Message from Hamilton Community Foundation
Last year, Hamilton’s Vital Signs pulled back the veil on a community making progress in some areas, but split by deep fault lines of inequality. Building on the work of the Hamilton Spectator’s Code Red investigation into Hamilton’s neighbourhoods, Vital Signs traced a picture of “two cities that share the same urban boundary but little else.”
In the year since, we continue to make progress on the economy and education, but the underlying dichotomy between affluent and poor neighbourhoods persists.
There are encouraging signs of progress in our economy. Small business startups have increased significantly in 2011 over 2009 while bankruptcies are down 37%. The unemployment rate for the Hamilton CMA (which includes Burlington and Grimsby) has been lower than both the provincial and national averages for two years. Youth unemployment has fallen and is also lower than the provincial and national averages. And, in the city of Hamilton, 2010 was a record year for building permits, up from $692 million in 2009 to $1.1 billion, while the housing market remained steady.
But it’s clear that this good news has reached deeper into some neighbourhoods than others. Child poverty continues to exceed 50% in several neighbourhoods, while the overall rate is 26%. Similarly, the Ontario Works caseload is the highest in a decade, climbing from under 10,000 in early 2008 to 14,110 in June 2011. The number of people using emergency shelters – 3,680 in 2010 – is similar to the previous two years. In education, the high school non-completion rate continues a steady improvement over the past decade – from 27% in 2000 to 19.9% in 2010 – but again, as last year’s Vital Signs found, the results vary from zero in some neighbourhoods to over 65% in others.
Hamilton still struggles to integrate immigrants. The number of new permanent residents moving to our city increased to 4,003 in 2010 from 3,778 in 2009. Almost 40% of recent immigrants to Hamilton have a university degree; double the rate of all working-age Hamiltonians. However, these immigrants also have double the unemployment rates of non-immigrants and a poverty rate over 50% – more than in any other Ontario city.
The central message that emerges from this year’s Vital Signs report is: we need to do more. We need to build on our economic momentum and extend it to every neighbourhood. We need to build strong, healthy communities that encourage civic participation and support entrepreneurs. We need to improve the prospects of our most impoverished families and our most vulnerable residents. We need to work with policymakers and planners to better integrate our neighbourhoods and schools.
As a foundation, we’re looking beyond our ongoing focus on poverty reduction – to align more of our assets to strengthening Hamilton through programs like community investing, and our role as a catalyst for broad and deep changes in areas like education.
As citizens, we all need the compassion to build bridges that close the gap between our two urban solitudes. We need the courage to set our city the ambitious goal of eradicating the devastating poverty that destroys hope.
Working together, we can build a more hopeful future.