How Brampton, a town in suburban Ontario, was dubbed a ghetto

Good long read on Brampton by Noreen Ahmed-Ullah (excerpt from her book, Subdivided: City-Building in an Age of Hyper-Diversity), the pace of demographic change and the lack of adequate municipal integration policies and programs:

Until last year, I was a reporter in Chicago, covering the inequities of the city’s public school system and writing about disenfranchised African American youths. Neighbourhoods on Chicago’s south and west sides – now those are true urban ghettos.

Here in Brampton, you don’t have abandoned homes boarded up, acting as magnets for prostitution and drug dealing. The city isn’t shutting down schools. Gang members are not opening fire at children playing on sidewalks.

So if Brampton is not a ghetto, what is it?

The sprawling suburb of subdivisions, with its high South Asian (specifically Sikh) population is what’s called an “ethnoburb” – a middle-class suburb occupied by an ethnic group. Outside the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, as well as London, England, the Brampton area is considered to be home to one of the largest Sikh communities outside of India. How it got to be that way is a lot like the story of other ethnic enclaves going back generations – people followed friends and relatives.

“It’s an interesting case because you have this clustering and clumping of particular people through market processes and social relationships,” says York University professor Roger Keil, who researches global suburbanization. “Immigrants from a particular ilk living together – that’s the common history of immigration from the Lower East Side of New York City to 19th-century Vienna.”

In Brampton’s case, the clustering was triggered by developers who kept buying farmland and converting them into endless subdivisions. Jobs at the airport, which employed South Asian immigrants for years, also fuelled the expansion, attracting South Asians first to Malton and then nearby Brampton. Within a generation, Brampton transformed from Canada’s flower-growing capital to its ninth-largest city. The population boomed from 234,445 in 1991 to 521,315 in 2011, with that number now estimated at nearly 600,000.

But the rapid demographic turnover has not been lost on long-standing residents.

Racial tensions ignite over everything from permit battles for a new temple to fireworks regulations for Diwali. In 2014, anti-Sikh flyers distributed by an immigration reform group called Immigration Watch, entitled “The Changing Face of Brampton” and asking residents “Is This Really What You Want?” sparked outrage among Sikh community groups. Another flyer distributed in March, 2015, warned of the city’s dwindling “European” population, implying the decline was a result of “white genocide.”

Whether it is “white genocide” or “white flight,” few would dispute that the town has lost a sizable chunk of its white population.

While academics shy away from using the term “white flight” to describe what happened to Brampton’s white families, residents speak freely of what they observed in their own neighbourhoods.

Back in 2005, when Gurjit Bajwa moved into his Castlemore subdivision of 3,500-square-foot homes, there were about 15 white families, out of 105. Many of those white families are now gone, with South Asians making up half the subdivision. Another 20 per cent of the families are black. This transition occurred in one of the wealthiest parts of the city, with homes valued at almost $1-million.

The 45-year-old emergency room doctor at Etobicoke General Hospital doesn’t know what drove the white families away, but he knows he too has faced the stigma of living in Brampton. Dr. Bajwa, who is Sikh, says that in the beginning he wouldn’t even tell co-workers he lived in Brampton, instead naming the neighbourhood where he lived.

“I would say I lived in Castlemore,” he said. “There was a negative connotation to Brampton. People wouldn’t say it, but it would just be a non-verbal cue like a rolling of the eyes, or ‘Oh I see.’ They were thinking: ‘You live in a ghetto. You’re a doctor, you could be living anywhere you want. You could be living in Rosedale if you wanted to. Why do you choose Brampton? Why do you choose to live in a ghetto?’”

So why did he move to Brampton?

“Two reasons,” Dr. Bajwa said. “One was housing prices. In the more established areas of Mississauga, Vaughan and Markham, the housing prices were higher. Here, they were 10 to 15 per cent lower. The other reason is that flocks tend to migrate together. If you have one community moving, they tell their relatives.”

Mrs. R, who immigrated to Canada from the West Indies 40 years ago, watched her neighbourhood change during the 15 years she lived in Brampton.

“My street was very diverse. We had West Indian, South Asians, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Caucasian,” she recalled. “By the time we left in 2015, the neighbour on the left who was Italian was now South Asian. And the one on the right who was Korean was now South Asian. You’d walk into a bank that was mixed and now [you] see South Asian managers and South Asian bank tellers. You’d have to be living under a rock to not see that things were changing.”

And the changes were not always welcome to the non-South Asians.

Some were upset that older Punjabi and Hindi immigrants seemed to be getting by without having to learn English. Because South Asians didn’t call out a friendly “hello” or because all South Asian homes had basement apartments or because of their “smelly” cooking, some people just didn’t like having them as neighbours. They watched the “welcome mat” being laid out by businesses like banks, and were filled with resentment. When they had immigrated here from different parts of the world, no one made services like opening a bank account easy for them.

“I’ve been here longer, and I feel like an outsider,” a black resident told me.

….Kristin Good is an associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University. In her 2006 book, Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver, she argues that local governments – not just their federal and provincial counterparts – have a role to play in helping communities deal with multiculturalism and the racial tensions that may arise as a community becomes more biracial than multiracial.

“As Brampton transitioned from a more diverse multicultural immigration base to a more concentrated South Asian population, that concentration creates a perception of cultural takeover in a municipality among long-standing residents and can lead to particular kinds of multiculturalism challenges,” Prof. Good says. “My theory predicts that you’ll see more of a backlash when there is concentration. Part of it is the perception that the immigrant group doesn’t want to integrate. Part of it is the sense of cultural takeover and the loss of being the majority in the place. And, part of it is that certain types of developments are perceived to cater to particular ethnic groups, and sometimes that makes longstanding residents feel excluded.”

In such cases, municipalities need to step in and foster intercultural understanding between the two groups.

Brampton’s municipal leaders never took that critical step. In fact, Prof. Good found that neither politicians in Brampton nor Mississauga had planned or reacted well to their minority population in the early 2000s.

“They were unresponsive,” Prof. Good said. “What they didn’t do were all of the things that more responsive municipalities did that follow a multicultural model of citizenship, rather than one based on a hands-off, laissez faire assimilation approach to immigrant integration.”

Source: How Brampton, a town in suburban Ontario, was dubbed a ghetto – The Globe and Mail