This story in Metro suggests a relationship:
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It makes sense that those whose income is below the average (an important distinction from ‘impovershed’) would live near SkyTrain; people who can’t afford cars or high parking prices want to live near high-frequency transit. Those families who can afford multiple cars have the choice to live far away from frequent transit service – unlike those with lower incomes.
Arguably, SkyTrain makes for a better quality of life (and leaves more discretionary income in the pockets) for those with less money or choices. It certainly means those who live near SkyTrain have more access to jobs and services than if they were stranded in distant Motordom.
In other words, a good thing. But the headline implies otherwise.
Skytrain attracts denser residential land uses. So a household can live far from the high costs of downtown living, while saving money being close to the train and living in smaller units.
Enhanced public transit empwers choice and one would think that greater choice would be welcomed in most neighbourhoods.
Gord – I agree with you that the headline and tone of the article does no service to anyone, insstead increases fears about transit.I read the maps as saying that people with below average incomes are increasingly able to find greater housing and neighbourhood choice, which is a good thing. That outlying communities become more economically diverse rather than strtified in the process is also a good thing.
The very interstin gpoint that should not be missed is sthat the so-called middle class is shrinking, with more households going down rather than up on the income ladder. Also that the Vancovuer of the 1970s was mostly a middle class city.
Skytrain doesn’t cause poverty. It is now a proven impetus for creating ghettos though. j/k 😉
Actually, my research indicates that the lower income trend is only present along the original Expo line. Majority of the new development around the Millenium line for example has brought more middle income residents into those neighborhoods.
Boom.
I suspect also that the development along the SkyTrain lines has made housing more affordable while the resistance to and lack of new housing development in many parts of Vancouver has lead to the lack of affordability. It shows that the claim by those who are anti-density that new development will decrease affordability is not correct.
Apologies for all the typos in my previous post. Argh!
Richard Florida also reported on this study on The Atlantic Cities: “their recent report, ‘Divisions and Disparities in Lotus-Land: Socio-Spatial Income Polarization in Greater Vancouver, 1970-2005,’ paints a Vancouver riven with inequality and the growing geographic segmentation of its classes” (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/11/growing-urban-class-divide-vancouver-edition/3302/). I took a look at the study and did not find it convincing.
True there is an increase in income inequality, as there is in many places, but the division of the city into “three cities”, an elite, a shrinking middle class, and a third lower income area primarily composed of recent immigrants does not match with experience. The reorganization of the city away from a concentric model where lower income belts surround the core is certainly true, but it is associated with many other things besides the “three cities”. There has been a change in redevelopment patterns where light industrial areas and single family homes are converted into apartment housing (or secondary suites are added to single family houses). This has occurred along the Skytrain line because it is a sensible place for that type of housing, and that type of housing attracts middle and lower income people because it is more affordable. It is not that the existing people in the area are made poorer by Skytrain. Immigrant catchment areas have changed from the inner belt to areas throughout the region and those areas are often lower income. But they do not stay lower income. Immigrants and their children experience higher incomes the longer they stay (although that process has slowed down lately). There also doesn’t seem to be an increased geographic segmentation by class, but actually a bit more mixing throughout the region.
“I took a look at the study and did not find it convincing. True there is an increase in income inequality, as there is in many places, but the division of the city into “three cities”, an elite, a shrinking middle class, and a third lower income area primarily composed of recent immigrants does not match with experience.”
Do you ideologically disagree with the research or find the methodology flawed? The creation of “three cities” is used to cluster the findings into manageable data sets that can be analyzed based on income (by three groupings), and to demonstrate how these have changed over time. And I’m not sure what you mean by “does not match with experience”. Unfortunately, the “experience” of many immigrants is the experience of higher incidence of poverty in suburban settings.
I’m not sure that the paper has an ideology besides publish or perish so I don’t disagree with it ideologically. David Ley was my professor for a few classes at UBC, and he didn’t seem very ideological. Never got the idea that he thought gentrification was necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.
I just don’t think the paper is very descriptively useful. Yes you can group people into three groups to see how the composition of the three groups changed, but it does not offer much explanatory power for what is going on.
They discuss the changes in employment in a post-industrial city, but it isn’t clear how those changes in employment actually map on to the groups or on to the city. That is a whole different data set. It isn’t clear whether there is more of less social mobility in Vancouver than in the past. Some of the data like the higher income areas that have a falling average income just doesn’t match their hypothesis of a consolidation of the first city.
And the geographic changes seem driven by changing immigrant catchment and changing redevelopment patterns that have nothing to do with three cities. Three cities analysis just obscures that. And the groups are just too big to draw any conclusions about poverty.
A few thoughts… Note the increase in number and decrease in size of the census tracts. Incresed density and finer detail results. Dark red has decresed is good. Increase in blue is…. bad? good? 1931 or 1936 map would be interesting to compare. How many blog readers lived through the Depression? Or read “10 Lost Years”?
(My dad has apparently taken control of my typing. “Tory times are tough times” adds Gran) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_%281938%29