Posted on 04/18/2006 8:07:21 AM PDT by fanfan
Tomorrow they count the homeless.
It's another amazing chapter in an already pathetic pattern of not being able to get a handle on this horrible blight we all know is a national disgrace. Have you been to a city park in recent years? Do you like the smell of urine?
It has become a dirty, disgusting city. The looks on the faces of our tourists say all you need to know about the possibility of them coming back to the garbage dump that is not in Michigan but sits right atop Lake Ontario.
Perhaps they should put the anti-smoking crowd in charge of dealing with the homeless. They have been successful at ensuring there's not many indoor spots to smoke anymore. They have been so effective, you can't have a cigarette near the entrance of buildings.
But it seems to be okay to urinate outside an entrance. And defecate, sleep and snore.
In many places people do whatever the hell they want. Don't park your car there for a second though. Prompt city service will be coming your way with a $30 yellow ticket if you do.
Interesting colour, yellow, since that's exactly what city council are when it comes to dealing with the homeless and panhandling issue. Gutless. You'd be fired at your job if you did it as badly. Not the gung-ho parking assassins themselves though. They are good at their jobs. Maybe they should join with the smoking police and take on the panhandlers together.
Of course we wouldn't be that merciless toward the less fortunate. We'll keep them hounding the hard-working people instead.
On the serious side, the state of this problem and the look of the city is an embarrassment. This is supposed to be the pride of the country -- a city we love to show off. World class.
Now Mayor "Vanity Fair Magazine" Miller is asking people to spend 20 minutes cleaning up the city. It might take a little longer than that. Have you seen it lately? In many places it's a dump. Dirty, smelly and disgusting.
Mayor Mel Lastman, Barbara Hall and June Rowlands before Miller were equally as inept in this area. No one has a plan.
During my years Scrawlin I took dozens of pictures of homeless people asleep on grates, doorways, in the parks or harassing the hardworking citizens or tourists for money.
And yet here they are in 2006 at City Hall looking at us taxpayers with a straight face and saying they are going out tomorrow to do a homeless census.
Some on council are terrified they won't find enough to justify their wasteful money-pit spending. That could be one positive aspect of supporting the count.
But I see this as another phony make-work project. We already know there is a problem but we don't have the strength to deal with it.
Meanwhile there's no Olympics for us in Toronto or World's Fair. Instead we spend almost six figures of taxpayers' money on this, which is a drop in the bucket of the more than $200 million already budgeted. We should be getting better results for our money.
Tomorrow some well-meaning people will count the vagrants, give them a questionnaire and then write a report and then come back with findings that will say we have homeless people here.
I'd have told them that for free. It's been a problem for a while. All the way back in 1992, I went undercover as a homeless person for a week and wrote a piece on it.
FOOD WAS OKAY
At that time I thought the services were pretty good and I never had a problem finding a place to sleep. The workers were professional and the food was better than what I eat today.
The lifestyle was neat too. Lots of sitting around and doing nothing. Fun and perfect for the lazy slugs who want to make a living at that.
Not so perfect for the ones having a tough time in life -- personally, financially or mentally. I realized all that was happening is they were using these people as pawns for the social worker types, who want more money for their friends to have jobs.
They can't have this problem solved. All that happens with the way they handle it is the homeless people just bunk in and make a life of it -- and use our city as a toilet. It's a lot of the same people year after year. I know many by name.
Not all are panhandlers and not all are homeless. Some are nasty and some are nice. But none should be allowed to live on the street -- or be forced to.
Whatever we are doing now is not working. Or, perhaps, it is working. Maybe that's why they are always there.
The solution is simple -- zero tolerance, like with the smoking or parking. Nobody should be allowed to sleep or panhandle on the street or in a city park. End of story.
If they are found there, they should be taken to a shelter or, if necessary and warranted, a jail. If you want to clean up your city, this is what you must do.
Miller and his gang of tax-increase and paperwork specialists don't have the guts, so brace yourself for another report. And more parking tickets.
Huh. Sounds exactly like San Fransicko.
This has happened to the leftist-run cities of the US, like NYC and San FranFreako.
Toronto is a dirty city ... and it DOES literally stink. I lived there for two yrs. I couldn't wait to get back to the Maritimes. Torontonians, for the most part, don't seem to care. They are too focussed on themselves to think about taking care of the city they live in.
"They are too focussed on themselves to think about taking care of the city they live in."
Just like in SF. They get so used to living with the homeless that they become immune to it. To a visitor, it is disgusting.
I lived in Toronto for four years until 1998. I don't have memories of it being particularly dirty or smelly (except on hot summer days or in chinatown). Maybe it has gotten worse.
The real stink is with the liberal/socialist supermajority in the town. They are rotten.
I last was in Toronto about 15 years ago, and I thought then it was a relatively clean city. It's a shame that it has gone downhill so quickly.
I left Toronto in 2000. It did seem to be going downhill then. There was a pretty good movement in the mid-90s to clean up before things were obviously going to get out of hand, but it lost steam after a few years. Haven't been back since, so I can't say what it's like now.
Yeah.....I can never understand people who go to San Francisco for a "vacation." Yech.
I could not have said any better.
Speaking of the smoking thing. Did you ever notice that the homeless always seem to be be carrying a fresh pack of name brand cigarettes. I noticed a man sitting by a store breathing through a oxygen mask and asking for hand outs. When the crowd of people thinned out he stuffed mask back in his bag and pulled out a unopened pack of Marlboros.
I remember walking through a park and smelling raw sewage. It turned out that the park, which ran along a shallow valley, had a sewage line running through it with vents every so often. I also clearly remember garbage all along the 401 and throughout the city. Add to this the air quality warnings throughout the summer. I moved back to the Maritimes in '97.
Hey Clive,
Give us your input on this, don't you live in a Toronto suburb?
Toronto is far worse than any of them. Stay away at all costs.
Last year, there were over 40 days of Code Orange or Code Red air quality in Toronto.
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