Mapping change along the Ion light-rail line
Waterloo Region research project gets $176,000 grant to study LRT’s impact on neighbourhoods and the impoverished
WATERLOO REGION — A coalition of local academics, nonprofits and municipalities are collaborating on a three-year project to study gentrification and displacement along the LRT.
“There is so much change happening along the LRT corridor,” said University of Waterloo planning professor Brian Doucet, who is heading the project. “A lot has been lost. A lot has been built, and there’s also a lot more to come.”
The federal Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council has awarded a research grant of $176,000 for the project.
The Region of Waterloo, the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo, the Social Development Centre, Working Centre and House of Friendship will collaborate on the project with several academics from as far afield as the United States and the United Kingdom.
The LRT has already brought enormous change to the region, Doucet says, spurring more than $3 billion in investment along the Ion corridor, even before a single passenger rode on the Ion, which began operating in June 2019.
He hopes the research will help ensure that the area undergoing such enormous change doesn’t “become a space for just the affluent.”
“The LRT is a big public investment, and we want to make sure that reaches a broad segment of the population, so that there remain affordable spaces within these parts of the city so that everyone who wants to is able to benefit from that investment, and the improvements and the changes that are taking place.”
The project will not only try to identify how neighbourhood and housing has changed along the corridor, but also create a series of maps of how areas along the LRT have changed and what buildings have been lost or built, and create an oral history project that captures the stories of the people who have seen their neighbourhoods change.
“Relying on statistics often misses some of the things that don’t show up in the statistics,” he said. “Things like what it means to live through these changes, what it means to see your neighbourhood change.
Displacement “doesn’t necessarily mean you’re kicked out of your home,” he said. “It can be watching a whole community change around you, seeing business close, seeing things open up that you know are not for you. That won’t show up in a statistical analysis.”
The project will hire and train people who have lived with poverty, to help design the research, carry it out and help analyze results, he said. “What you get with this method is a much richer and more detailed account of what’s happening.”
Doucet hopes the project will not only fill in some of the gaps about the impact of the LRT, but also create a new coalition of partners who will continue to shape housing policy once the project is over.
Each partner brings something to the project, and each will get benefits, he said: municipalities bring valuable data, expertise and the people who will eventually turn the project’s findings into housing strategies. Nonprofit partners have strong connections to low-income residents built upon years of mutual trust, as well as expertise rooted in understanding what it’s like to be poor. Together they’ll be able to do research on a scale they couldn’t do alone.
“Gentrification happens everywhere,” Doucet said. “There’s a lot of broader knowledge to be gained about how to have a more just city, and a more inclusive city.”