More For The Working Poor-Less For Bums

Afordable housing dollars seem to be going to housing the "homeless" while diddly squat is being done for the working poor who are making a contribution but just don't seem to get any breaks from the city government. I appreciate that it is the province and the feds that control the money but it is the citie's responsibility to deal with the safety and street issues. Miller has failed to fix "the broken windows" and his homeless iniatives have done but solidified the position of those who have made homelessness a cottage industry.

Taking it to the streets

By SUE-ANN LEVY

Downtown resident Francesca Filippelli is most skeptical of Mayor David Miller's claims that 800 people have been removed from the streets and put into homes in the past 18 months.

The mayor, in fact, regularly boasts on the election campaign trail that one homeless person per day is being sheltered under his $18-million Streets to Homes strategy, initiated in February 2005.

But Filippelli, a 31-year-old paralegal, wonders if that is indeed the case why she still sees the same faces on the same downtown corners each day when she walks to work.

"I don't buy it," she told me last week while discussing the mayor's claims.

"I've seen the same faces for four years."

She lists with ease the gauntlet of street people she encounters en route from her condo at Spadina and Queen's Quay to her office at Queen and Yonge.

There's Kevin Clarke, the perennial mayoralty candidate, parked at Adelaide and Bay; a man in the bus shelter in front of one of the TD Bank towers at Wellington and York; a petite woman huddled near a woman's clothing store at Yonge and Adelaide; and a man with a long beard on one of the grates at the corner of Richmond and Yonge Sts.

"I even know their names," she says with a sigh.

But to hear Miller or the city's shelter housing officials tell it, the Streets to Homes strategy -- which added $18 million to the whopping $200 million already being spent annually on the homeless -- has been a smashing success.

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