Metro Vancouver was more 'middle class' in 1970: study Metro Vancouver's middle class has shrunk and poverty has become more common in the suburbs over the last four decades, according to data mapped by a University of Toronto Cities Centre research team. The maps compare the average personal incomes of Metro Vancouver's census tracts in 1970 and 2005. It's one of the first steps in a projected six-year study that will examine the causes and consequences of shifts in personal income across six Canadian cities, according to UBC geographer David Ley, who worked on the project. The number of tracts (or census spatial areas) with a middle income average dropped considerably overall, from 71 per cent in 1970 to 53 per cent in 2005, according to Ley. In 1970, the average middle income in Greater Vancouver was $5,220. In 2005, it was $36,123. The averages are calculated among 178 tracts in the Vancouver region. Ley said that personal income in historically flush areas like North Vancouver and West Vancouver, as well as older neighbourhoods in the downtown core where gentrification has "occurred with a vengeance," has consolidated and expanded, so fewer people of the middle class live there. Through parts of east Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and north Surrey, the number of low income tracts has increased and the middle class has decreased. The spatial distribution of 2005's lower income tracts often follows the Expo and Millenium SkyTrain lines, Ley said. "We no longer have a single compact low income poverty