Mile and its surrounding area become a made-in-Toronto example of urban renewal gone wrong.
Looking south of the forty-ninth parallel, numerous American cities have been grappling with the perilous balancing act of healing urban decay without the ills wrought from the side-effect of gentrification. This is also a context where much effort has been dedicated to answering the following empirical question to the above theoretical story: Does gentrification result in serious displacement of lower income residents, especially those of a racialized minority? Some research from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) may assist us in understanding the impact of gentrification on these residents. One of their reports found that ~111,000 Black Americans were displaced as a result of gentrification in various neighbourhoods across American cities between 2000 and 2013. Most of these displacements have happened in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Seattle. Yet the report indicated that out of the 1,049 census tracts that were actually gentrified, a subset of 11,196 census tracts that were deemed susceptible to gentrification in 2000, only 232 of them showed displacement of Black or Latino residents. The only cities that were experiencing this sort of impact from gentrification were a tiny minority and were only detected in a small number of neighbourhoods. Although this shows that this specific displacement effect of gentrification is not so pervasive, the senior research analyst of NCRC and co-author of this study, Bruce Mitchell, said that this still constitutes an emergency for those affected places. According to him, this is an emergency due to the extreme housing affordability issues that accompany gentrification, which substantiates the above theoretical story on the displacement effect of gentrification. It is worth emphasizing that this report defined gentrification as census tracts experiencing increases in education levels, household incomes, and housing values — happening as a result of an “influx of investment and changes to the built environment.”
Mitchell also says that gentrification may look different among cities, a suggestion that manifestations of the phenomenon are context-sensitive. Indeed, the Greater Golden Mile area of Scarborough is starting from a position nothing like the crisis situations that gripped numerous American urban locales throughout the decades, such as the South Bronx in New York City. Many of these former crisis neighbourhoods in America’s most prominent cities were historically slums. They were often left economically stunted through the discriminatory practice of redlining, which typically involves “denying borrowers access to credit based on the location of properties in minority or economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods.” The challenge nonetheless remains the same: Channelling investment in a struggling neighbourhood with the purpose of improving quality of life and economic standing, and without displacing the people who should be benefitting from it. Given the care being dedicated to ensuring that the evolution of the Greater Golden Mile serves humanistic ends as best as possible, and that Scarborough does not have a similar troubled history as the aforementioned American cities, I am cautiously optimistic that this vision will be realized.
