Mayor Olivia Chow, tear down this homeless encampment.
Councillor Ausma Malik, take a minute out of your too busy day to encourage city workers to dismantle the three-year-old tent city in Clarence Square Park before somebody dies.
It’s just a matter of time.
People have already been hurt, and many others have overdosed in this small downtown park at Wellington St. and Spadina Ave.
Residents want action.
It’s a Toronto disgrace, with lighter policing than businesses faced if they violated proof-of-vaccination rules during the pandemic lockdowns.
It’s the Wild West. There are no rules, and the needles found at this location are not safe and effective. The stuff shooting into people’s veins here is deadly.
This place should have been closed down a long time ago.
There is nothing legal about people pitching a tent and creating a city in a park located in an area where people pay seven figures — or minimum rent of $3,000 a month — to live.
“Our building has been targeted many times, with violent offenders roaming our hallways,” said Victoria Curcio, who lives in a nearby building in the Spadina Ave.-King St. area.
If people are looking for their stolen bike, phone, camera, generator, credit card or jewelry, you may find it here.
Break-ins in their apartments are commonplace. They had to install steel plates to secure the doors.
Their cars in the underground garage are often broken into or vandalized, too. People have been struck, spit on, followed, threatened, robbed and swore at.
And while there have been no reports of anybody eating people’s pets, there are allegedly occupants among this tent cluster who will try to steal them.
“I have personally had a woman, who was extremely inebriated, come out of the camp and lunge and try to steal my dog,” said Victoria, who added she was “shaken” by what happened.
She still is.
When joining the news conference with MP Kevin Vuong, David Kelley, who represents local hotels and condo boards, and Dana McKiel and Karlene Nation, from the Downtown Citizens Association, she chose to wear her sunglasses and turned down requests for pictures of her and her special dog.
She doesn’t want anybody to try to steal him again.
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This is what Toronto has become. Another woman at the press conference said she had been assaulted twice there, but was reluctant to go on film for fear of retribution from the lawlessness that exists in the camp.
It’s anything goes.
“Clarence Square Park is full of crime, full of assaults and full of feces,” said Spadina-Fort York MP Kevin Vuong.
And it reeks of the smell of narcotics and in the morning, and the site is littered with used condoms and syringes — every day for the past three years.
But not this day.
On the morning of this news conference, it seems, the city sent a crew to clean up mounds of garbage, drug paraphernalia, and other disturbing items strewn around the park.
An hour after all the media, police, politicians, business leaders and residents left, it was business as usual.
But there is nothing usual or routine about this park or any of the other encampments in the city. They are a haven for drugs and danger.
“We have had three fires there,” said McKeil. “And this location is right across the street from a gas station.”
It’s time for the community to take back this park.
Sometimes Toronto takes safety seriously, like it did with Adamson Barbecue, where they brought in dozens of cops — many on horses — to enforce health rules during the pandemic lockdown. But so far there’s been no such enforcement for this.
“It’s just not safe here,” added Nation.
The city knows it’s not safe – hence they sent four police officers to this event.
Were they there to protect the participants or signal that police are on the scene? With about six more cops and a team of city staff, the time could have been better used taking down these tents/drug dens and reclaiming the public park.
So far, Chow and Malik, who represents the area, have not responded.
Residents, meanwhile, say they have had enough and are going to fight back.
“This park and others like it are the people-who-live-here’s backyard,” said Vuong. “It’s for families to spend time with their kids or people walking their dogs.”
Neither of which are safe the way it is now.