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A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods

On July 12, 1995, a punishing heat wave settled over the American midwest. Over the next seven days, temperatures soared into the 40s, with humidity making it feel even hotter. The nights provided little relief as temperatures remained high. Roads buckled, water pressure dropped from all the open fire hydrants, and the power grid started to fail.

Over the course of that fateful week, over 700 people died prematurely in Chicago alone, with elevated death rates in St. Louis and Milwaukee as well.

Heat waves are silent, deadly killers, relentlessly grinding their sufferers down through rashes, muscle soreness, exhaustion, nausea, headaches, dizziness, decreased blood flow to the brain, arrhythmia, tissue damage, kidney failure and cardiac arrest.

But heat waves do not kill indiscriminately: some people are more susceptible than others. Senior citizens, in particular, are less resilient against sustained heat and suffer dispropor- tionately when they cannot cool down.

And, the 1995 heat wave also taught us that some neighbourhoods are more resilient than others. A young sociologist named Eric Klinenberg overturned status quo thinking about heat waves in what turned out to be a landmark study on two Chicago neighbourhoods with highly divergent health outcomes.

In North Lawndale, a poor neighbourhood in Chicago’s West Side, (where Martin Luther King Jr. based his 1960’s campaign against segregated poverty) the built form is characterized by single family houses, stand-alone apartment buildings, few businesses (and those mostly segregated in strip plazas), demolished vacant lots, narrow sidewalks and a generally low-quality public realm.

Neighbouring South Lawndale, locally known as Little Village, is also a poor neighbourhood, but it enjoys a more traditional built form of dense, mixed-use buildings with stores on the main level and apartments upstairs. South Lawndale has a high population density and a vibrant local trade rich in amenities.

Both neighbourhoods are populated mainly by lower-income ethnic minorities, but the dif- ference in mortality and morbidity rates during the 1995 heat wave is stark.

In North Lawndale, residents are isolated by the abandonment of their local geography, afraid both to venture out to seek help and to answer the door when relief workers come to offer aid. It had one of the highest death rates in the city.

As Klinenberg put it, “the dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density and family dispersion undermines the viability of public life and the strength of local support systems, rendering the older residents particu- larly vulnerable to isolation.”

South Lawndale, by contrast, is a neighbourhood with rich public space, a stable population and high social connectivity.

Vulnerable residents were not isolated from their neighbours and could share in their community’s social resources. It had one of the lowest death rates.

I believe we can draw some clear lessons from Chicago in how we approach neighbourhood development in Hamilton.

In recent years, the City of Hamilton has developed a Neighbourhood Action Strategy, built upon a decade of groundwork laid by Hamilton Community Foundation, focusing on the city’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Instead of having “experts” swoop down and lecture neighbourhoods about what they need, the action plans for the target neighbourhoods have focused on developing local expertise and leadership to identify and prioritize what the residents recognize are their biggest chal- lenges and opportunities.

Every time I review the Neighbourhood Action Plans for each neighbourhood — communities like Davis Creek, Gibson and Landsdale, Keith, McQuesten, Riverdale and Crown Point — I’m struck by the commonalities in what people need.

People in every neighbourhood want to feel safe in their homes and in public. They want social connections with their neighbours so they don’t feel isolated. They want safer, richer, more inclusive and more beautiful public spaces, especially their streets and local parks. They want to be able to make local trips in safety and comfort.

They want access to local amenities, including both public services like schools and libraries and also a healthy mix of retail businesses and commercial services. They want local housing to be clean, safe, well-maintained and inclusive.
In short, people want their community to be resilient. This is abundantly a matter of quality of life, of course, but we are increasingly aware that it is also a matter of life and death. In Hamilton, the annual Vital Signs reports and Steve Buist’s Hamilton Spectator Code Red series have identified huge variations in morbidity and mortality between different neighbourhoods.

People who live in safer, more vibrant, more socially connected neighbourhoods are significantly healthier and live longer than people who live isolated in communities with disinvested public spaces and dangerous streets. For far too long, Hamilton has practiced a kind of poverty by postal code that has left whole neighbourhoods mired in deep, self-reinforcing poverty of both public and private investment.

As Hamilton continues to enjoy an economic and cultural renaissance, we have both an exciting opportunity and an urgent need to invest in our most vulnerable neighbourhoods so that they can share in the benefits.

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