e “suburbanization of poverty.”

The family of Iranian refugees is on income assistance and barely making ends meet. They struggle to find work and cringe upon mention of their monthly bills.

“Life is so hard in Canada,” says daughter Shabnam, the member of the family of six who is most comfortable speaking in English. Without Canadian references, Ms. Kokeihi says work has been hard to come by.

Increasingly, the poor of Metro Vancouver are like the Kokeihis: scattered outside the urban core, making them all the harder to see, much less help. Pockets of poverty are building in the suburbs. According to research by UBC geographer David Ley and the University of Toronto's Cities Centre, the areas where average income contracted the most in that same 35-year period are in the outlying areas of Vancouver and its suburbs: southeast Vancouver, north Richmond, Burnaby, Surrey and Coquitlam. Several were also among the poorest, compared to the rest of the city, in the 2006 census. These areas, magnets for both immigration and refugee settlement, have become nodes of low income, unemployment and the invisibly poor. The people who live there are disproportionately new Canadians and visible minorities.
“If it’s not in your face regularly, I think there’s sometimes a sense people won’t think it’s as big an issue as it really is,” says Martin Wyant, executive director of SHARE family and community services in Coquitlam.

The income polarization of the cities is almost universal. Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban demography, explained “Cities often offer a raw deal for the working class, which ends up squeezed by a lethal combination of chronically high housing costs and chronically low opportunity in economies dominated by finance and other elite industries.” Poor people can’t afford to leave the city. They need access to public transit (however lousy), subsidized housing (however crummy), social networks and social services. Cities such as Toronto also face the larger challenges of the post-industrial revolution, where upward mobility is sharply diminished and where education and technology are creating much greater separations between the haves and have-nots. Toronto is increasingly dominated by two opposite populations – one with an average income of $88,400, and another of $26,900. In a five-year period alone, average incomes declined in 34 of the city’s census tracts (about 7 per cent of its total) – 23 of those areas became predominantly low-income. At the same time, 12 areas became high-income and nine earned “middle-income” status. In Toronto, the idea of neighbourhood-specific poverty came to the fore several years ago. A Scarborough-based community planner sees families, seniors and new immigrants struggling to cope in her Kingston-Lawrence neighbourhood. “Most of the jobs here are part-time, contract. They aren’t adequate jobs for people. No wonder accumulation of wealth is happening somewhere else.”