Around the world, two headline crises – the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass awareness of racial injustice and segregation – have exploded not across entire countries but, most often, in specific neighbourhoods. In North America and Europe, these neighbourhoods are suburbs where high-rise and low-rise apartments dominate and where mostly non-white immigrants and other low-income groups have struggled to climb the economic ladder. In many cities, Covid-19 is now found primarily in these districts.
What the two crises of 2020 have painfully taught us is that the huge social, economic and health problems we tend to think of as global or national concerns are really playing out in specific neighbourhoods rather than countries, regional jurisdictions (e.g. states, provinces, etc.) or even cities. And it may well be that the most effective solutions can be found only at the neighbourhood level, too.
When you look at the hardest-hit neighbourhoods in various cities in well-off countries, you notice a set of patterns. For instance, they tend to be located on the edge of a city. In other words, in Europe and North America, the areas hardest hit by Covid are racialized, lower income, suburban neighbourhoods.
Take the north Etobicoke and western North York neighbourhoods of Toronto, including Rexdale, parts of Weston and Jane and Finch.
Those neighbourhoods have experienced infection rates 10 to 20 times higher than those of downtown and affluent North Toronto neighbourhoods.
Those suburban areas also have by far the largest Black populations in the city, more than three times the city average. They are also some of the city’s major immigration landing pads and are among the few places that have been accessible to many Caribbean and African immigrants in recent decades.
They are neighbourhoods containing large numbers of workers deemed “essential” or otherwise unable to work from home under pandemic restrictions, in sectors such as health care, transportation, banking, “essential” retail (food, etc.), construction, and manufacturing. And they are sprawling places far from subway lines, with most residents dependent on crowded public buses as many can’t afford cars.
These neighbourhoods also tend to have many large, inter-generational families living in relatively small apartments.
To be clear, this is not just a City of Toronto problem. Adjacent Peel Region neighbourhoods were hit just as hard by Covid as the northwest Toronto neighbourhoods cited above – if not harder.
And in suburban Durham Region just east of the City of Toronto, the health unit of Pickering City Centre has a confirmed Covid rate of 2209/100,000. This was higher than any City of Toronto neighbourhood (the hardest hit neighbourhood in the City of Toronto was Weston, with a confirmed Covid rate of 1901/100,000). In fact, rates in Pickering and Ajax in Durham were higher than the City of Toronto average. As with Peel neighbourhoods adjacent to hard hit City of Toronto neighbourhoods, Pickering and Ajax have rates similar to neighbouring Scarborough in the City of Toronto.
These suburban patterns are also starkly visible in Montreal, where the disease was most heavily concentrated in places such as Montreal-Nord – northern-edge neighbourhoods that are home to the city’s largest Black populations and are plagued with persistent problems of economic inequality.
These patterns also hold in American and European cities such as New York City, Houston, Paris, and Barcelona.
In other words, these suburban neighbourhoods pretty much are the Covid crises in the Fall of 2020 in Europe and North America. We are not “all in this together”. People living in lower income, racialized, largely suburban neighbourhoods are taking a much bigger hit than more affluent areas, both in terms of contracting the disease itself and in terms of the collateral damage related to actions taken by government to contain the disease.
Why certain suburban neighbourhoods are so hard hit by Covid
You can immediately see how the COVID-19 crisis played out so dangerously in these suburban neighbourhoods.
First, a very high proportion of the residents of such neighbourhoods are essential workers and didn’t have the option of staying home – now or when the virus was at its peak.
Moreover, the apartment buildings in these neighbourhoods tend to be far apart, separated by big grassy spaces that are mostly deserted. In these neighbourhoods, people end up clustered in crowded building elevators and lobbies, in the handful of convenience stores and small supermarkets in strip malls, in religious services that offer one of the few forms of community bonding, and on buses and streetcars that are often over-crowded – even when ridership on public transit is generally down because of Covid fears.
It’s not that the pandemic targeted these suburban neighbourhoods because their residents are prone to taking risks or acting irresponsibly. The virus took advantage of vulnerabilities that the residents of these neighbourhoods have no control over: overcrowded apartments that make isolating sick household members impossible and the grinding necessity of working a low-wage job deemed essential by the government – often a long transit trip away. Before Covid-19, these neighbourhoods were frustrating obstacles to improving one’s station in life or giving one’s kids a better start. Now, they’re also a danger to livelihoods and life itself.
If the pandemic is concentrated overwhelmingly in certain low-income, suburban neighbourhoods, what are the implications for our current anti-Covid policies and practices?
By far the most consequential policy initiative (for both good and bad) implemented by governments to fight Covid-19 was the closure of all non-essential services. Did this broad lockdown achieve the desired goals in Canada? Yes and no. Obviously, the lockdown made some contribution to “flattening” the outbreak curve which permitted our hospitals to easily handle a modest influx of COVID-19 patients (there was no “surge” in any province – even in relatively hard-hit Quebec).
However, for the roughly 60% of confirmed cases that contracted the virus from other members of their household (again, often people living in over-crowded living conditions in the suburbs with at least one household member deemed an “essential” worker), the lockdown did little to protect them. They had no choice but to go to work and if they contracted Covid, there was no place for them to isolate in their crowded living quarters. The lockdown also did nothing to protect those living or working in institutional settings such as long-term care (LTC) facilities, shelters or hospitals (14% of confirmed cases).
In other words, for over 75% of Canada’s confirmed cases, the lockdown provided little or no protection from Covid. However, there was considerable collateral damage from the lockdown: three million Canadians lost their jobs in a matter of weeks because the government ordered their employer closed; all schools – including universities and colleges – were shut down; there were huge increases in mental health problems related to social isolation; and there was a major disruption in the health care system.
An example of the harm done to the health of Ontarians by the massive re-allocation of scarce health resources to fight Covid, is demonstrated in a new study suggesting it could take more than a year and a half to clear the backlog of surgeries in Ontario hospitals.
The backlog is rooted in the fact that in mid-March, the provincial government instructed Ontario hospitals to cancel elective surgeries and other activities deemed not urgent to prepare for a surge of COVID-19 patients. As indicated above, that surge never happened.
And in Canada, the lockdown did almost nothing to save lives. Over 80% of deaths were in nursing homes and nursing home residents were obviously not circulating in the broader community at the time the lockdown was imposed. And most of the rest of Ontario deaths related to Covid were in institutional settings such as health facilities, corrections institutions and amongst essential workers. Again, the lockdown did nothing to protect these people.
Covid needs to be fought at the neighbourhood level
All this suggests that going forward, Canada needs to take a much more targeted, place-based approach to fighting Covid-19 than we have in the past six months. This approach should rely far less on broad-stroke lockdowns, across-the-board capacity restrictions (e.g. restaurants are only allowed to operate at 50% capacity at any given time), gathering restrictions (e.g. a maximum of fifty can now gather inside in Ontario and a hundred outside) and travel restrictions (e.g. the strict 14-day federal quarantine on return from international travel).
Because Covid is concentrated in certain suburban neighbourhoods, it may be that at this point when the hospitalization rate due to Covid is so low (as of September 12, Ontario had only 43 patients in hospital because of Covid and many hospitals have no Covid patients at all), these broad-based measures are doing more harm than good and should be loosened up. In other words, given what we know about the concentration of Covid in low-income, heavily racialized suburban neighbourhoods, is the best way to fight it to bankrupt hundreds of restaurants and bars, close down all theatre and live music venues, empty out the cores of our major cities, crater public transit ridership, and pretty much eliminate all international travel?
(Note: To be clear, the evidence does suggest that one broad-based measure, the mandatory wearing of masks inside public places, is very effective in containing the spread of Covid and therefore should be continued and strictly enforced).
Canada should substantially increase targeted initiatives in high caseload neighbourhoods. And those neighbourhoods are first and foremost low-income, heavily racialized suburbs.
There is no question that poverty, inequality and even racism play a role in the high incidence of Covid-19 in these lower-income suburbs. Therefore, programs that address inequality at the national or provincial levels (job creation programs, more generous income support for the unemployed, higher minimum wages, stronger unions, pharmacare, paid sick days, criminal justice reform, etc.) are important.
But that still leaves people in these suburban neighbourhoods vulnerable because of isolation and the nature of their housing. This means that place-based solutions that invest resources in specific neighbourhoods, must be massively increased if we are to defeat Covid.
In the short-term this would mean:
- an increase in testing and contact tracing in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of confirmed Covid cases;
- Twenty-four hour turnaround times in getting the results of testing to residents so they don’t infect other household members while waiting for results;
- A huge program aimed at hard hit neighbourhoods to immediately make safe beds available outside the home for those testing positive and unable to otherwise isolate because of crowded living conditions;
- A huge investment in child care and K-12 school re-opening to increase subsidized child care spots and reduce class size so that adequate social distancing is possible for pre-schoolers and school-age young people living in neighbourhoods where there are high rates of confirmed cases.
- More frequent bus and streetcar service to relieve overcrowded suburban transit routes on which social distancing is already impossible; and
- A massive investment in long-term care facilities to increase care and to allow each resident a private room.
A long-term vision
Long term, we need to fix these suburban neighbourhoods themselves. The fact that Covid is overwhelmingly concentrated in lower income, suburban neighbourhoods makes it clear than many of these neighbourhoods simply don’t work.
A harsh spotlight has been shone by Covid-19 on the consequences of isolated suburban neighbourhoods that sort us out by class and race, revealing deep social inequities and vulnerabilities. The treatment and living conditions of racialized minorities and ‘essential workers in these neighbourhoods is not just unjust but ultimately harmful to all of us. The truth is that the old issues related to inequality and racism found in these suburban neighbourhoods are still there and new issues such as Covid are piggybacking on them.
The pandemic has, if anything, accentuated the need for a shift to more sustainable and integrated ways of living. Infectious disease and chronic disease are overlapping (i.e. those with underlying chronic medical conditions are more vulnerable to Covid). Urban design flaws are central to many of these suburban social and health ills – and the lack of easy access to the essentials of life is one of those urban design issues.
The walkable neighbourhood is the place where many of the solutions come together. In policy circles, this is forcing an intense reconsideration of how the physical city shapes, enhances, or inhibits our lives to make us more resilient or more vulnerable.
If isolation rooted in urban design flaws is a key driver of both Covid and other health and social ills in the suburbs, we can take inspiration from Paris which is determined to not let the Covid crisis go to waste.
The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has provided an inspirational vision with her promotion of the “15-minute city”.
When Parisians emerged from their apartments in May, they found that 50 kilometers of bright-yellow pop-up “corona lanes” for bicycles had been laid over crowded underground Métro lines. Café tables spilled out onto streets from which cars had been banned, taking over former parking spaces and enabling the city’s restaurants to reopen with minimal risk of contagion.
This notion of a 15-minute city suggests the enormous benefits of walkability and proximity to local shopping, transit, schools, daycare, libraries, recreation, culture, health care, and employment. It takes us back to a path we abandoned in the post-war period with the growth of suburban neighbourhoods where zoning forced a segmentation between residential and commercial space and as a result, an overreliance on the car to deal with the necessities of life. The notion of a 15-minute city has ricocheted around the world capturing the imagination of city builders and has become the guiding mantra in cities that are reinventing themselves.
Toronto and the 15-minute city.
Nowhere is this re-orientation more urgent than in the vast suburban landscape where 3/4 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area lives in a post-war environment shaped by the car.
Lest the above vision of walkable suburban communities seem utopian (or typically Parisian), it is worth looking at planning work being done in Brampton, a municipality just northwest of the City of Toronto.
Brampton is a city of over 690,000. It is the 9th largest in Canada, the fastest growing, the youngest and most diverse. It has the most acute need for this shift and yet perhaps offers the greatest opportunity. It also has high rates of Covid.
However, most significantly it has opted for change. Its 2040 Vision was adopted in 2018 after community engagement involving thousands of citizens. Brampton’s goal is to take the land around the intersection of two classically suburban major arteries and re-direct growth into denser, walkable, compact neighbourhoods served by transit and making walking and cycling the primary way of moving around these neighbourhoods.
Conclusion
This post has argued that as Canada moves into the Fall season, we need to take a hard look at the most effective ways of fighting Covid-19 taking into account the economic, social and health collateral damage done by anti-Covid restrictions such as lockdowns, school closures, limitations on gathering sizes, capacity caps and travel restrictions.
The post further argues that the starting point for this assessment has to be the acknowledgment that suburban, racialized neighbourhoods are being much harder hit than other neighbourhoods. In fact, in some suburban neighbourhoods in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the per capita Covid rates are almost 20 times higher than in wealthier, predominantly white neighbourhoods a short distance away. This is not just a GTA phenomenon but a global one.
The implication of this huge disparity between neighbourhoods is that broad-based restrictions may not be as effective as neighbourhood specific interventions.
The post also poses short-term and long-term solutions to this problem.
In the short-term, an effective strategy would mean:
- an increase in testing and contact tracing in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of confirmed Covid cases;
- A huge program aimed at hard hit neighbourhoods to immediately make safe beds available outside the home for those testing positive and unable to otherwise isolate because of crowded living conditions;
- A massive investment in child care and K-12 school re-opening to increase subsidized child care spots and reduce class size so that adequate social distancing is possible for pre-schoolers and school-age young people living in neighbourhoods where there are high rates of confirmed cases.
- More frequent bus and streetcar service to relieve overcrowded suburban transit routes on which social distancing is already impossible.
Then there are the long-term solutions.
Covid 19 seems to be creating a tipping point where what was impossible suddenly becomes possible – like the rapid takeover of traffic lanes for bicycle lanes and restaurant patios. This may clear the way for a re-configuration of the car-oriented post-war suburbs into walkable neighbourhoods.
This will be long-term project but cities around the world are embracing the notion of a 15-minute city with great gusto. This means massive investments in community and social infrastructure so that employment, transit, school, shopping, parks, libraries, community facilities all grow along with the neighbourhood and are easily accessible by walking and bicycling for all community residents.
Why has Canada been bringing in more and more immigrants, when they may be no better off than where they came from. We only have so much money to help these people, and at present our debt is horrendous. Nevertheless, the Liberal government is bringing in 350,000 new immigrants, not counting asylum seekers and refugees. The more people squeezed into these areas, the more difficult life will become for them. Promising a life that Canada just cannot deliver, is grossly unjust. Perhaps people of certain ethnicity could help their fellow immigrants in one way or another. Something has to be done to stop the madness invading our Canada of today. We immigrated to Canada 54 years ago, and have had a decent life in Canada, through hard work, and our respect and love for this beautiful country. When I hear how Canada is put down for racism and discrimination, I cringe. Because it was not at all like that when I came here. Life is what we make of it, and people who were poor, as we were as children, appreciate a great place to succeed and grow, which is why we have always been thankful for being welcomed to this beautiful Canada.