MERE LAWS WON'T SHUT CRACK HOUSE

The girl wore black - skirt, boots, skimpy top - and her hair was also
black, but artificially so; and her face was pale and her lips were
red and her chains were silver.

The hour was early and the morning air was clean, and she may have
been coming off the night shift when she entered the apartment
building and the door closed quietly behind her.

The building is a crack house on Wilson Park Rd. At night there are
fist fights on the sidewalk when little drug deals go wrong; bottles
get smashed, and jagged howls of rage and outrage tear the darkness.

But I was on the sidewalk in the quiet morning, waiting to meet the
Parkdale city councillor, Gordon Perks. Because the problems in this
building are on his plate, and the good neighbours push him hard. The
neighbours have done their best to shame the landlord into action,
using wit and ingenuity.

So far, to no avail.

The councillor - he is not without a certain self-possession - led me
around the back of the building to get a sense of the place, with its
litter of discarded condoms and blue rubber gloves.

Blue gloves? The paramedics have been there. And I have seen worse,
but a crack house is a crack house, and this one is hell in the west
end.

What can the councillor do, what can he say to the neighbours who have
a right to live in peace, and to raise their children safely?

In a nearby cafe he said, "I meet every six weeks with all the
enforcement agencies - Police, Alcohol and Gaming, Public Health,
Licensing and Standards, and Fire - and representatives from the
neighbourhood come to the meetings, on the understanding that they
won't share specifics about enforcement strategy.

"There is an ebb and flow to these things; when problems get worse, we
can signal to the landlord and the tenants, we can issue orders for
garbage or for broken windows. Most of the time, problems take care of
themselves.

"In some cases - the Queen's Hotel, the dungeon on Queen (St. W.) and
O'Hara (Ave.), a hostel at Sorauren (Ave.) and Dundas (St. W.) -
buildings get closed."

Not as easy as you'd think: "The Queen's Hotel took years ... there
were hundreds of violations; social services came in ... we had
Health, Fire and Police in there daily. But Police can't close a
place, and Licensing and Standards can't go in without the permission
of the owner. The one agency that can close a place is Fire, but there
have to be legitimate reasons; if the owner keeps up a minimum
standard ..." Wilson Park Rd. is a particularly thorny case. But here
you should wonder why it is that landlords are not licensed in this
city.

And then the councillor surprised me. "I don't think all the tools are
enforcement. I chair the Drug Strategy Task Force. We need treatment.
We need harm reduction. If we treat the people who live in that
building as enforcement objects, we do nothing to solve the problem -
if they move, they'll just go to some other address."

I have a hunch some of the people who live in the crack house on
Wilson Park Rd. moved there after a recent sweep of Lansdowne Ave. and
Bloor St. W.

But the councillor is right. If arresting crack addicts and petty
dealers was the answer, this place would have been shut long ago.

The neighbours remain impatient. Last I heard, they were trying to
find out who holds the mortgage of the building, and who provides the
insurance.

Pressure to bear?

I wonder if the punk girl cares.