Hi, first newsletter. Hello!

So there is a very big (11k) facebook group on fb of liberty village residents that I am a part of because I actually live in LV.

KIDDING.

I just lurk.

For a while now there have been reports of increased drug activity, needles on the ground, lots of safety fears (though no actual incidents other than a nail salon break-in have occurred) due to the opening of the St. Felix Respite Centre by Lamport Stadium. The complaints of LV residents have registered in the press and yesterday a community meeting was held. Result of meeting is 4 full time police officers in LV. Before the meeting the residents absolutely lost their shit on facebook. Of course.

A key thing to know about the respite centre is that it is TEMPORARY until 1000 new shelter beds are built. 180 000 people are on a waiting list for affordable housing. Housing for the most low income residents (apartments and rooming houses) is consistently disappearing. This lack of housing and subsequent homelessness is the core issue few lv residents seem to acknowledge.

So let’s see. A photo was posted of needles on the ground (which were cleaned up in 30 minutes by a staff member of the centre) and the group had a violent implosion.

I spent some time combing through the 450+ comments to try to make sense of what people in LV feel about this and it’s… a lot.

The tone of a lot of the comments - callous, calculating, ruthlessly pragmatic on the one hand and socially conservative on the other - made me cringe. Almost every comment started with “I think these people need help but” NOT HERE SOMEWHERE ELSE. This was followed by quite a few “@husband we need to move”

Here is what Ashley (originally from st. catherines) had to say:

So happy the city spent all this money to house drug addicts. In a booming neighbour too! Let’s see how long the tech companies stick around looking at that circus tent outside their windows.

What struck me is the solipsism of this ‘community’ and a complete lack of bigger thinking about why these issues are happening or how Liberty Village residents have contributed to the gentrification that has exacerbated this exact problem of homelessness.

You don’t need a degree in urban studies to know that Liberty Village and Parkdale are both old toronto communities that had gone through waves of gentrification and change (good and bad). The area’s direct relationship to mental health and addiction is even more storied: In the 70s and 80s a policy of “de-institutionalization” meant that tens of thousands of patients from Queen Street Mental Health Centre and Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital were released into the area with no housing or social support services provided. Many of them ended up in rooming houses, group homes and cheap apartments - the same spaces being demolished now for more condos and higher rents.

There was exactly ONE COMMENT about LV’s growth as a factor in economic and social causes of homelessness: the financialization of housing, real estate speculation, and lack of federal/provincial investment in building affordable housing.

Let’s not forget that LV/Parkdale is becoming increasingly more gentrified, making housing unaffordable for so many who have lived in this area WELL BEFORE ANY OF US CONDO DWELLERS MOVED IN!

The Palace Arms at King and Strachan, Strachan House at Strachan and Wellington, ALL existed before liberty village was developed. If you bought here hoping that all the original residents would be pushed out, then that’s YOUR bad.

home and community as investment

For many LV residents a condo is an investment, a financial investment, so as much as they may be sad that there are people struggling and frame their comments as desire to elevate their community, they ultimately care about protecting the growth of their property values and their returns.

As Geoffrey here puts it so plainly and honestly:

Also i'm curious on the correlation between one's opinion on this and whether he/she rents/owns. When a young person coughs up all their savings for a 500K - 1M shoehouse 'starter' home, damn straight they are going to be concerned with ensuring an improvement in community optics - its the definition of taking ownership of your community. At these real estate values, there is no room for mistakes that could negatively influence young families' investments.

Finally it is brand or “Community optics” that is truly at stake here for the LV commentators. In the financial world of speculative investment where Geoffrey dreams of wealth from rising property prices, it is the protection of this wealth that is at stake. In fact, a community is something to be “owned” it is something to buy into, rather than participate in alongside others, however different from you they may be.

Words such as “community” here are empty signifiers when the desirability of community members is based on class and when the only solution proposed is more policing (which they got).

aye there’s the rub

But then, if it is true that ballooning property prices are responsible not only for lack of affordable housing, but also for the increase in wealth for investors,

and i, geoffery, have taken on a big big nasty mortgage, made a risky investment, hoping, nay praying, for the continued out of control growth of these prices,

if my whole future and upward class mobility rests on the hope that this investment pays off,

then these undesirables in my neighborhood are an existential threat to me financially,

they are yet another financial risk to be managed and solved. and i think it is this exact fear (a fundamentally financial fear) that is the result of so much anger and so much rage against litter from a shelter that is helping hundreds of people every day.

think of the children, I mean, dogs

I want to end my close reading of facebook comments with the children.

Actually, not that many people talked about kids, because let’s be real how many kids are there in LV. People did talk a lot about their precious dogs. Dogs, presumably on leash if this community is as law abiding as it claims, are to be protected at all costs.

At all costs.

Want to help?

Here are a few places that are always looking for donations and volunteers:

Parkdale Community Food Bank

Parkdale Project Read

Parkdale Neighborhood Land Trust

St. Francis Table

Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre