In the three months after the Roehampton hotel shelter opened in July 2020, crime in the surrounding neighbourhood skyrocketed by 30% compared to the summer before, an FOI obtained by the Toronto Sun shows.
The Yonge-Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant East neighbourhoods — the two neighbourhoods most drastically impacted by the hotel shelter — saw increases in all the major crime indicators, except assaults, compared to the summer of 2019.
The Invisible Asylum
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world. Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness. If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before—and less capacity to treat and manage them.
A Seattle activist who has called for abolishing the police and prisons has been named the city’s “Homelessness Czar,” a position that will allow him to establish and run the new Regional Homeless Authority for Seattle and surrounding King County.
This is just what Seattle needs.
Laura Stone is absolutely fed up with being harassed, assaulted and vandalized by mostly drug-addicted tent dwellers in the Moss Park encampment.
Stone is not her real last name.
There was another close call Saturday at a Toronto homeless encampment — one of the many tent cities still proliferating across the city, mostly in downtown parks.
Toronto Police Const. Ed Parks said firefighters responded around 11 a.m. to reports of black smoke coming from the encampment in Clarence Square park, located at Wellington St. and Spadina Ave — within walking distance of the Super 8 by Wyndham, one of the city’s hotel shelters.
