[memph]

Looking at Toronto, there's a few different things going on.

First of all, the downtown core is where most of the growth in white collar jobs is happening.

There is still some job growth in the outer suburbs, especially since they're growing very fast, but a lot of that is construction/trades, warehousing, retail, schools and other public services. There is some office space being built in the suburbs, but much less than in downtown. And Toronto is still retaining a lot of manufacturing jobs, but it's not really gaining any new ones.

The inner city is largely quite gentrified, with just a few low income pockets (much of them public housing). Once you get to around 6-7 miles from downtown though, you start getting more low income areas, mainly in the unfavored quadrants (NE and NW), with the highest proportion of low income areas around 10-13 miles, and continuing to about 15 miles. The residents increasingly work in the suburbs as you get to the 12-15 mile mark or so. They're still not uniformly low income like it can be in the US though, the SFH housing is still pretty blue-collar middle class and retirees, but there's a fair bit of housing projects and old highrises that are low income. In the favored quadrants though, it's still pretty upper-middle class (Bayview Village, Port Credit).

Then you get the outer suburbs with 80s-10s housing stock. They're more SFH dominated, with some condos, but not much public housing or rental apartments. Commuter rail service is often better than in the inner-middle ring suburbs, or at least comparable, and because there's fewer low income households, they're quite desirable among white collar families that work downtown but can't afford a 3-5 bedroom home there. For the professionals that work in the suburbs, they're also most likely going to live there. There are some lower-middle class pockets though, where large household sizes, renting out basements, etc can make the homes more affordable, mainly in Milliken and Brampton, but also to a lesser extent Ajax, Maple, Erin Mills, East Credit and Uptown Mississauga.

Commuter rail is only useful if you work in the CBD, the retail jobs in the inner city that are a few miles from downtown aren't really accessible from the outer suburbs, so the lower-middle class households living in the suburbs are unlikely to work downtown, they mostly work in the suburbs, much of them in the service sector supporting the white collar suburbanites.

I think the situation in Toronto is actually relatively stable now. The core is still getting lots of job growth and condos, so it'll continue to need lower wage workers to support that, and they'll most likely be living in those areas around 6-10 miles from downtown. Commuter rail is also being improved/expanded, since there's not enough housing in central Toronto for all the job growth, so there will continue to be professionals working in the outer suburbs to make up for the fact that there's not as much office space being built in the outer suburbs as 10-20 years ago. And the low-wage workers who support the upper-middle class suburbanites will find homes in condos or neighbourhoods like NE Brampton that are further from commuter rail or suburban office parks.

You aren't going to see a complete segregation though imo, because the outer suburbs of Toronto are too far to commute to central Toronto jobs more than 1-2 miles from Union Station (especially with congestion), and high income areas still need low income workers to serve them.