TENT CITY DRUG FEARS HASTENED ITS DEMISE

Fears that teenaged students were going to Tent City to buy crack were
among the reasons that the site was shut down this week, a spokesman for
the property owner says.

"Going back to school, through monitoring, we found there was a lot of
teenagers, kids with backpacks, going on and off the site," Nick Cowling
said on behalf of Home Depot Canada.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cowling said, there were indicators of "increased
criminal activity" and the site was becoming a "refuge" for people involved
in drug trafficking and prostitution.

The removal of the shantytown's residents, accomplished Tuesday, came as a
surprise to key city officials. Secrecy was such that they were left out of
the loop and shelters scrambled at the end of the day to house those evicted.

Recent newspaper articles say many residents of the makeshift dwellings
took a dim view of a crack-smoking subculture that existed there. Home
Depot and municipal officials say they had been concerned a long time about
it, as well as about about fire hazards, stolen electricity, contaminated
soil and squalid living conditions.

Around the end of August, Home Depot Canada abandoned plans to allow the
residents to stay and began discussing plans with Toronto police to use
security guards to evict them -- guards who would need police backup.

At the same time, police and Toronto Hydro officials visited Tent City to
shut off illegal power hookups. By then, residents were already expressing
concern that they were being watched more closely and that an eviction was
coming.

For most of September, those planning the eviction kept their plans under
wraps.

On Monday afternoon, Police Chief Julian Fantino met with Mayor Mel Lastman
to notify him that the evictions would come the next day.

By 9 a.m. on Tuesday, police were calling public-health officials, asking
them to be on standby in case any pets were left behind after the site was
cleared.

An hour and a half later, security officers, supported by police, began to
arrive. Tent City residents were given 10 minutes to leave the property and
told that they could come back later to fetch their belongings.

Yonge Street Mission workers were on hand, called by Home Depot, to refer
the displaced people to shelter.

Front-end loaders and trucks came to remove shrubs and trees and to bring
in chain-link fencing. (Home Depot Canada says it has no plans to develop
the site, but it wants to contain the contaminated soil.)

By 11 a.m., Mr. Lastman was holding a press conference hastily arranged by
aides who had been surprised to learn about the evictions.

Meanwhile, key officials were just learning that Tent City had been closed.
"We didn't find out until the middle of the morning," said Eric Gam,
commissioner of community and neighbourhood services. He said public-health
officials alerted his office that police had called them.

By the afternoon, city officials were scrambling to find beds for the
displaced. They looked mostly in the direction of the WoodGreen Community
Centre, on Queen Street East.

Ever since people began camping on the site in the late 1990s, Tent City
had been a problem for city planners. Lately, it had also been something of
a black eye for Toronto.

In January, The New York Times said of Tent City: "A shantytown is swelling
on the shores of Lake Ontario, practically in the shadow of Canada's
richest banks."