Urban Problems

6 Pages 1400 Words

Contemporary cities across North America are in crisis, and Toronto is no exception. Growing poverty and homelessness, mounting waste, air pollution that impacts residents’ health as well as the environment, inadequate transit, and failing infrastructure are issues that council faces perennially while trying to redress decrease in financial resources. The challenges are enormous. This paper will examine some of the issues facing Toronto today and consider directions for sustainable solutions.
A considerable problem facing Toronto is that of growing homelessness. The city’s solutions have invariably been short-term band-aid solutions that fail to address the underlying problem. The removal of the residents of Toronto’s Tent City in 2002 was accompanied by the offer to provide housing in the old Princess Margaret Hospital (Dunphy, 2000). However, the housing was emergency sheltering only, and under conditions that far below acceptable standards—inadequate toilet facilities, poor air flow, high infection rate for disease, and rampant violence (Crowe, 2000). In addition, the shelter spaces opened at the old Princess Margaret Hospital increased the total number for the city by only 320. There are between 40 and 50 thousand homeless in Toronto. While there are differing estimates of the increase in homelessness, the least dramatic is a rate of 40 per cent over a twelve-year period boom 1988 to 1999 (The state, 2001).
The underlying problems remain unaddressed. Poverty in Toronto is on the increase—8.3 per cent in the five years from 1995 to 1999, even as the city’s economy was experiencing a boom (Kalinowski, 2002). Economic policy shifts and downloading of services by higher levels of government without commensurate increase in municipal revenue sources (Pockets, 2002) have not only helped to create the city’s problems, they further serve to hamper its capacity to deal with them.
However, the municipal level of government...