Maintaining services in city's 'priority' neighbourhoods should be key election issue: Miller

Maintaining services in city's 'priority' neighbourhoods should be key election issue: Miller. Jean Marie Beautot and Cutty Duncan stand outside Action for Neighbourhood Change's office on Weston Road. Staff photo/MIKE ADLER

Other politicians are calling for more police, but Miller, running for a second term as mayor, promises 13 neglected neighbourhoods will get $1 million each in investments to bring them hope.

Nine are "at-risk" inner-suburb areas identified the year before. They combine the scarcest services with the greatest social challenges.

The other four, Malvern among them, are touched by violence.

Miller wins the election that fall, and what's known as the Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy has been the city's policy instrument since then for fighting poverty and alienation, particularly among youth.

Now, all that may be nearly over.

Miller and Frances Lankin - his partner as Toronto's United Way CEO - are both leaving their posts, and Miller said he's baffled candidates for mayor and council aren't talking about the strategy more.

"If I was running again, I'd make it the centerpiece of my campaign," Miller said in an interview last month. "I think any candidate worth their salt running for mayor should be talking about this issue all the time."

He's not alone, but figuring out if this placed-based approach to dealing with the city's neediest neighbourhoods has worked isn't easy.

It doesn't help that agencies involved in the strategy did their work quietly, at times out of the general public's view, or that city and United Way assessments of Strong Neighbourhoods won't be ready until next year.

In the southeast part of Scarborough where it was first tried, the strategy hasn't solved a lack of community space, especially for children and youth. Residents cheered a recreation centre addition that broke ground this year as "something rather than nothing," said Mike McKenzie of the Scarborough Village Neighbourhood Association.â?¨Co-chairperson of the group, founded with help from an agency called Action for Neighbourhood Change, McKenzie said Strong Neighbourhoods' greatest achievement is "folks are listening."

A city worker vacuuming the sidewalk - once a much more common sight around Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue than at Eglinton and Markham Road, McKenzie said - now comes regularly, and the city forced a high-rise owner to fill two decades of potholes at Cougar Court.

Scarborough Village is still a "somewhat foreign" idea to many who live in it, but having a name for the neighbourhood counters media stigma around Markham and Eglinton, he said, while local people are "learning to take charge" and speak as a community.

Producing that voice, and seeing residents able to direct change in their own neighbourhoods, was a key strategy goal.

But some "priority" neighbourhoods drawn up by the city and United Way had hyphenated names - Westminster-Branson? Eglinton East-Kennedy Park? - residents had never heard before.

Forming a real residents' group in such places proved difficult.

In Crescent Town, based around a set of East York high-rises near Danforth Avenue, the city's name left residents feeling singled out or left out, said Madhavi Reddy, local ANC project manager.

They chose a new name, Taylor Massey, after the Don River tributary. After two years, there is no association for the whole area, but ANC is working with people in "little neighbourhoods" within it, and two more outside the boundary.

The smaller communities are divided, but Reddy said the agency hopes their residents come together and both the larger and smaller groups will one day act on their own. "We're getting there," she said.

Last month, Lankin said nine of the neighbourhoods have "fully-functioning" residents associations, and 10 (Taylor Massey isn't one of them) have produced a total of 100 tangible projects - such as sewing clubs for women - through grants to residents.

The United Way had seen a huge increase in inner-suburb families living in poverty, and "a high majority" of the 2005 gun-violence incidents were in the 13 priority neighbourhoods, she said.

"There was the unfortunate canary in the coal mine, in terms of the evidence and the proof, and it's so sad it was young peoples' lives," Lankin said. "We've still got many years to go to get to where we want."

The process changed the United Way, which began as a downtown organization funding downtown agencies, as it set itself on course "to get at root causes" in under-served suburbs while not pulling out support from downtown neighbourhoods such as Regent Park.

The city, however, started its own work in most priority neighbourhoods faster than the United Way-backed ANC could. The strategy also called for 13 Neighbourhood Investment Partnerships including businesses and three levels of government, but none were formed.

City staff also developed the Neighbourhood Wellness Index, a more complex means of measuring resources and needs in neighbourhoods.

Some middle-income or high-income residents of priority areas "felt that this was a negative and stigmatizing name," while others from across the income spectrum joined the new resident associations to lend their skills, Lankin said.

"We've learned there is a willingness across social-economic groups to work together."

Higher-income residents of such neighbourhoods, however, may not know how to lend their help if they wanted to. The ANC projects employ outreach workers from a specific community and do most of their work in person.

For nearly two years, the agency's Jamestown project, the Rexdale ANC, has been in a Kipling Avenue apartment tower across from North Albion Collegiate. But with no sign outside, no phone listing and no searchable internet presence, the operation in North Etobicoke cannot draw much outside support.

After being told none of the ANC office numbers were on its website, Caitlin Stidwell, a communications officer, called it "simply an oversight" on the United Way's part and said the website will be updated.

Miller said most of the strategy is meeting his hopes. The $13 million in capital investments - all of which "have been about young people" - have turned into $31 million through private, federal and provincial funding, he said.

"Unless we build on this effort there's a very real risk that we'll slide back. And one of the consequences of inequality and poverty, sadly, is that the drug trade moves in to some places, and you get ensuing safety issues."

Meanwhile, Oniko Hines, a teenager who was watching anime at a Weston Road community centre, knows what his priority neighbourhood needs now - dancing.

Hines, 16, wanted to open a dance studio after a three-week business camp at the Learning Enrichment Foundation, once a vacant building. Teens are leaving the area to learn dance and "I want to give them a reason to stay," he said.

Too young to apply for a loan, he could get a Resident Action Grant to open a studio if they were still available in Weston-Mt. Dennis.

The film club fell apart, but other projects started by grants survive. The craft circle still meets, the indoor basketball club still plays and the community kitchen serves 30 to 40 people a week.

A founder of the Mt. Dennis Community Association in 2005, Jean Marie Beautot saw Weston Road, with the area's industrial employers gone, becoming a ghost town. "People didn't talk to one another and connect," recalled Beautot, who was impressed the ANC wanted to work with residents directly instead of agencies.

"Nobody was doing that before," she said.

Four years later Weston is still in transition, but ANC will be scaling back staff and resources in the area just as communication is blossoming between its many groups as never before.

"That's the question: Strong Neighbourhoods made us stronger, but are we strong enough to do it ourselves?" Beautot asked.