Quote:
Calgary was built on possibility and an ingrained belief that success is available to all those who seek it. But from 1980 to 2005, the gap between rich and poor neighbourhoods deepened dramatically. While the region roared into a period of unprecedented prosperity, Census data show that the income differential between have and have-not communities (measured with the Gini coefficient, using after-tax values) grew by 81 per cent -- far more than any other urban centre. The increase was enough to vault Calgary over Toronto, giving “The Heart of the New West” the dubious distinction of leading the country in neighbourhood income inequality.
According to University of Toronto sociologist John Myles, who crunched the data in a 2011 working paper titled “Why Have Poorer Neighbourhoods Stagnated Economically, While The Richer Have Flourished?”, the shift was caused primarily because “the rich were getting richer.” Over 25 years, the mean after-tax income in Calgary’s poorest neighbourhoods inched up by a mere five per cent; in the richest neighbourhoods, meanwhile, that figure ballooned by nearly 75 per cent.
None of this comes as a surprise to Noel Keough, an urban design professor at the University of Calgary, who has tracked the issue of income inequality in the city since the ’90s. As for the root of the disparity, he, too, points toward the collection of gleaming corporate headquarters clustered downtown.
“The oil and gas sector earns significantly higher [incomes] than any other sector, and it’s a minimum of people that work in oil and gas,” he says. “The concentration of a single industry with large, multinational players concentrates the wealth that’s generated in our city and in our province.”
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Wanted to add in the actual front page as it's being shown right now. (This is beside the point, but they didn't use a very recent picture of downtown...)
Obviously Huff Post is left leaning, sometimes annoyingly so, but they raise a lot of valid concerns about the direction Calgary has taken.
Full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/12...tml?ref=canada