My friend Jennifer offered to show me around Danzig the other day; I’d told her I was curious, not about the aftermath of the shooting, but about the state of public housing in the neighbourhood.

I knocked on her door and she let me in, and I could see that her door frame was broken. She said, “Wait until you see how I lock it.”

She pulled the door shut and wedged a stick between the inner front door handle and the outer handle of the closet door so that, if you were pushing on the front door from the outside, it jammed on the stick.

I raised an eyebrow.

She said, “I’ve stopped putting in work orders. They don’t come, or they say it’s the kids.” I don’t care who it is. She can’t lock her door.

She directed my attention to the ceiling above her front door; water damage. “At one point, the toilet leaked. In the winter, the door froze shut.” That’s not how you want to lock a door.

Her kitchen counter is cracked, and not properly attached to the cabinets beneath it; the cabinets have no doors.

I asked if I could look upstairs. She warned me to be careful, or I’d fall through a busted tread. She reported the problem two months ago; no action yet.

Mould in her bathroom? She said, “I think every apartment has this problem.” I’d seen enough.

We took a walk.

She introduced me to a lady who showed me how the tiles around her bathtub are not sealed, making it impossible to use the shower; mould there, too.

I met a lady down the street who pointed to the ceiling above her door, water-damaged because — you guessed it — the toilet upstairs leaked.

I did not meet the lady a few houses over — she was out — but I was able to look inside her place anyway because, once again, the lock on her front door does not work, which means when she goes out her place is vulnerable to people whose intentions are not mine.

The absent lady’s kitchen drawers were warped; her cupboards were coming away from the wall, and there was a pile of dirty laundry on the basement floor because her dryer blows fuses.

Yikes.

I met yet another lady who said her furnace sometimes does not work, and the furnace guy couldn’t figure it out, and neither could the electrician, and winter is coming, and she has four kids.

I saw a lady standing on a porch across the street. She said her place had mould, and her son has asthma and uses a puffer, and the mould is killing him. “Words can’t express what I feel. If I had any money, I’d leave.”

The next lady I met was pushing a child in a stroller. She said, “One Sunday, I was on the bus going to church. There were three cockroaches crawled out of the stroller. I was humiliated. At home, I have mice. If I lie on the couch at night, I can hear them. I put traps. The mice go away. They come back.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

These are not the worst stories. They are just the first stories. Here’s the question: does neglect breed apathy, or does apathy breed neglect?

And does it matter? These women and their families need help now. Gene Jones, head of TCHC, would raze Danzig and rebuild it, or redevelop it somehow, if he could; but he also said that people have to take personal responsibility.

Of course they do. But in the short term I’m betting you could do more in Danzig with a team of social workers than you could with an army of repairmen.