Lubna Alli

The matter at hand

Upon typing the words “Malvern, Scarborough” into Google, the top related searches that Google spits out are “Malvern crime,” “Malvern ghetto,” “Malvern shooting” and “is Malvern a good place to live.” If this isn’t a tell-tale sign of the reputation that the community of Malvern in Scarborough’s east end holds, then I don’t know what is. This case study explores how Malvern came to carry the “ghetto” label, and argues that the label is sustained by a lack of care for the community’s advancement. This lack of care is a cycle that has repeated itself year after year, leading me to believe that this is a problem that could be addressed with more funding and community development strategies.

Ultimately, these concerns can only be talked about so much amongst community members before they need to be taken to higher levels of power within the City of Toronto, where the appropriate committees can discuss the issues and take action to improve the situation for residents. This is where the problem lies, and how it finds a way to resurface year after year, keeping the label of “ghetto” attached to Malvern. In order to strip Malvern of this label, it is important that the City of Toronto sees the comparatively poorer conditions that residents of Malvern face compared to those in other parts of Toronto. These comparisons are analyzed here in several facets, for example academic performance, transportation dependency, and housing.

This issue is an important one to me: I grew up and lived in Malvern for 5+ years, and I know many others who have seen much harder times in Malvern than I have. Having seen the effects of poverty in Malvern first hand, it is an issue that is near and dear to my heart, and I truly believe it deserves more attention and care. The case of Malvern, which is often compared to Regent Park, Rexdale or Jane and Finch, relates to the themes of social mixing, transportation dependency and public housing in urban development and planning. They are discussed in the sections that follow.

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Malvern: the backstory

This section reviews the background behind how Malvern came to be labelled a “ghetto.” It answers the questions of what, who, when, why, where, and how in regards to this case. To understand the label, it is important to first look at the definition of the word. A ghetto, by definition, is “a part of the city in which members of a particular group or race usually live in poor conditions; the poorest part of a city.” (Merriam-Webster 2016) This is the definition implicitly invoked whenever the label is applied to Malvern.

Right off the bat, there are three main characteristics in this definition: racial segregation/ethnic enclaves, poverty concentration, and underdevelopment. Each can be found in Malvern to some degree, which is why the label sticks. From a development and planning perspective, strategies such as social mixing, affordable housing, and better representation are strong examples of methods that can be used to tackle the conditions that get Malvern labelled this way.

The community of Malvern, with a population of about 44,000, is bounded by Highway 401 to the south, Steeles Avenue to the north, and Markham Road and Morningside Avenue to the west and east. It is located in the north-east end of the City of Toronto, more specifically Scarborough. Malvern is known to have the highest concentration of young people in all of Canada. (2013) According to the same source, Malvern also has a significantly higher concentration of immigrants compared to other parts of Canada, with New Canadians making up 61 percent of its population, making it highly culturally diverse. (2013)

Malvern as a community came to be with the establishment of the Malvern Post Office in 1856 in David Brown’s general store. Although Senator David Reesor’s plan to make Malvern the ‘Capital of Scarborough’ via the extension of the Grand Trunk Railway failed, in the late 1950s the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation set out to change Malvern’s fortunes. It acquired the farmland and implemented a building plan to create a model community of affordable homes, and the first residents moved into their homes in 1972. (Dunkelman, 1997) As a result, a number of lower-income families opted to buy homes in areas such as Scarborough, which was considered suburban land and provided a more budget-friendly option for growing families who could not afford to live in more expensive areas of Toronto such as Old Toronto or York. Soon thereafter, an influx of immigrants started to find their way to Toronto, and with very few assets, many committed to affordable housing options such as the ones available in Malvern.

Specific to the neighbourhood of Malvern, 43% of residents immigrated to Canada before 2001, roughly 10 points higher than the City of Toronto as a whole. The top five birth countries for immigrants in Malvern are Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India, Jamaica and Guyana. The visible minority share of Malvern’s population is an astounding 87%, compared to 49% for the City of Toronto overall (City of Toronto, 2011) — nearly double. Additionally, many of the Sri Lankans who arrived in Malvern as recent immigrants between 2006 and 2011 were fleeing the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war. As is evident, this data already maps onto the conditions the label points to. There are ethnic enclaves. There is a poorer population. And, as will be explained, there is a lack of care, which is analyzed in the next section.

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Dissecting the issue

In this section, the conditions behind Malvern’s label are discussed and analyzed in hopes of coming to some consensus about the matter and a proposed solution. For starters, this case is relevant for the mere fact that Malvern is an underprivileged community that faces levels of poverty similar to other “rough” areas in Toronto like Regent Park, Jane and Finch and Rexdale, yet it receives comparatively less attention than the rest. When researching this topic, very few studies focused on the community of Malvern alone, although it was mentioned as a relevant example in a fair number of scholarly journals that focused on struggling communities. Fong and Shibuya’s research, which analyzed census data from 1986 and 1991 (as cited in Walks & Bourne, 2006), suggests that there is a correlation between a higher density visible minority population and poverty within a neighbourhood. Additionally, also using 1991 census data for Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs), the results indicate, “Aboriginals and recent immigrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in particular are increasingly likely to live in ‘ghetto’ or ‘underclass’ neighbourhoods.” This research reinforces the link between ethnic enclaves and concentrated poverty — a pattern visible in Malvern.

When it comes to ghettos in Canadian cities, the most common point brought forth is that our so-called ghettos, although seemingly dire to us, are nowhere near as problematic as those of US cities such as Baltimore, Detroit and Oakland. This point gives a different perspective on the matter, and it is important because it reminds us how relative our scale is. Our perception of what is good or bad is highly affected by what we’ve already established as our grounds of comparison. To provide perspective, according to an article by Tracy Huffman in the Toronto Star, although Malvern has pockets of crime, it is not considered a ghetto. (2006) Huffman explains that gang violence in Malvern, specifically a turf war between the Malvern Crew and the Galloway Boys, has helped perpetuate the idea of Malvern as a crime-ridden, unsafe place to be. Gang violence reinforces easy access to drugs and guns and also leaves an impression on youth, who may be swayed to join a gang at a young age. According to the minutes of a public meeting held on November 17, 2005, Malvern’s youth were producing academic results significantly below expectations. Additionally, schools saw high levels of suspensions and expulsions caused by violent and/or aggressive behaviour toward peers and teachers. (Toronto Police Services Board, 2005)

As a result of gang involvement among youth, urban planners made the conscious decision to implement more community programs geared towards steering the youth of Malvern away from it. In addition, the government allocated more funding for these communities, setting aside money in the budget for projects such as HOODLINC, whose objective is to “improve the life outcomes for multi-barriered youth living in Toronto Community Housing (TCH) communities in the Malvern community through providing youth with recreational and social development opportunities.” (Toronto Police Services Board, 2005) This initiative, along with others implemented in Malvern such as the R.O.S.E. Program (Real Opportunities for Success in Education) and the Malvern Community Coalition, were all conscious efforts to provide the community with mentorship, employment assistance, and fitness and nutrition programs, amongst other services. These solutions are typically what is brought to the table when planners are trying to figure out ways to improve and benefit a community as a whole.

Why the help comes late

These services and programs require approval, and this is where the glitz and glamour of a seemingly easy solution loses its sparkle, and where the reality of lack of care comes into play. Underlying this is a structural problem: in a policy environment shaped by neoliberal priorities, resources and political attention tend to flow toward those with the means to demand them, while lower-income communities bear the consequences. This is exactly the problem facing Malvern. David Miller, mayor of Toronto during a time when crime and poverty in Malvern were at their peak, contributed to the problem even while attempting to avoid neoliberal tendencies. According to Albo, “Miller’s administration continued to celebrate the ‘creative class’, criminalize homelessness, and increase the police budget, even though [it meant] reducing services to “socially deprived and racialized” communities such as Jane and Finch, and Malvern” (as cited in Capurri, 2013).

Marginalized communities are forced to deal with the circumstances thrown their way because, more often than not, they do not have the means to voice their issues and make their concerns known. Many Malvern residents depend on public transit, and in a community where a large share of the population are immigrants, language barriers are likely for some. All of these factors considered, the odds of someone who lives in Malvern making the trip to a City Hall meeting in downtown Toronto to voice their concerns are not high. This becomes a cycle that contributes to the problem, as those in a position of power to make a change tend to overlook the importance of an issue that is not brought to the forefront.

Those who are in a position of power to make a change tend to overlook the importance of an issue that is not brought to the forefront.

Unfortunately for communities like Malvern, attention and care tend to arrive only when it’s almost too late, when the situation has escalated to a point where help is needed, and even then the government is stingy with the help it chooses to offer. Boudreau et al. go on to support this point, claiming that “during the Miller years, right-leaning councillors (Case Ootes, Karen Stintz, Rob Ford and Denzil Minnan-Wong just to name a few) advocated for the protection of taxpayers’ money and warned homeowners that their taxes were used irresponsibly to pay for welfare, treatment of drug addicts, and immigrants.” (as cited in Capurri, 2013). This reluctant, minimal help is how many of the community initiatives were implemented in Malvern. The Malvern Community Recreation Centre, for example, was built with that intention, and its library serves as a safe space for many children who stay there while their parents are at work. The positive effects of these implementations are showing too: “Youth usage of the Malvern Library has increased by 70% as a result of youth focused programming and targeted outreach.” (Toronto Police Services Board, 2005)

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Moving forward

As the situation in Malvern worsened, community involvement became more frequent, with residents no longer as afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation from gangs. According to Huffman, there has been “a huge co-operation from a community [Malvern] that is fed up with the violence and the stigmas associated with the neighbourhood.” (2006) The conversation about Malvern continues to progress with increased community involvement, a strategy that seems to be making positive changes. When the City replaced its priority-neighbourhood designations with 31 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas under the Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020 in 2014, Malvern scored above the City’s equity benchmark and was not designated. This, of course, does not dismiss the fact that the neighbourhood, though it has made progress, still needs a lot more work to bring it up to par, or more optimistically, to a competitive level with other neighbourhoods in Toronto. The City’s programs and community development infrastructure were excellent attempts to overcome the poverty and ethnic segregation the community fell victim to. Additionally, development strategies that consider more affordable and public housing and that work toward social mixing can help fast-track the process of shedding the “ghetto” label that has followed Malvern for so long.

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Works cited

Canada. Toronto Police Services Board. City of Toronto. Minutes of the Public Meeting of the Toronto Police Services Board. Toronto Police Services Board, 17 Nov. 2005. Web. 24 Nov. 2016. <http://www.tpsb.ca/component/jdownloads/send/18-2005/296-05nov17pmm-pdf&gt;.

Capurri, V. (2013). ‘Residents’ or ‘taxpayers’? neoliberalism, rob ford’s mayoral campaign, and the meaning of urban citizenship. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 22(2), 1-17. Retrieved from http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1675910669?accountid=14771

Dunkelman, D., DD. (1997). Toronto Neighbourhood Guide. Retrieved November 22, 2016, from http://www.torontoneighbourhoods.net/neighbourhoods/scarborough/malvern/history

“Ghetto.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Huffman, T. (2006, Mar 21). Violence on upswing in malvern; police taking preventative action, keeping an eye on area gunfire down from 2004, which saw a record 22 shootings. Toronto Star Retrieved from http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/438951738?accountid=14771

“Malvern – Social Profile #4 – NHS Languages, Immigration, Income (PDF).” Demographics – Your City | City of Toronto. City of Toronto, 2011. Web. 22 Nov. 2016. <http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=b654edb4bcae1410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD&vgnextchannel=1e68f40f9aae0410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD&gt;.

Training initiative reaches out to Malvern community. (2013). Retrieved November 22, 2016, from http://www.canoe.ca/CareerConnectionNews/050720_youthforce.html

Walks, R. A., & Bourne, L. S. (2006). Ghettos in canada’s cities? racial segregation, ethnic enclaves and poverty concentration in canadian urban areas. Canadian Geographer, 50(3), 273-297. Retrieved from http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/228371823?accountid=14771

City of Toronto. (2014). Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020 staff report (background file 67382). Retrieved from https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2014/cd/bgrd/backgroundfile-67382.pdf