Overview

Abstract (English)

A misunderstanding of how poverty is distributed throughout a city will lead to wasted resources and ineffective supports for the most vulnerable residents. The purpose of this study is to understand whether poverty in Halifax’s suburbs is increasing in relation to its downtown. In many cities, suburbs were originally places where less affluent residents could self-build their own homes without conforming to the city’s building standards; poverty in the suburbs is not new. But over time, and with the help of urban renewal, poverty came to be largely concentrated in the inner city. In recent years, studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada have all reported increasing levels of poverty in the kind of dense suburbs typically found outside but close to the city centre. By 2007, 49% of Americans living in poverty were living in the suburbs. At the same time, poverty in many city centres is decreasing, thanks largely to a push to revitalize downtowns and the consequent gentrification. While there are certainly many broad development trends that explain the commonalities of how cities develop, each city nevertheless has its own history and unique localized patterns of development. Therefore, it is critical to evaluate poverty distribution independently, wherever possible, to determine whether the broad trend toward suburbanization of poverty is happening in a particular city or not. This study uses a pre-established method to divide the Halifax Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) into five categories (Downtown and Suburb types A-D) based on dominant housing age, residential population density, proximity to the downtown and land use. It relies on data from the 1981-2006 Census and the 2011 National Housing Survey (NHS) to compare prevalence of low income, average housing price and seven other variables that generally co-occur with poverty, in each of the five categories.

Abstract (French)

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