ON THE DOWNSIDE
As a photographer, McPherson is constantly searching for a new image to capture, and so sees downtown in a way others don’t.
For her, the life and death of Tom was part of the story of downtown St. Catharines that rarely fits the narrative of economic revival. “The thing is there are two downtowns in this city,” she says. “And they don’t ever seem to really interact.”
One downtown is a place of new growth and opportunity fuelled by the Meridian Centre, the Brock University school of fine arts and the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.
The other is a bleaker place, defined by a poverty fed by low wages, low levels of education and few opportunities for social mobility. It is a downtown where people sleep in parks at night and the notion of buying a ticket to a hockey game is a fantasy.
It is a place where a man can die unnoticed in plain sight.
“We live downtown and so we walk through the park often,” McPherson said. “This isn’t the first time I have seen something like this. Last winter, we took a walk through Montebello and we came across this young girl huffing on an aerosol can. I didn’t even know what huffing was until that day.”
The disparity between the economic growth in downtown and the people who live in the district is starkly laid out by data collected by the Niagara Prosperity Initiative at Niagara Region.
Using data from Statistics Canada and other sources, the prosperity initiative gauges the economic health of a neighbourhood. It compares indicators like the Low Income Measure, the number of households earning less than $20,000 after taxes, the number of working poor, the unemployment rate from each neighbourhood in Niagara against the figures for the municipality the neighbourhood is part of and the region as a whole.
In each of these categories, downtown St. Catharines ranks worse than the overall data for the city and region.
Of the nine indicators the initiative collects data for, eight are flagged as problem areas for downtown.
For instance, the data shows the percentage of households in Niagara earning less than $20,000 annually is 11.02 per cent, and for St. Catharines that figure is 12.59 per cent.
For downtown area, it is 34.9 per cent.
The percentage of the population classified as “working poor” — these are people who have jobs but earn too little to pay for their basic needs — is 9.12 per cent for Niagara and 10.1 per cent for St. Catharines.
For the downtown community, it is 19.54 per cent.
“The recession isn’t over for many people,” said Betty-Lou Souter, CEO of Community Care of St.Catharines and Thorold, the area’s food bank.
Community Care has been based in downtown St. Catharines for most of its history because that’s where most of its clients live. Although social housing units have been built in other parts of the city, most of the food bank’s clients live within 2.5 km of the building.
The downtown is also ideal for services that cater to clients who aren’t exclusively located in the immediate area.
“The bus station is important for us,” said Michael Lethby, executive director of the RAFT, a youth hostel and drop-in resource centre on Centre Street, a few blocks from the Carlisle Street bus station.
“A lot of our youth are coming in from elsewhere in the city and even from elsewhere in Niagara or outside the region. So being next to the bus station is very helpful.”
Souter says this knot of services in downtown is not a phenomena unique to the Garden City.
“You will see this happening in most urban downtowns,” she said. “Downtown is where the action is, so to speak.”
In many cities, including St. Catharines, those struggling economically will often cluster downtown where most of the agencies they rely on are located.
For those who turn to panhandling, Souter said, downtowns are also where businesses and office buildings cluster, so there are lots of people walking around with a few dollars to spare in their pockets.
Although there are new attractions and businesses downtown, and some wealthier mini-suburbs, the people who live in some downtown neighbourhoods aren’t finding jobs there. In some cases, Souter said, they aren’t even ideal candidates for the kind of work that is available.
As with many communities with higher than average levels of poverty, you find more residents with fewer skills. For instance, according to the NPI data, 18.31 per cent of those living downtown ages 25 to 64 do not have a high school diploma, compared to 11.32 per cent for all of St. Catharines and 11.45 per cent for Niagara.
Those who live on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder are often not considered in large economic revitalization projects.
Over the years, housing has been demolished to make way for more commercial projects, including the Ministry of Transportation building on St. Paul Street. The more recent wave of developments is no different, with the old Knight’s Inn being smashed down to make way for the performing arts centre.
While the motel was never a city attraction, it was a place some people relied on.
“So that is one of the things that you really should keep in mind when you are planning these sorts of projects,” says Bob Barkman, an intensive case worker at Community Care. “I am not saying don’t do them, but you have consider that there are people who live in these places, and if you take away that housing what becomes of them?”
The renovation of the Leonard Hotel directly across the street is another place Barkman points to. For a long time, he said, the hotel charged very low room rates and was a hub for people with limited incomes.
“A community does develop in places like that,” said Catherine Livingston, program manager at Community Care’s housing help program.
“People have their own networks. You could argue they are not the most healthy networks, but that is what they have.”
Barkman and Livingston said when the Knights Inn was torn down and the Leonard renovated, some of the people who lived in those buildings ended up being “scattered to the wind.”
Given the lack of affordable housing in Niagara, each time units are removed the overall housing problem is made worse.
“I think there has been a real decrease in the amount of housing that’s available at the most economic end, the lowest end,” says Susan Venditti, executive director of Start Me Up Niagara, a downtown agency that works with the poor.
“It started off when we lost the city motel and there’s been changes in the Leonard. As the Leonard has been refurbished, the price of rooms has gone up so they’re out of reach for some of our folks … It’s definitely more difficult for the people that I deal with to find housing in the downtown core.”
However, Venditti said, the housing crisis in Niagara is not caused by redevelopment in the core, and in the case of the Leonard, many residents found other housing thanks in part to the owner of the hotel who worked with them.
Owners Nick Atalick and his wife, Kelly Clarke, moved tenants up floor by floor while the historic building in dire condition underwent a massive $4-million renovation. Re-branded as the Carlisle Suites, the building features bachelor and one-bedroom apartments.
They said they wanted to give the tenants lots of notice, even though they weren’t required to, because the old Leonard fell under the Hotel Act. The couple held turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and Christmas for the first few years and worked with Venditti to help those who couldn’t afford to stay to find other accommodations.
Atalick loaded up their furnishings and helped them move.
“Nick went the extra mile to give them all things. Some of them had been here 15, 16 years,” Clarke said.
“It was a big transition, but we did it with a lot of emotion and care. We’re proud of what we built, but we are proud we didn’t just kick them out of the door.”
Venditti said although the changes downtown have made housing more difficult to find, there is a larger community benefit to moving affordable housing away from the core to avoid a long-term centre of poverty in the city.
“For people who have housing issues, are on a low income and require services, it makes a lot of sense to me to try to stay in the area where there are services,” she said. “But your services have to be dispersed throughout the city, because we can be a little service ghetto, too.”
People have their own networks. You could argue they are not the most healthy networks, but that is what they have.” Catherine Livingston