Do You (Still) Like Your Neighbourhood?

With everything going on in the world, a lot of people don’t. This is why.

The pandemic has society spinning on its head. People have too much time on their hands and the government is handing out money like it’s deeply discounted Hallowe’en candy. Strangers are becoming stranger all the time and well, in my opinion, aggressive.

Not too long ago, if someone said something to you and you didn’t answer, everyone kept walking. Now if you don’t stop and talk to the stranger than strange stranger, or give them money, they (try to) intimate you even in broad daylight. My neighbourhood has always had panhandlers but they are now out of control.

It is really hard to call people people when they behave like animals by going to the bathroom at the side of the sidewalk in front of houses and people on the streetcar. And if someone reading this is thinking, Well, there aren’t public washrooms anymore, there are. Like the one at the church across the street, less than 35 metres away from where I yelled at an old man to poop on someone else’s front stoop and not that of my friends all while in broad daylight. But why bother to have to possibly wait for the streetlight and the washroom when the streets of Toronto are right there. If someone in authority cared something would have been done by now, but, in my opinion, no one in authority has cared for a long time. And just for the record, a few months before the pandemic, no one believed me when I would tell them that people use the streets of Toronto as their public washroom. Now that the City of Toronto is housing people all over Toronto, people are believing a lot of things they never thought would happen in their back or front yards.

Break and enters are on the rise in every neighbourhood but mine probably because there is nothing left to steal. And the fact that there are cameras literally everywhere on every building. Since not every neighbourhood is as equiped as mine and some have secluded pockets, break and enters will only continue.

One thing my neighbourhood has always had an abundance of is organizations that hand out harm reduction kits. The majority of those kits’ used needles etc., end up on the streets of Toronto until Needle Hunters, who are paid $14.50 an hour pick up all the (illegal) drug paraphernalia that drug users/addicts can’t be bothered to dispose of (even if needle drop boxes are right in front of them). Few people believed me about that too, but now months later, as the City of Toronto has been housing the homeless in a variety of neighbourhoods people are believing the discarded needles etc., that they see. And how could they not? Needles, bands, and anything else in those harm reduction kits are left all over their neighbourhoods.

Toronto is becoming like a lot of American cities. Dirty, drug infested, and downright deplorable! With so many people from my neighbourhood being housed all over Toronto, my neighbourhood, outside of the aggressive panhandlers, is safer and cleaner. As a side note, there are at lot of people who have chosen to live in areas that they can’t afford and that is a problem.

As usual I could go on, yet I won’t.

Here is a link to Behind the Blog! Today’s blog is called, Is There A Tent City Near You?