It is 1 p.m. and the three dozen tents that have become a fixture in Alexandra Park are mostly quiet.
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A city worker is busy picking up litter found each day around the tents — including dozens of dirty needles and other drug paraphernalia.
HOMELESS IN TORONTO: Time for for city to move beyond encampments
The playground is empty, as is the Bathurst and Dundas-area park, on a gorgeous autumn afternoon.
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The tents are mere metres away from an elementary school, where students were running through the schoolyard.
This is one of the larger encampments that have peppered downtown Toronto in recent months and one of three a Toronto Sun team toured last week.
They have, for the most part, been left to flourish during the COVID pandemic with little police or city presence.
The tent cities vary from dozens of tents bunched together in sections of a large park — like in Trinity Bellwoods Park — to just a few or even the lone tent in a parkette behind a bus shelter on Mt. Pleasant Rd. at St. Clair Ave. E.
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They have become so rampant in city parks and parkettes that there are regular updates on various community safety social media pages about young families being afraid to use their local parks.
One mom recently wrote on the private Liberty Village FB page that “the quality and enjoyment” of the neighbourhood around Trinity Bellwoods park has “plummeted.”
“The park, once an enjoyable outing, has become a worrying place to take my family (two young kids),” she wrote, referring to the increased crime and discarded drug paraphernalia.
The parks and the profusion of encampments in Toronto’s downtown look like a scene straight out of the award-winning March 2019 documentary Seattle is Dying.
That much-watched documentary provides insights into their problems that seem eerily similar to Toronto: Cops with little power to clear the encampments; city ordinances ignored; sad souls consumed by their demons defecating and urinating on public streets; Seattle residents inured to the scenes of “sickening reality” and denial by the powers-that-be that drug addiction and homelessness contribute to the lawlessness.
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There is a Toronto bylaw that makes it illegal to camp or pitch tents in city parks. It’s Chapter 608 of the Municipal Code. Sections 13 and 14 ban people from dwelling, camping and lodging or from installing and erecting a temporary tent, shelter or structure in a city park.