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I despair for my city.

After spending several days walking the streets of downtown Toronto, I’ve concluded that unless our politicians wake up to the reality of what is occurring in front of their noses, we could easily become another Seattle or San Francisco.

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While the decline has been steady over the past 10 years, I have never seen it so bad.

The street sleepers. The encampments. The plethora of beggars.

The screaming drug-addicted parked in front of tony stores. The pungent smell of urine in subway entrances and on some downtown sidewalks. The filled-to-overflowing garbage bins. The littered sidewalks full of food wrappers and abandoned water bottles.

I could go on but let me refer to my experience last week.

On Thursday, photographer Jack Boland and I found more than a dozen encampments, beggars and street sleepers within a few blocks of City Hall.

Despite the existence of new city shelter standards and six respite shelters (with an average per diem of $146 per night), and perhaps because of the city’s nine overdose prevention sites, the downtown streets appear to have become a dumping ground for street sleepers from outside Toronto and for drug addicts who get their fix and then plop themselves down with impunity wherever they so choose.