Tenants had been throwing their garbage off the balconies for years at 2777 Kipling Avenue in North Etobicoke, to the point where the 18-storey apartment building looked as if it bordered on a landfill. I did not know such things happened in a modern city in Canada.

Perhaps I was too busy smugly studying apocalyptic Detroit abandonment porn to notice Toronto’s slide. The place looked as awful as the underside of the Gardiner. Finally a team of 80 arrived in hard hats for a cleanup, which we’ll discuss.

But first, if I may have a moment, _______ (insert quiet screaming). If a sentence starts with “garbage” and ends with “off balcony,” I’m not sure I can even insert the word “flung.” Maybe tenants didn’t hurl it like cows from a castle in a Monty Python movie, but quietly tipped it out at night. But the visuals are shocking.

I’m willing to concede that the tenant who threw a stroller off the balcony rather than taking it downstairs probably watched in some dismay as the thing landed in a tree. There it remained for years, rusting and leaking, mute testimony to the worst Saturday night of the marriage and eventually the couple moved out or divorced, whichever was faster.

Either way, they escaped their despair, as the other tenants and neighbours of this privately owned building did not. They just lived with acres of coffee grounds, glass, used diapers, broken toys and what a Star reporter called “unknown substances.” One hopes he meant condiments and moisturizers, but he didn’t.

Even as the CBC filmed crews continuing days of cleaning on Thursday, a tenant dropped a dirty diaper on their heads.

I blame everyone here: a shameless landlord, a dysfunctional city that didn’t enforce its maintenance orders, and tenants who lost the will to live after the first fatal dumping, which seems to have begun as the cheaply built 1960s highrise began seriously deteriorating about 15 years ago.

I accept that the tenants gave up, but wonder about strategy.

1. Perhaps the tenants knew the building was a slum, so they created what is known in the fashion world as a “flattering adjacency,” which means standing next to someone who looks worse than you. The apartment is tidy; the Humber River conservation area next door looks like hell; we win.

2. This is what you do when you’re an infant, throw your toys out of the stroller because, what, your dad’s not going to pick it up? This was the landlord’s explanation, he perhaps not realizing that this made him the equivalent of an abusive father taunting a baby.

When the Star reached the landlord by phone, he spoke of his tenants with contempt, using this parental analogy. “Are these people adults or are they children?”

He couldn’t remember when he last visited 2777 Kipling, denied the building was a mess and saying his “triple-A” management team of eight full-time staff kept the place in great shape.

But CBC video of the building showed rotting walls and broken concrete. The garbage chutes were said to be damaged and disposal areas dark and filthy.

3. My third analogy is more dire. This might be the equivalent of the “dirty protest” by IRA prisoners in British jails: treat us like animals and we’ll behave like animals. They smeared excrement over the walls of their cells so staff would have to clean it up. As a considered political tactic, it was a disaster. Guards have total power, prisoners have only moral power, which they squander at their peril.

The flaw in this is, of course, that a city is not a prison but an opportunity, a regulated one.

People flock to cities for the freedom and anonymity they offer, but they are actually highly structured places. Built on a gravesite of tunnels and cables, they are paved and planted in layers, buildings rising and spreading at an almost violent speed. Nothing happens without permission. The city is planned, paid for, maintained and surveilled. All these things are done badly or well.

Toronto has done badly here, so badly that people like me, obsessive about cleanliness and tidiness, feel something resembling panic. I speak as someone who rushes to the window to watch the little street-scrubbing vehicles go by, sweeping and scouring the matter that flows down the hill when it rains. I feel a rush of happiness, and mute the jumpy feeling that occasionally forces me to place everything in my office in tiny rows.

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I live in an organized city, and vote to keep standards high and cheese-paring Denzil Minnan-Wongs out of office. Minnan-Wong once stood outside a newly built public washroom with a protest sign because the building was too expensive and attractive. I call this depraved. He’s the deputy mayor now.

I want a clean organized city and I want money spent. If 2777 Kipling is a dirty protest, dirty is winning. What I’m writing is less a commentary than a howl of despair.