A city of outliers
A healthy ring of suburban communities around the outside and a struggling centre in the middle
ON THE WHOLE, Hamilton is a pretty average place by the numbers.
Median household income is pretty much the same as the Canadian median. Same for the median after-tax income of all people 15 and older, and ditto for the average value of a home.
When it comes to poverty, we’re not far off the national average as a city, although the breakdown varies a bit — more kids in poverty, fewer seniors.
We’re a little less visibly diverse than the rest of the country but our unemployment rate is slightly better.
But here’s the problem with averages. While it’s the most common statistical tool we use, an average value can hide a major flaw in numbers. Averages don’t do a good job of handling “outliers” — numbers that are far detached from the main group.
Here’s an easy example. In a set of numbers containing 50, 150 and 1,000, the average would be 400. But that average doesn’t really represent any of the numbers in that set very well.
When we look at Hamilton and break it into smaller pieces, we find that it’s a city of outliers.
ONE GOOD WAY to break the city into pieces is to use Statistics Canada’s system of census tracts and there are about 140 of these tracts — let’s call them neighbourhoods — in Hamilton. It’s when we start looking at results down to the level of census tracts that we see the problem of outliers.
Take median household income from the 2016 census, for instance.
For the city as a whole, it’s a tad more than $69,000, close to the national median.
But one Flamborough neighbourhood has a median household income of almost $134,000 while one neighbourhood near downtown has a median of just $20,500, which, frankly, is shocking on its own.
Another way to look at it is that there’s a 6.5 times difference between the highest and lowest census tracts.
Look next door at Burlington to see how that changes. The difference is just 2.2 times between the neighbourhoods with the highest median household income — $157,400 — and the lowest — $71,400.
Inside Hamilton, let’s look just at Ancaster, the city’s wealthiest suburban community.
The difference between the neighbourhoods with the highest and lowest median household incomes is just 1.4 times, an indicator of Ancaster’s homogeneity when it comes to income.
With poverty rates, the outliers are even more exaggerated.
In Hamilton, the lowest neighbourhood poverty rate is 1.7 per cent and the highest rate is 47 per cent. That’s a difference of nearly 28 times from one extreme to the other. In Burlington, the difference between the highest and lowest poverty rates is less than nine times.
One Flamborough neighbourhood has a median household income of almost $134,000 while one neighbourhood near downtown has a median of just $20,500.
“While we have seen some high-level economic improvements in the community, there is a continuation and in some areas even a deepening of the segregation of poverty.” TERRY COOKE CEO, Hamilton Community Foundation
SO WE’RE A CITY of outliers. Why does that matter?
For one very important reason. The outliers aren’t scattered randomly throughout Hamilton.
If they were, one explanation could be that it’s just chance at play.
But that’s not the case. There’s a very clear and persistent pattern.
Tom Cooper, director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, calls it the “doughnut analogy.”
There’s a healthy ring of suburban communities around the outside and a struggling centre in the middle of the lower former City of Hamilton.
“We certainly have a community that is economically segregated, where more affluent people tend to live in areas outside the core,” Cooper said recently.
By now, that doesn’t really come as a surprise.
For the past eight years, the Spectator has illustrated this pattern of disparity and uneven prosperity over and over through our Code Red projects, which have mapped health, social and economic factors down to the neighbourhood level.
After a while, the maps look the same. The green parts of the maps with the best outcomes always seem to be in the same places around the edge of the city, while the red parts with the poorest outcomes tend to be concentrated in the central part of the lower city.
When the 2016 census was released, it marked the first time since 2006 that we had reliable results to examine at the census tract level, because of the Conservative government’s decision to abolish the long-form census for 2011.
SO IN THAT DECADE between 2006 and 2016, what’s happened in Hamilton?
Violent crime rates remain below the national rate but there’s been a 20 per cent increase in violent crimes since 2015-16, the third-largest increase of any Canadian city.
As a whole, the city has generally kept pace with the rest of the country over the past decade.
Unfortunately, not much has changed when we break the city into its smaller pieces. The green parts are still the green parts and the red parts are still red.
That’s to be expected. A decade isn’t long enough to fundamentally shift a city’s makeup or its outcomes.
What’s concerning, though, is that there hasn’t been much movement in reducing the gaps between the neighbourhoods with the best and poorest outcomes.
Let’s again look at median household income as an example.
Between the 2006 and 2016 censuses, the median household income for Hamilton went from $55,300 to $69,000 — a jump of 25 per cent over a decade. (As an aside, that sounds good, but the Canadian median household income increased 31 per cent over the same period.)
Now let’s look at what happened over a decade at the neighbourhood level. The 34 neighbourhoods with the lowest median household income are all found in the former City of Hamilton and 33 of the 34 are located below the Mountain.
For both the 2006 and 2016 censuses, the neighbourhood with the lowest median household income in Hamilton was the area bounded by Queen Street South, King Street West, James Street and Hunter Street West.
Between 2006 and 2016, median household income in that neighbourhood creeped up from $18,400 to about $20,500.
That’s a modest increase of 12 per cent over a decade, meaning that neighbourhood — where roughly half of the people live below the poverty line — fell further behind the rest of the city.
Or take poverty rates as another example.
In the 2016 census, they ranged from 1.7 to 47 per cent at the neighbourhood level. A decade ago, the range was 0 to 48 per cent.
“While we have seen some highlevel economic improvements in the community, there is a continuation and in some areas even a deepening of the segregation of poverty,” said Terry Cooke, president and CEO of the Hamilton Community Foundation.
“The other thing that should really concern us is the racialization of poverty,” Cooke noted.
When poverty in Hamilton is broken down by racial groups, the latest census shows that just over 10 per cent of white people live in poverty, compared to 25 per cent of black people and nearly 50 per cent of Arabic people.
When we look at poverty by race and generation, 23 per cent of firstgeneration white people in Hamilton live in poverty compared to 72 per cent of first-generation Arabic people.
“Increasingly, what we see is more racially segregated neighbourhoods and schools, which over the long term is potentially a real cause of division and discord for a community that really needs to be inclusive,” said Cooke.
THIS YEAR’S VITAL SIGNS
report by the Hamilton Community Foundation does offer some signs of encouragement, with a few caveats attached.
The number of jobs in Hamilton jumped by 8 per cent last year to 416,000 and the value of building permits shot up by nearly 30 per cent from 2016 to 2017.
The number of people in Hamilton who feel a strong or somewhat strong sense of belonging to their city continues to rise steadily, beyond either the provincial or national rates.
The teen pregnancy rate in Hamilton was cut in half from 2003 to 2016, but the rate is still above the provincial average.
The rates of people with post-secondary education have continued to rise over the past decade, but they still remain below the provincial average for men and women.
Hamilton’s violent crime rates remain below the national rate but there’s been a 20 per cent increase in violent crimes since 2015-16, the third-largest increase of any Canadian city.
The rate of physically active Hamilton adults is about the same as the provincial and national averages, but the city has a higher rate of overweight or obese people than the rest of the province or country.
“The two big areas I think the community needs to focus on are: How are we doing in terms of the overall health and well-being of the community and how are we doing in terms of providing access and opportunity for kids to succeed educationally,” said Cooke.
“We know those were two significant dark clouds from the original Code Red work and they continue to be challenges.”
The rates of people with post-secondary education have continued to rise over the past decade, but they still remain below the provincial average for men and women.