Metro Suburbs in Transition (MSIT), a major three-year social planning assessment of Toronto carried out in the late 1970s was the first to recognize, document,and make recommendations about the changing nature of postwar suburban neighbourhoods in the city. In two volumes Marvyn Novick, a Senior Program Director at the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto (SPCMT), provided “a review of trends in the social development of new suburban communities in Metropolitan Toronto.”
The MSIT reports were the first to thoroughly document and analyze the dramatic social transition taking place in Toronto’s rapidly growing postwar middle-class suburbs. “The era of suburban and metropolitan innocence in Toronto is over” Marvyn wrote in 1979. It was not simply a municipal level problem. Toronto, the research argues from the start, “has been consistently frustrated by Queen’s Park and Ottawa in its attempts to provide integrated urban policy leadership in areas of critical interestto Metro residents.”

The first MSIT volume, subtitled Evolution and Overview, published in 1979 was 300 pages, with 65 maps (long before computerized GIS), 37 figures, and 24 tables. It made the case for a “renewed metropolitan perspective” on what was happening in the postwar suburbs.
The typical sub-urban family of the 1950s and 1960s isno longer: “father in the labour forc
mother at home full-time, ownership of a ground level home with private open space, two to four children, homogeneous neighbours.” There were more diverse family types in the suburbs, fewer were able to independently secure social supports when needed, the economy was no longer generating secure employment and rising incomes, and much more transit was needed.
Relying mainly on the 1976 census, Marvyn and his small group of assistants and an impressive advisory committee documented in great detail for the first time the growing mismatch between the physical environment and the social structure of the suburban population. The postwar physical design of Scarborough, parts of North York, and the northern half of Etobicoke,are very different from that of pre-WWII Toronto.

“Physical environments,” Marvyn
noted, “reflect, support, or accommodate
prevailing social, economic, and political
realities.” The analysis confirmed that the image of urban life in metropolitan Toronto, “with clear social distinctions between the City and the suburbs…no longer correspond to the social realities of what exists today or to the conditions which will have to be faced in the coming decade.”
The second MSIT volume, a Planning Agenda for the Eighties, published in 1980 focused on what to do, a policy and program response. This was only 270
pages, 40 figures, and 29 tables, with 65
recommendations.
What should be done? To start, “the passivity and drift of the seventies” needs to be reversed. The municipalities of Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke need to engage in social and community planning and need to provide essential social services. They need a family housing strategy, major financing for new neighbourhood voluntary agencies, and more inclusive zoning for “fair share distributions of group homes, crisis accommodation facilities, and day care centres.”
In short, the suburban municipalities within Metropolitan Toronto need to adapt to the new conditions with appropriate social policies and programs for households with special needs, crisis accommodation facilities for women and children, community services for troubled youth, home support for seniors, affordable recreation programs, and more. The social and economic realities that produced the sprawling automobile dependent physical pattern of the suburbs required effective social planning in addition to much better physical land use planning.
When the MSIT reports were published many members of the Metro council and the municipal councils, and provincial cabinet ministers, were defensive and some were
highly critical, considering it an attack on their policies, which it was. The head of Metro
Toronto’s government, Paul Godfrey, set up a committee to review the report
without benefit of public meetings. Municipalities took the report more seriously.
The chair of the Scarborough committee, for example, stated “the report was a real eye
opener. It showed us we really hadn’t been planning for the future.” That committee’s
report highlighted the “lack of any recognized centre of public responsibility for social development needs” together with the fragmentary nature of funding of social services.1
Metro’s Suburbs in Transition was prepared during a period of high-inflation, per-
sistently high-unemployment, and weak economic growth, in the political context of
a rising neoliberal market perspective in Ontario that reduced the priority placed on planning and social support. In contrast, the report called for the opposite, the development of a new network of services and facilities at the community level to address the changing social needs. The “critical factors” include: profound shifts in family structure; changing roles of women; the presence in the suburbs of a continuity of family life—large numbers of youth, and a growing elderly population; the ethno-cultural diversity of recent immigrants to Metro; and a relatively uniform suburban housing stock and land use pattern.
The Metro government response was that the trends are not as dramatic or as bad as the SPCMT claims and that all that is needed are some minor changes in the allocation of resources. A 1983 follow-up to MSIT, Neighbourhoods Under Stress, a task force chaired by
Marvyn, resulted in new core funding for neighbourhood agencies, jointly sponsored by the Metro Toronto government, the provincial government, and United Way of
Greater Toronto.2
This Community and Neighbourhood Supports Services Program was the core of a neighbourhood-based model that eventually led to the designation of Priority Neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs, now known as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas.
It took about two decades, however, before more attention began to be paid to the
worsening trends first identified by the two MSIT reports. In 2002 the United Way’s A
Decade of Decline: Poverty and Income Inequality in the City of Toronto in the 1990s
provided an analysis of the changes in the financial well being of Torontonians based on household income, the rate of poverty, the depth of poverty, the income gap be-
tween high and low-income households, and the geographic segregation of poverty.
In 2004 another United Way report, acknowledging it was based on the Metro’s Suburbs in Transition research, attracted a great deal of attention. It documented the dramatic growth in the socio-spatial division of the city. There were not only growing rates of poverty in the midst of prosperity but a growing gap in the socio-economic and ethno-racial composition of neighbourhoods.
In Poverty by Postal Code: The Geography of Neighbourhood Poverty, City of Toronto, 1981 – 2001, the United Way referred to the analysis in MSIT which “predicted that inaction could ultimately lead to the flight of the middle classes, as had happened in American cities. Now, a quarter of a century later, it is important to look at how the poverty levels as well as other socio-economic characteristics have changed in the inner suburbs.”3
What we now know is that it is not an American style “flight of the middle class” but the absolute decline in the share of middle-income jobs, middle-income households, and as a result, middle-income neighbourhoods. It is a dramatic increase in income inequality creating greater socio-spatial polarization.
The initial postwar decades were a period of growth in the share of middle-income households in Canada, and thus in Toronto. The two MSIT reports do not use the words inequality or polarization with respect to income because both were still trending in the right direction during the 1970s. The measurable change took place in the late 1980s and in particular during the 1990s with Finance Minister Paul Martin’s major social program cuts, cuts in transfers to the provinces, and massive individual and corporate income tax cuts.
In 2007, and then an updated version in 2010, The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2005 was published by the urban centre at the University of Toronto.4 As MSIT had warned, it documented how low-income neighbourhoods were more numerous and increasingly concentrated in the postwar suburbs.
In the 1970s, when most of the city’s low-income neighbourhoods were in the inner city, low-income households had good access to transit and social and community services. The area referred to as ‘City #3’ in the Three Cities report are census tracts that are going down in socio-economic status.
All of the City’s 2005 Priority Neighbourhoods and most of its current Neighbourhood Improvement areas are in City #3. The focus of MSIT was Toronto’s ‘rapid growth suburbs.’ As of the 2016 census 89% of the City #3 census tracts are in the MSIT’s rapid growth suburbs.5
It is now forty years since the MSIT research. We know Marvyn Novick’s assessment of trends was correct. We will not know how correct his recommendations were. Most, but not all, were ignored by all three levels of government in the emerging neo-liberal age of public policies focused on austerity, deregulation and tax cuts. One of MSIT’s legacies is highlighting the importance of social planning and social policies.
Another, as demonstrated in the many related follow-up studies, was to demonstrate the importance of doing, and how to do, research on social trends and then frame policy responses for a dynamic and rapidly changing metropolitan area.
In the 1980 MSIT planning agenda, Marvyn warned that if trends were allowed to
continue: “Metro could slowly drift into the fortress community, typical of established
U.S. cities, in which the powerful guard what they have as parts of the surrounding urban fabric crumble into despair and disarray.” He added, “This has not been the tradition of Toronto, nor is it the evident will of Metro’s people.”
In the most recent assessments of Toronto’s social trends, such as the Toronto Foundation’s Vital Signs reports, we are regrettably reading what the MSIT warned us about if social planning and inclusive public policies and fair taxation were ignored.
- Vital Signs 2017/2018: “The patterns of poverty continue to reflect the worrying divide that faces our city, with far more people living with low incomes in the inner suburbs than in the city’s core.”
- Vital Signs 2019/2020: “Dividing lines are growing. The experience of life in the city for newcomers, young people, and racialized groups is markedly — and increasingly — more challenging than for White, long-time residents. Widening gaps in income and wealth, and neighbourhood disparities are reshaping the city.”
The polarization of the city need not continue. It is not inevitable. The jurisdiction and financial capacity of the federal and provincial governments are sufficient to reverse the trend. A wealthy nation can use its resources to make a difference. But that is not happening yet.
In a December 2014 email Marvyn told me that he had just reviewed “in greater detail” both of his MSIT reports in preparation for an interview with a reporter. In view of how extreme the socio-economic, spatial, and racial divides had grown as documented in the “excellent three cities work in updating and enhancing the MSIT themes,” he wrote “I was struck by how successful the ideologues had been in imposing their structural agenda on the policy climate of Ontario.”
In the email Marvyn then cited the following four sentences from his MSIT’s 570 pages. He noted that these four sentences, written in 1980, help explain why his and the SPCMT’s warnings were and sadly are still being ignored. “In our judgement, neo-market views which have come to predominate in Ontario, reflect an impoverished sense of economic history. They fail to understand the inherent relationship between public investments in education, health, urban development, welfare, transportation, defence, communications — and industrial wealth formation.
They are insensitive to productive forms of partnership among government, labour,
and industry in more successful post-war economies. They create unnecessary and
therefore unacceptable levels of inequity for the weak and dependent in bearing the
burdens of renewal.”6
David Hulchanski is Professor of housing and community development at the Uni-
versity of Toronto and was a colleague of Marvyn Novick.
Online access to Metro Suburbs in Transition, Part I can be found here. Online access to Part II can be found here.
Notes:
1 Special Committee of Scarborough Council, “Scarborough Community Services Project: Report on the Metro Social Planning Council Report “Metro Suburbs in Transition’,” editor, Dave Hawkins, Borough of Scarborough, 1979.
2 Neighbourhoods Under Stress, by the Joint Task Force on Neighborhood Support Services, Toronto: Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1983.
3 Poverty by Postal Code: The Geography of Neighbourhood Poverty, City of Toronto, 1981 – 2001, by United Way of Greater Toronto and the Canadian Council on Social Development, Toronto: United Way of Greater Toronto, April 2004, p.25.
4 The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2005, by J. David Hulchanski, Toronto: University of Toronto, Cities Centre, 2010.
5 The Three Cities Within Toronto report was updated in 2017: The Opportunity Equation in the Greater Toronto Area: An Update on Neighbourhood Income Inequality and Polarization, Toronto:United Way Toronto & York Region and the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, University of Toronto, November 2017.
6 Metro Suburbs in Transition: Planning Agenda for the Eighties, 1980, p.57.