Sipping coffee in a spacious Calgary bungalow, Sandra Horley is a long way from home. The single mother of two lives in Forest Lawn, an east side neighbourhood considered among the city’s most challenged. Car-less and often without bus fare, the 43-year-old, who depends on social assistance, gets around mainly by foot.
But for the purposes of our discussion, Horley has agreed to meet at the tidy suburban cul-de-sac on the other side of town, where her kids’ elementary school principal, Jean Johnson, lives. The area’s manicured lawns are a world apart from her hardscrabble community, and yet, when it comes to gauging Calgary’s economic disparity, Horley says the distance between here and Forest Lawn is not the one that matters most.
“In Calgary, I see it like this,” she explains, opening her arms like an alligator’s jaw. “You have your wealthy,” she says, glancing up at her top hand, “and then you have your middle class and your poor, and they’re down here. Because of the oil industry in this province and in this city, there is a big discrepancy here.”
Simplistic though it may seem, the evidence is mounting that Horley’s assessment isn’t far from fact.
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.
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