Pubdate: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Page: A22 Copyright: 2002, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168 Author: Colin Freeze TENT CITY DRUG FEARS HASTENED ITS DEMISE Fears that teenaged students were going to Tent City to buy crack were among the reasons that the site was shut down this week, a spokesman for the property owner says. "Going back to school, through monitoring, we found there was a lot of teenagers, kids with backpacks, going on and off the site," Nick Cowling said on behalf of Home Depot Canada. In recent weeks, Mr. Cowling said, there were indicators of "increased criminal activity" and the site was becoming a "refuge" for people involved in drug trafficking and prostitution. The removal of the shantytown's residents, accomplished Tuesday, came as a surprise to key city officials. Secrecy was such that they were left out of the loop and shelters scrambled at the end of the day to house those evicted. Recent newspaper articles say many residents of the makeshift dwellings took a dim view of a crack-smoking subculture that existed there. Home Depot and municipal officials say they had been concerned a long time about it, as well as about about fire hazards, stolen electricity, contaminated soil and squalid living conditions. Around the end of August, Home Depot Canada abandoned plans to allow the residents to stay and began discussing plans with Toronto police to use security guards to evict them -- guards who would need police backup. At the same time, police and Toronto Hydro officials visited Tent City to shut off illegal power hookups. By then, residents were already expressing concern that they were being watched more closely and that an eviction was coming. For most of September, those planning the eviction kept their plans under wraps. On Monday afternoon, Police Chief Julian Fantino met with Mayor Mel Lastman to notify him that the evictions would come the next day. By 9 a.m. on Tuesday, police were calling public-health officials, asking them to be on standby in case any pets were left behind after the site was cleared. An hour and a half later, security officers, supported by police, began to arrive. Tent City residents were given 10 minutes to leave the property and told that they could come back later to fetch their belongings. Yonge Street Mission workers were on hand, called by Home Depot, to refer the displaced people to shelter. Front-end loaders and trucks came to remove shrubs and trees and to bring in chain-link fencing. (Home Depot Canada says it has no plans to develop the site, but it wants to contain the contaminated soil.) By 11 a.m., Mr. Lastman was holding a press conference hastily arranged by aides who had been surprised to learn about the evictions. Meanwhile, key officials were just learning that Tent City had been closed. "We didn't find out until the middle of the morning," said Eric Gam, commissioner of community and neighbourhood services. He said public-health officials alerted his office that police had called them. By the afternoon, city officials were scrambling to find beds for the displaced. They looked mostly in the direction of the WoodGreen Community Centre, on Queen Street East. Ever since people began camping on the site in the late 1990s, Tent City had been a problem for city planners. Lately, it had also been something of a black eye for Toronto. In January, The New York Times said of Tent City: "A shantytown is swelling on the shores of Lake Ontario, practically in the shadow of Canada's richest banks." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth