Imagine spending ten hours a day caring for your children and elderly parents, cooking, cleaning, and ferrying them between appointments on a bus that doesn’t run on time, before you even think about your own job, education, or rest. For countless people in Toronto, this is not a thought experiment. It is an everyday reality.
The problem is a gendered one, with women taking on more unpaid care responsibilities and domestic labour than men. And while supports for caregivers do exist, there are often significant barriers to access. For example, subsidised childcare waitlists stretch for years.
The barriers can also be geographic. Many low-income families live in “transit deserts,” areas like parts of Scarborough, Etobicoke, or North York that are underserved by rapid transit. Meanwhile, legal aid, mental health support, and adult education programmes exist in silos (PDF), and are rarely accessible to a substantial number of caregivers who need them most.
The result is what economists call “time poverty”: a chronic, grinding shortage of time that falls hardest on low-income women, racialised communities, and immigrant families already navigating systems not built for them.
It is a structural failure with real economic consequences. When caregivers cannot access training or steady employment, Toronto’s labour market loses skilled workers. When care falls apart, families fall apart. The city pays for this crisis of care downstream, in social services, in healthcare, in lost economic productivity, long after the moment a caregiver missed the bus to a class she couldn’t afford to take.
Toronto’s City Council should look to Bogotá, Colombia for a practical, proven answer.
Since 2020, Bogotá has been building a network of Manzanas del Cuidado, “Care Blocks,” that bring childcare, eldercare, legal aid, adult education, and job training together within a 15-minute walk in the districts where caregiving burdens fall hardest. The model starts from a simple premise: care work is concentrated in low-income, underserved neighbourhoods. Therefore, infrastructure must be too.
Each Care Block co-locates programmes so that while children attend tutoring or play, their parents can complete a diploma, see a therapist, or attend job training. Public laundries free up hours lost to handwashing. Legal advisors and counsellors support women experiencing domestic violence. Co-ordinators trained in feminist planning oversee these hubs, often working alongside the caregivers who helped design them.
Critically, Bogotá’s success required co-ordination instead of massive new spending. Departments of health, education, social inclusion, and urban planning restructured how existing services were delivered — spatially instead of bureaucratically. This co-ordination was driven by political leadership. Mayor Claudia López, Bogotá’s first woman and openly LGBTQ+ mayor, reframed care as economic infrastructure rather than charity. During the pandemic, when unpaid care work surged, López made caregiving central to the city’s recovery, treating time as a resource that cities can redistribute. Colombia had already begun measuring unpaid care as part of its GDP, revealing it represented nearly 20 per cent of national output, making the invisible visible.
By 2024, the city had opened 24 Care Blocks, with plans for 45 by 2035. In four years, over 46,000 people earned diplomas or training certificates through programmes delivered within the Care Blocks, and nearly 240,000 participated in wellness activities on site.
Toronto already has the raw materials: community centres, libraries, schools, public health offices, settlement services. A pilot care hub in a transit-accessible, high-need neighbourhood such as Rexdale, Malvern, or Thorncliffe Park could demonstrate what co-ordinated, place-based care infrastructure looks like in a Canadian city. It would not require building something new from scratch. It would require building differently with what already exists.
Bogotá’s Care Blocks remind us that equity is built into the streets, schedules, and systems of a city. If we want a caring, functional, economically resilient Toronto, we need to design for it.
Obaid Khan is an MBA candidate at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
This piece was written as part of the Centre for Global Social Policy’s Opinion Piece project, with funding from SSHRC and the Canada Research Chairs.
Photo via Unsplash
