Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
While this may be a factor, I don't think (my admittedly subjective) perceptions are due to Chinatown. I'm talking about the "professional class" downtown, like you see in the tunnels, office towers, condos and transit. Or shopping/dining. There's a very visible East Asian population, similar to Bay Area, while the South Asian population seems less obvious.
Random observation, but I was in the downtown Nordstrom last summer buying pants, and it seemed most shoppers were East Asian. Or maybe Chinese Canadians really like shopping, who knows.
It might also be that U.S. South Asians skew higher income than Canadian South Asians, so they're more represented (relative to population) in professional settings.
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Well, Toronto has two Chinatowns which do add a fair bit to the core's Chinese population. The second one on Gerrard St east of Broadview has a Chinese population that's pretty similar to the Spadina/Dundas one at this point, but it's a bit more out of the way so it doesn't cater to tourists as much. They probably help draw in more East Asians from more outlying areas of the city too. There's also a Koreatown on Bloor W and a new Korean/Japanese cluster emerging at Bay and Dundas. Meanwhile there isn't really a "Little India" in Downtown Toronto.
Chinese are also probably more strongly represented among wealthy international students, tourists and wealthy permanent residents.
But among downtown professional workers, in my experience, it's been a pretty even split.
The central electoral districts by demographics, there contain a little over 100,000 people apiece. B, C and E are the districts that contain the Chinatowns but aside from those you can see it's pretty equal.
A) Toronto Centre
White: 55.3%
Chinese: 11.1%
South Asian: 11.8%
Other: 21.8%
B) Spadina-Fort York
White: 57.2%
Chinese: 14.8%
South Asian: 8.3%
Other: 19.7%
C) University-Rosedale
White: 67.3%
Chinese: 14.0%
South Asian: 4.5%
Other: 14.2%
D) Toronto-St. Paul's
White: 71.7%
Chinese: 4.5%
South Asian: 3.8%
Other: 20.0%
E) Toronto-Danforth
White: 67.2%
Chinese: 12.3%
South Asian: 5.4%
Other: 15.1%
F) Parkdale-High Park
White: 73.8%
Chinese: 3.5%
South Asian: 4.7%
Other: 18.0%
G) Davenport
White: 68.1%
Chinese: 5.9%
South Asian: 4.2%
Other: 21.8%
All in all though, the core is relatively white, quite similar to New York where the most close-in areas are majority white, like Manhattan south of Harlem and the most close-in parts of Queens and Brooklyn, and then outlying Brooklyn/Queens, northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and adjacent New Jersey has a lot more minorities.
I think the areas that are most likely to become ethnic enclaves are the ones with high housing availability at the right price point for the ethnic group to move into. In the US, that was often less desirable neighbourhoods with higher turn-over, which accelerated once they started experiencing white flight. In Toronto, you had a bit of that with the suburban highrises, but without as much of the "acceleration" since the income differences between the different ethnic groups and whites were smaller, so self-segregation of whites didn't lead to as much decline (also by the time Asian and Caribbean immigration to Canada began, the US wasn't experiencing as intense white flight either).
But the suburban highrises weren't enough, and enough of the immigrants were middle class that they wanted a lot of SFH areas to move into, so new SFH areas became ethnic enclaves, with the Chinese moving into Agincourt and Milliken, and later further into Markham and Richmond Hill, while Caribbean and South Asians went to Malvern, Rexdale and Malton and later Ajax and Brampton. Now that South Asians have become established in Brampton, and Chinese in Markham, and that those suburbs are particularly desirable to people from those ethnic groups who want to stay with their community, new subdivisions in those suburbs are often <5% white.
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