Torontoist » poverty

Duly Quoted: Doug Holyday

"I know that when I’m downtown, sometimes you have to walk around these people, they’re right in the middle of the sidewalk and you’ll run over them if you don’t pay attention... And from the taxpayers standpoint we’re paying millions of dollars to try to help people that need it but we’re also paying for it another way, when visitors come to Toronto and they see these people on the street, they probably get the impression that we’re not doing anything or we don’t even care."

Cathy Crowe, Street Fighting Nurse

June Callwood watches over Cathy Crowe as she delivers the fifth annual June Callwood Lecture. Cathy Crowe remembers June Callwood as “a real doer.” Crowe (a community health nurse) met Callwood (a journalist-cum-activist) when Crowe was new to her job and assigned to volunteer at Nellie’s, helping with the shelter’s Sunday dinner. A single mother, [...]

Requiem for a Chair, by John Andras

A group exercise in the main studio at SKETCH. Photo courtesy of Sonya Reynolds. When people in Toronto talk about “The Street,” they usually mean one of two things: the current state of affairs in the boardrooms and trading floors of Bay Street, or life amongst the down-and-out who are scraping by on the city’s [...]

Toronto Centre is Going to the Polls Tomorrow

By-election candidates at the Cabbagetown debate (left to right): Pamela Taylor (PC), Stefan Premdas (Green), moderator Ian McPhail, Cathy Crowe (NDP), and Glen Murray (Liberal). As the municipal elections campaign heats up, another campaign is also underway in Toronto: a by-election in the riding of Toronto Centre for MPP. Toronto Centre is a patchwork of [...]

Rounding Mount Dennis

One of several barber shops on the Mount Dennis stretch of Weston Road. If Toronto, the Greater, is a universe unto itself, then beyond the countless points of light and rapturous, flash-lit starlet nights, there must be, too, some dark matters: specifically, the unchecked growth of neglected living spaces across our metropolis. Neighbourhood decline begins [...]

Let Them Eat Kraft Dinner

Anyone who’s read a newspaper or magazine in the last few months can verify: recession chic is the new black. The only thing more irritating than regularly seeing a decline in the figures on your RRSP statement, though, is the spate of sanctimonious and insulting articles on frugal living being churned out in economy-sized quantities [...]

Economic Crisis, Social Fallout

This is the second in a three-part series exploring the effects of the global economic downturn on Toronto. Last week, economist Walid Hejazi gave an overview of what we’re in for as the slowdown worsens. Next week, a view from the halls of power. Photo by Brad Saunders. Much of the news coverage surrounding the [...]

Innovation Meets Insulation

In step with the crisp winter air that swept into Toronto earlier this week, TAXI Canada has re-launched the 15 Below Project. In case you don’t have time for the full background, TAXI’s Creative Director Steve Mykolyn teamed up with Toronto-based designer Lida Baday last winter to develop a water-and-windproof jacket for the homeless. This [...]

Toronto Still Eating Its Young

Nearing the tail end of a year marked by mounting homelessness, an alarming spike in related deaths, and the continuing closure of an unacceptably high number of emergency hostels and shelters, a report published Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is a timely reminder that, yes, untold numbers of people in Toronto are [...]

Historicist: Forgotten Urban Squalor of The Ward

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Slum – Price’s Lane (August 27, 1914). City of Toronto Archives, Series 372, Sub Series 32, Item 320. In Low Life, Luc Sante writes of how slum districts in contemporary New York—despite [...]

Inverting the City of Neighbourhoods

Photo by Carnotzet from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. North American cities are undergoing a massive change. And it’s not just gentrification, Alan Ehrenhalt writes in The New Republic, it’s a wholesale “demographic inversion.” In Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, and elsewhere, the poor, minorities, and immigrants are being pushed to the outskirts while the affluent—and, in this [...]

Class War Begins, Kids Stupid, Olympic Torch Home

The latest census stats show conclusively that the poor are either getting poorer, or that they’re not. The Star toes the OCAP line, rambling about free trade and crappy jobs, while the Post weighs in for the plutocrats by observing that family incomes have actually grown across the board, and that the income stats are [...]