There is some legal stuff in the works involving the tenants of 250 Davenport Rd. and the Toronto Community Housing Corp.

The issue is safety.

And I don’t want to spend any time explaining legal matters, but I do have some thoughts on safety, and of prudence.

Let us begin by considering sidewalks and snow. If it snows and you do not clear your sidewalk, you might get fined; if you do not clear your walk and someone slips and falls, you might be liable.

And so the prudent homeowner shovels snow, and the belt-and-suspenders homeowner uses a shovel, plus lashings of salt or gravel.

When it comes to community housing, you would think that if there were concerns over safety. And so I stopped by 250 Davenport recently to look for signs of prudence.

A couple of tenants were to meet me at the entrance, but no one was waiting for me when I arrived, and I did not have phone number for my contacts.

The first signs of prudence were promising: There was a TV monitor in the lobby, and on the screen there was a security guy peering around.

Did I say promising?

After a moment the guard got up and disappeared from the screen, and a tenant came in with a bag of groceries and opened the door, and the door was slow to close.

I stepped in.

And nothing happened, except that I had the freedom of the building.

Eventually, my friends showed up, and they showed me around. They also gave me a little history lesson, in order to explain why some of the women tenants keep baseball bats by their doors, or in their bedrooms.

OK, look, I understand that the dilemma for TCHC is that money is tight, and there are plans to redevelop the property, and . . . hang on.

Money is tight?

The corporation has just lashed out $1.6 million in severance payments for a handful of fired executives, and there is enough money left over to hire an executive coach and to arrange some remedial management training for Gene Jones, the CEO who did all the firing.

OK, I digress.

But I wonder how much of that money could have been used to attend to problems in this building, including the flooded underground parking, or the leaks and the cracks and the flood damage from last summer.

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And what about the pipes I saw, at ceiling height, which have been leaking? Oh, well, at least the leaks have been attended to with plastic sheeting and tape.

Excuse me? There is no leak in the world that can be fixed with tape and plastic sheeting.

But the real issue is security.

I saw a sheltered area used by addicts, where they are invisible from the street, although they are quite visible to a tenant who can see and hear them through the single-pane window of her room.

A single-pane window? Oh, not exactly true; the window has an additional layer of protection — a sheet of thermal plastic to keep out the cold.

No wonder the tenant has a baseball bat.

My friends then showed me the various entrances to the building, and I learned how the drug users jam coins into the hardware on the doors, so that the doors do not lock and so may be opened at any time by anyone.

The dealers and the drug addicts do this coin trick, as you might guess, so that they can enter the building in order to use drugs, or to trade sex for drugs, and to relieve themselves in other ways, in the comforts of the stairwells.

The local councillor, Adam Vaughan, sent a letter to TCHC on Jan. 23, urging the corporation to attend to security in the building. Thing is, I see no signs the letter has been heeded; perhaps, in addition to executive training, remedial letter-reading courses are required for some TCHC staff.

Yeah, I’d sue, too.