Eleanor Green was on her local TTC bus route to her volunteer job at Centenary Hospital in Scarborough recently when she looked around at the other passengers and saw only one white face.“Most were Black, like me and there were brown faces too,” says Green, 71, a retired dental receptionist.That’s a stark change, she says, from when she moved to her McCowan Rd. and Sheppard Ave. E. area condo 22 years ago. Her observations fall in line with a map of Toronto put together by researchers led by University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski, that shows Black people living in clusters mainly outside the core — and very few downtown.Community activist and writer Desmond Cole argues the map clearly demonstrates the city has a “segregation” problem when it comes to where Blacks live.“This is called segregation. That’s what it is. There is no other word for it,” Cole told a hushed audience of city leaders, builders, planners, innovators and housing advocates gathered Thursday at the Evergreen Brick Works for the Future Cities Canada Summit, a city-building workshop.He said many “young brilliant Black people” are leaving the city because “we can’t get the opportunities we deserve.”Cole urged the crowd to consider the lives of people impacted by segregation and discrimination and “incorporate their needs into the notion of city building in 21st-century Toronto.”Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development and faculty housing chair, used Canadian census tract information for 2016 to explore inequality in the city.The data was derived from census respondents who self-identified as Black. In 2016, the community was nine per cent of the city’s population or 239,850 people.The map shows that Black people predominantly live in the western (old city of York) portion of the city, as well as the northwestern corners including Etobicoke, North York, and Scarboroug ...
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