How the city and suburbs came together,
In the ’50s, begrudgingly acknowledging that city and suburbs could help each other has led to divides that remain today
In 1950, Mrs. R.P. Halls lived on a muddy, unpaved street serviced by septic tanks and looked longingly at the houses a few streets over in Toronto, where roads were paved and bathrooms were connected to a sewer system.
She lived on Glenavy Ave., near Mount Pleasant cemetery, in the landlocked township of North York. A place booming with post war growth, but lacking the simple things: “. . . if they wanted to take a bath, they had to visit friends outside the township,” according to the book North York Realizing the Dream.
“At one stage there was even rumours that babies were being washed in soda water.”
Toronto had planned to sell water to North York to alleviate the shortage, but withdrew the offer “because of an insulting statement” made by the North York reeve, who, balking at the price, noted the township could buy the water cheaper from Scarborough.
“Typical Hogtown,” said one North York councillor quoted in the Daily Star.
“Those poor little darlings; they should get out of politics if they can’t take a rap and laugh at it,” chuckled Oliver Crockford, reeve of Scarborough. “I guess the public knows now who’s hard to get along with.”
On the surface, it seems to be another example of parochial Toronto politics,but the solution that would come is also an example of Toronto’s unity — a begrudging acknowledgement that both city and suburb, in some way, could help each other — and Mrs. R.P. Halls.
During the Second World War, Toronto churned out airplanes, antiaircraft shells and all manner of war supplies. Manufacturing was thriving, wages were increasing and people were moving to the city. Thousands of families doubled up in houses and crammed into shacks.
Veterans returned to a housing shortage and the Central Mortgage and Housing Corp. was created to help solve it.
The yearning for open space was an “explosive force,” writes Humphrey Carver in his 1962 book Cities in the Suburbs. These were the ideal conditions “to project the suburbanite out to the horizon far beyond the last street car loop.”
While smaller developers were still dominant in the 1950s, bigger companies began to see the city’s potential, assembling a “legion of builders and workers” and taking advantage of economies of scale, writes James Lemon in Toronto Since 1918, published in 1985.
In Scarborough, farms were “devoured” by bulldozers, houses and apartment buildings took the place of fields and “great factories sprang up in green pastures,” writes Robert Bonis in A History of Scarborough.
“They were looking to live a life, that’s what they were looking for,” says Oliver Crockford Jr., 84, son of Scarborough’s former reeve of the same name.
The younger Crockford was in his 20s during the boom, measuring elevation for the new developments as a rodman.
Many townships struggled to keep pace with expensive infrastructure needs such as sewage and water. The region was a hodgepodge of arterial road that didn’t connect, and 11 different police forces operated on 11 different frequencies, Lemon writes.
Toronto had infrastructure, access to the lake, and a healthy commercial and industrial tax base. In a 1949 report, the Toronto and York Planning Board recommended amalgamation, Lemon notes.
“It was clear growth was going to happen. The question was, ‘Who was going to control that growth?’ ” says former Toronto mayor John Sewell.
Toronto’s proposal was met with suspicion. In Scarborough, Reeve Crockford believed forced amalgamation could further the cause of “communism.”
Others worried it would be a “higher taxes — no benefits” scheme.
“Take a look at our fine homes. Take a look at their tax bill, mine is $60 a year. Then take a look at the tax bill in Toronto for a similar house. You’ll find it way over $150,” said Lewis Patch in 1950, who hoped his unincorporated village of Thistletown would be safe “from the clutches of Toronto.”
The province, through the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) rejected amalgamation in 1953, and decided to form Metro Toronto — a level of government that would take on large infrastructure projects, pumping stations, expressways, parks — while leaving local governments to local matters.
No one in the GTA could escape being a Torontonian, OMB chairman Lorne Cumming told the media. In the municipalities, help with city building seemed to ease the transition. The suburbs continued to grow, and land speculation drove up housing costs. Land development was in many cases piecemeal, following the “logic of large scale market forces,” according to the 1980 release of the second part of Metro’s Suburbs in Transition study by Marvyn Novick, a senior program director at the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto.
In the new suburbs, some homeowners were financially stable, but many lived at the “precipice of debt and deprivation,” noted one 1960s study.
Unlike other North American cities, Toronto made a concerted effort to add apartments and public hous- ing to suburban communities: “The objective was to avoid the stratification of the region, with the poor left in the central area and the more affluent withdrawing into suburban enclaves,” Novick writes.
Social services were left for voluntary organizations to “figure out for themselves” after the physical form was cast.
Some public housing was over-concentrated, while other buildings were isolated from the community. Some boroughs didn’t allow zoning for second-hand stores. The study noted the province’s economic position was declining. There was little social support, and the neo-liberal agenda had begun to take hold, says Novick, a retired Ryerson University professor who remains active with the Social Planning Network of Ontario.
“The notion of keeping taxes low became a dominant theme,” he says.
“The suburban dream has turned into a nightmare of social problems in Metro in the past 10 years,” the Star wrote of the first part of the “startling report,” released in 1979. “The boroughs have inherited all the problems normally associated with the inner city — poverty, unemployment, racial tensions, drug and alcohol abuse, and juvenile crime — and are woefully ill equipped to deal with them.”
Interestingly, the second part of the study noted a “growing tendency” of non-suburbanites to “reduce suburban life to a set of simple images — sprawl, dominance of the automobile, excessive levels of market consumption.”
In The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl, Sewell writes that Metro Toronto was successful in giving a forum to “differing points of view.” He notes that low density communities elected politicians who “often conflicted” with urban politicians over matters like the Spadina Expressway, and outside of Toronto, in places such as Mississauga, similar voices were emerging.
It was only a “matter of time” until “the new communities of the fringes found a strong political voice that was louder than that of the older, compact city. That happened in 1995 with the provincial election of the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris,” he writes.
The Harris era brought the end of Metro Toronto, and the birth of the amalgamated city that many had feared since1950. Education was taken off the property tax, but social services and public housing were “downloaded” to the city.
“Mike Harris could have been a hero, but he turned out to be a bum, because if he had amalgamated the cities and not downloaded, he would have been a hero. The downloading suffocated us,” said Mel Lastman, the megacity’s first mayor.
University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski said that since the 1970s, the labour market worsened — the idea of “jobs for life” was replaced with temporary work and low wage jobs. Housing costs, driven up by high income earners, outstripped inflation. Governments continued to cut social benefits and not spend money on new rapid transit options. As immigration shifted away from the European base, more newcomers encountered discrimination in the housing, job markets, and education, he says.
In his “Three Cities within Toronto” report, Hulchanski showed that since 1970, income polarization has created three distinct cities in Toronto, as many of Toronto’s middle income census tracts (City 2) disappeared, and poverty had moved from the centre of the city (City 1) to its edges (City 3).
What has happened since the1970s, he explains, is that people with choice prefer the old Victorian part of Toronto or suburbs in the 905, and not the old postwar suburbs.
“It’s car oriented, the houses are 50 years old, there are scattered 40- and 50-year-old clusters of high rises, and it isn’t well served by hardly anything,” he says.
Many people who live in underserviced communities feel trapped — by poor transit, and a lack of social mobility — the latter a relatively new phenomenon for Canada, where past generations of newcomers were able to “move up,” along with their children, says Roger Keil, a York University professor who studies global suburbanism.
He cautions against oversimplifying: “Suburbia is a more complex place than the political mindset of Ford nation,” he says, but notes that “the mythology of the inner suburbs has to do with the fact that these people were promised a better life . . . they have become those places now where new problems arise, and new social tensions can be seen.”
While ideologues seek to divide by suggesting other people are causing problems for a certain group, an alternative message is “we have to pull together, and make things happen,” Novick says.
“That’s what we do during war, that’s what we did in the postwar period, that is what we’re starting to do now,” he says.
Novick says the interesting thing about Metro Toronto was that the provincial politicians who played key roles in its development and early years — premiers Leslie Frost and John Robarts — were conservative.
“They met their responsibilities. It’s the old British Tory tradition that you have responsibilities that come with privilege and they met that,” he says. “Sometimes, it meant that people of their class had to pay taxes to meet their responsibilities and they didn’t whine, they didn’t scream and complain.”
At Meadowvale Rd. near Hwy. 401, the return trip downtown takes three hours on the TTC. This is the Dean Park neighbourhood of Scarborough, classified as middle-income in 1970, the average income in 2010 declined by more than 20 per cent compared to the Toronto average, classifying it as a part of Hulchanski’s “City 3.” (Just across the street, on the east side of Meadowvale Rd., is “City 2,” a neighbourhood that is still middle income.)
Unlike the downtown core, “City 3” better reflects the diversity of Toronto. People who live here have to travel far to find employment, yet have the “poorest access” to the TTC. On a Thursday afternoon, people trickle in to the bus shelter from the nearby neighbourhoods of single family homes and midrise apartments. They like their neighbourhood for many reasons: It is friendly, multicultural, and peaceful, they say.
One young man says he doesn’t expect much for transit. A few would like to see more local buses, others want more express buses.
“Some people have afternoon jobs,” says Maisie Lowe as she prepares for the hour-and-a-half ride to her downtown job.
There is an old saying that Toronto is “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix,” a European downtown surrounded by an American suburb.
“We are Los Angeles surrounded by Shanghai, we will disregard both the Los Angeles and the Shanghai at our peril,” says Keil. “We are the world out there. We need to begin to understand that. This is an incredible opportunity; we need to begin to develop the urban region from the outside in.”
As the 86 Scarborough pulls into traffic, Lowe waves from her seat in the back.
The bus crests the 401overpass and disappears.