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THE GARDEN DISTRICT RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION CREATES THE GABRIELLE ROY PARKETTE
Roses, eunonymous standards and boxwood flourish on the grounds of the Gabrielle Roy Parkette on George Street. The neglected stretch of land along the school fence was turned into a rose garden thanks to the volunteer efforts of The Garden District Residents Association. For the past four years, its members fundraised, recruited landscape professionals and worked diligently with the Gabrielle Roy Public School and its Parents Council to come with a plan to rid this part of George Street of loiterers and drug dealers who claimed this patch as their own.
The project attracted the attention and generosity of local residents who donated of their time and money. Seaton House, the men's shelter located at the north end of George Street has offered 50 hours of labour. Maintenance of the Parkette, named after the Gabrielle Roy Public School has been possible through volunteer efforts of the area residents and contributions from the film industry.
The Gabrielle Roy Parkette is another grass root initiative aimed at changing the look and feel of the neighbourhood which for too long has suffered from misguided policies and neglect. The first one was the September 30th. 2001 Mayoral Proclamation of THE GARDEN DISTRICT bordered by Yonge, Carlton, Sherbourne and Queen Streets. The name celebrates the historical tradition of Toronto's public parks, Allan Gardens and Moss Park, and provides a framework for landscape improvements to the District's streets, sidewalks, residential and business properties. An annual Garden Competition is now in place from May to October which recognizes and celebrates the best green projects in the residential and business/institutional categories. The winners are featured on www.gardendistrict.ca
These volunteer efforts have not however been matched by municipal initiatives. To this day, Garden District has not received any street signs or street banners, a visual identity enjoyed by other neighbourhoods in this historical part of Toronto. Let's hope that the Gabrielle Roy Parkette will spur City Hall to action.
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LET’S HOPE JARVIS GENTRIFIES
By Eva Curlanis-Bart
The headline in the Post Homes (National Post, March 15th) heralded hope. At long last, east downtown was on its way to recovery. Well, not quite. The hope ends at Richmond Street as the article confirmed. To the north lies the vast land of shelters, hostels, rooming houses, to the south the vibrant neighbourhood where young and upcoming professionals buy condos, go to clubs and restaurants and shop locally. And not withstanding a few forays north, as recent plans for Shutter Street would suggest, that demarcation line is here to stay if the downtown councillors have their way.
The City’s politicians and bureaucrats have created a ghetto where residents erect gates and barriers to protect themselves from the threat to their lives and property and where schoolyards are fenced with barbed wire. A neighbourhood void of retail and services where hundreds of transients roam the streets and parks, assaulting, thieving, relieving themselves in public, screaming day and night a scream of despair, addiction, illness or rage. Local politicians advance the theory that those who demand devolution of the ghetto do so to safeguard the value of their properties. That is a myth perpetrated by those responsible for the waste of human life and public funds.
At a staggering cost to the taxpayer, the shelter sector has failed to do what it was created to do – help the destitute. To the tune of $120 million a year, it maintains a vast bureaucracy while the homeless are allowed to set up camp in parks and pan handle on every street corner.
The City’s budget figures reveal some staggering facts. Up to 75% of shelter cost goes to salaries and benefits, building supplies exceed bedding supplies, and more money is spent on staff travel than on TTC for the clients, and shelter cooks cost twice as much as the food they dispense. No wonder, the bureaucracy cries for more. And never mind that there has been no census of the homeless, no assessment of their needs, no tracking system within the shelter network, no analysis why the homeless do not make use of shelter facilities.
Unless we hold politicians accountable for their decisions, unless we press for the redistribution of social facilities throughout the city in the name of fair share, Jarvis will not gentrify. More importantly, the historic Garden District will be given no chance to grow into a balanced community.
Pockets of Poverty in GTA? Take a Look at Toronto's Downtown East Side: You'll find Much More than Poverty Here.
Carolyn Matthews
"The poor live in pockets in the subrbs," recent news articles have announced, the writers no doubt assuming that we already know about those who live in downtown Toronto. But do we? It's worth taking a good look at the poor and disadvantaged jammed in ghetto-like conditions in the city's downtown east side - roughly south of Wellesley, from Sherbourne Street to the Don Valley. Take a drive or walk here from almost anywhere else in the city and you will bump into homeless people and beggars; into drug dealers, prostitutes, and the mentally ill. You'll find few places to have coffee, do banking or any other business, as many retailers have fled because of the area's high crime statistics and high insurance rates.
Local residents will talk to you freely about how they have watched the steady
proliferation of group homes, shelters, half-way houses and store-front social services. The deterioration of their streets: how garbage collects, homeless people relieve themselves, the mentally ill shout at their demons, and where their guests often fear to walk. They are not exaggerating: close to 60% of all shelters, half-way houses, group homes and all the attendant social services, are located in this area - Wards 27 and 28.
Why, are they concentrated here, and is it a problem? Let's take a look. Most of us will readily admit that it's heartless for disadvantaged people to be so ghettoized; are familiar with studies that show how concentrating any type of activity in one area is detrimental to it - Regent Park and The Beach are but two examples, if for very different reasons. How can immigrants possibly be integrated into such places, we wonder? How can those most vulnerable survive in conditions where hundreds of homeless people are housed alongside half-way homes for federal convicts on conditional release…where the poor have few services that the rest of us take for granted, few opportunities for even part-time employment?
Worse yet for those warehoused in the downtown east side is the fact that this area contains some of our most significant places of historical interest, heritage buildings and beautiful Victorian streetscapes, all constituting potential tourist attractions, and therefore, funds for the city. It lies smack in the heart of the city, a stone's throw from the Eaton Centre, the entertainment district, City Hall - as prime real estate as you can get. The poor and handicapped are ghettoized here in full view of the rich and privileged; are ignored amid the glitter, the glamour, and the bustle. It is a shame for them, and a shame for all of us.
The City's Committee of Adjustment has recently given approval to the Salvation Army to purchase St. Leonard hotel on Sherbourne, just south of Wellesley Street. In allowing this sale, it disregarded its own by-law crafted twenty-five years ago, a law created to prevent just such a situation. The by-law states that a group home must be 245 meters distant from another. It must not contain more than six to ten people. The Army's proposal will house up to eighteen federal convicts on conditional release, right next door to another of their existing such homes that houses thirty-five inmates.
'Neighbourhoods must not be jeopardized,' the by-law states. 'At-risk people contained in the facilities are not to be placed alongside other at-risk people.' This is the law. Why is City Council ignoring it and perpetuating a situation it knows does not work, and that is cruel to those it herds into this area? Why, in 2002, did it refuse to take a census of the homeless? One cannot help but come to the conclusion that the City must have an unspoken plan to continue to contain the poverty industry right here.
One can also ask why the City continues to ignore protests by residents, business and community groups in the area. Tax-payers in Wards 27 and 28 feel a huge sense of betrayal at the City's arrogance in breaking its own by-laws, at its insensitivity to its clients (the poor), and themselves - a large group of tax-payers. It has taken a seemingly small issue - granting the right to the Salvation Army to purchase a flophouse - to ignite long-simmering passions of the local people. Because of the City's action, an almost unprecedented cooperative effort among many diverse business and resident groups is taking place to mount a challenge: on behalf of poor, on behalf of themselves, and against the City for the breaking of its own by-laws in such a seemingly cavalier fashion.
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