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Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal home to nearly half of all living in low-income neighbourhoods

Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal home to nearly half of all living in low-income neighbourhoods

Nearly half of all Canadians considered to be living in low-income neighbourhoods reside in the country's three largest cities.

National Household Survey details released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday suggest that 48.5 per cent of people considered to be living in poor neighbourhoods come from Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.

The income breakdown information suggests that there are a total of 478 low-income neighbourhoods in Canada (communities of 5,000 or more with 30 per cent of residents considered impoverished).

Of those 478 neighbourhoods, 171 were in the three largest cities.

New data released from the 2011 National Household Survey suggests that 4.8 million Canadians live in low-income situations.

That is 14.9 per cent of the country that earn less than half of the country's median income.

[ More Brew: NHS: Canada’s median income reaches $47,868 ]

That threshold is considered to be $19,460 for a single person or $27,521 for a two-person family.

According to the survey, one in five low-income Canadians live in poor neighbourhoods. And while most of those neighbourhoods are found in large cities, but smaller metropolitan areas were also found to have a high concentration of low-income Canadians.

Among the highest were Sherbrook, Que., and Windsor, Ont.

"Among Sherbrooke's 36,000 low-income residents, 16,000 lived in one of the (census metropolitan area's) 13 low-income neighbourhoods," reads the report.

That accounts for 44.5 per cent of the city's low-income residents.
Other cities that rank high on the list include Windsor, Ont. (40.6 per cent),

Trois-Rivieres, Que. (39.2 per cent), and Saint John, N.B.

The survey also found that low-income neighbourhoods had a higher proportion of recent immigrants and single-parent families.

Such neighbourhoods were also, not surprisingly, more likely to be home to adults who reported not working in 2010.

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