Neighborhood Change in Canadian Cities: socio-spatial inequalities in Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, 2001-2016

Keywords: neighborhood change, metropolitan inequality, urban development
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56

Abstract

Recent research on urban inequality and neighborhood change has shown increasing polarization in many cities. Often better off neighborhoods pull ahead, and less well-off areas fall behind. This work has often focused on total change in neighborhood income and direction of those changes but does not look at the influence of 1) the changing dispersion of the neighborhood distribution (inequality), 2) overall growth or decline (growth), or 3) the exchange of relative positions within the urban hierarchy (exchange) on total change. We examine neighborhood income change across census tracts in the three largest Canadian census metropolitan areas (CMAs), Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, over the 2001-2016 period. Using techniques from income and neighborhood mobility research (Van Kerm, 2004; Modai-Snir & Van Ham, 2018), we estimate the contribution of structural (i.e. inequality and growth) and urban-level (i.e. exchange) factors to the changing socio-spatial structure of cities.
Our primary goal is to describe each component’s contribution to total change. We show that in large metropolitan areas neighborhood change is driven largely by changes in the relative income of neighborhoods rather than deepening inequality or growth. However, change related to inequality is tied to the initial position of neighborhoods. Rising inequality is associated with incomes decreasing in low-income areas and increasing in affluent areas, supporting previous findings on polarization. We link these results to socio-demographic and environmental (e.g., land use, air quality, roads, parks, vegetation) data, allowing us to describe how social and physical environments are associated with neighborhood change within each metropolitan area.