MURDERS, ASSAULTS AND OVERDOSES, THE CITY'S HEART IS BLEEDING

If all goes according to plan, Toronto mayoral candidate Jane
Pitfield will take a walk on the wild side tomorrow with a tour of
the epicentre of a ghetto in this city that is saturated with
illegal rooming houses, homeless shelters, derelict buildings,
crack dens, drug dealers, alcohol detox centres, substance-abuse
clinics, low-end hooker strolls and condom-littered alleyways spiked
with discarded syringes.

And all within a few blocks of the Eaton Centre.

It should be an eye-opener for the Ward 26 councillor who hails from
the leafy quietude of Leaside -- even if she is co-chairman of both
the Homeless and Socially Isolated Committee and the Aboriginal
Affairs Committee.

This ghetto, of course, has its bull's eye at the corner of Jarvis
and Shuter, and ripples out from there -- east to River, west to
Church, south to King, and north to Carlton.

It is where this city bottoms out, and where crime is chronic.

According to a 2005 United Way report, this small patch of the
city's core has more social services agencies dealing with the poor,
the disenfranchised and the addled than any other section of
Toronto, making oft-maligned Parkdale a veritable paradise by comparison.

Super-Sized Shelter

It has the lowest median income in the city, at $15,000, an
unemployment rate of 11.5%, and a population in which 44% of the
people lack a secondary school education.

And city hall seems not to care about the continuing erosion and
decay -- at least not Mayor David Miller and certainly not local
councillor Kyle Rae.

But there is an election in November.

There are those who write about this part of town who know little or
nothing about it. But I do. It is where I live while searching for
the fodder for this space, in a basement apartment right by the
aforementioned bull's eye.

And there is little here that I have not witnessed, including the
aftermath of murders, assaults and overdoses.

Drug dealing is done openly.

A few metres down a lane from where I live, the Salvation Army is
tearing down its Harbour Light Mission at the corner of Jarvis and
Shuter and, with funds from the province and the feds and the
approval of city hall, it will begin building a facility virtually
double in size -- with 100 units of transitional housing for the
homeless, and a 100-bed residential care hostel for drug addicts.

From the outside looking in, this is good.

But, according to research by those who oppose it, led primarily by
the optimistically named Garden District Residents Association, this
project will only oversaturate an area already saturated with
everything but an officially declared red-light district and
legalized shooting galleries.

And the group has a legitimate argument.

Within four blocks of the Sally Ann's planned redevelopment, for
example, some 20-plus agencies are involved in administering 2,500
emergency shelter beds, 12 group homes for criminal offenders, 20
group homes for the mentally ill, six harm-reduction resource
centres handing out free needles and crack pipes, 1,000 long-term
care beds, thousands of social housing units and 18 cooperatives
designed for affordable housing.

All close to the bull's eye.

If this is not ghetto creation, then what is it?

And then there is what has been referred to as "demolition by
decay," a phenomenon which city hall bureaucrats cannot combat
because there is no bylaw in existence to force developers to
maintain minimum standards of maintenance for buildings that have
gone derelict.

A prime example is Walnut Hall, described by the Toronto Star's
architecture columnist, Christopher Hume, as the only block of
Georgian townhouses left standing in the city.

That row of old homes, on the north bank of Shuter, just east of
Jarvis, has been boarded up and unheated for the last 20 years. When
bricks began falling off the building, the owner, Joe Jonatan, was
ordered by the city to put up protective fencing, but that was
it -- with Jonatan's excuse being that it has taken "longer than
expected" to come up with a feasible business plan to make Walnut Hall work.

Where's The Planning

The block, however, is now for sale, with $2.2 million reportedly
being the asking price for this ruin.

But, as Hume wrote back in July: "In some cities, a developer like
Joe Jonatan would be heavily fined for his actions and even have his
property expropriated. In Toronto, (however), we have no choice but
sit by and watch as he lets a unique and valuable heritage site fall apart."

Eva Curlanis-Bart is the president of the Garden District Residents
Association, and the woman who will be escorting Pitfield on
tomorrow's scheduled walkabout -- one that has been confirmed by
Pitfield's special assistant, Paul Virdo, as definitely being on her agenda.

A year ago, to prove one of her many points about the decay and
ghettoization of her neighourhood, Curlanis-Bart pulled statistics
compiled by 51 Division which showed police being involved in more
than 1,200 "interventions" in her district -- and that's just
in the roominghouses alone.

"What has happened to urban planning, to balancing
the socio-economic mix of neighbourhoods?" she asked.

"Victimhood, expediency and political correctness are not
substitutes for vision, wisdom, justice and courage."

Tomorrow, therefore, will be Pitfield's opportunity to see for
herself what Miller and Rae tend to see with a blind eye.

Hopefully she will not be wearing blinders.