Blaming Bricks And Mortar For Crime And Violence Is Ludicrous

People commit crimes. Attitude also contributes. Does anyone really believe that if there was no public housing there would not be crime and gang violence of the magnitude we see today? Look at the history and demographics. The public perception, especially that of the social in-activists, that the police should be social workers with guns contributes to the problems. The judicial system that releases someone found with a large quantity of illegal in their vehicle because they were deemed to be profiled contributes to the problem.

GANGSTA BABIES: VIOLENT GANG LIFE FROM PARENT TO CHILD

Fixing public housing will fix T.O.

Looking back on it today, the mistakes made in Toronto's great social housing experiments of 50 to 60 years ago are so incredibly obvious.

Whatever possessed urban planners of the day to jam thousands of low-income earners into these public housing ghettoes, consisting of everything from huge apartment complexes to low-rise buildings and town homes, isolated from their surrounding neighbourhoods?

Worse, they were equipped with few of the amenities that make a community a neighbourhood -- schools, arenas, community centres, local businesses, malls, through streets.

And yet that mistake was repeated over and over again -- in Jane-Finch, Regent Park, Lawrence Heights and beyond.

Today, Toronto Community Housing is the landlord that has inherited all those planning mistakes, responsible for 58,500 housing units across Toronto, accommodating 164,000 low and moderate-income tenants.

Not all the news is grim.

Regent Park is in the midst of a $1-billion revitalization scheduled to finish in 2018, with Lawrence Heights up next.

Despite the problems, many good people have grown up in these communities and gone on to live healthy, happy, productive lives. As is true of any community, most of the people are good.

But let's not kid the troops.

As the Sun's Ben Spencer reports today, the legacy of all those planning mistakes is today found in gangs and guns, violence and drugs, exacerbated by a $350-million backlog of housing repairs.

On Friday, Mayor David Miller announced he intends to use $75 million from the city's sale of Toronto Hydro Telecom to Cogeco Cable to reduce this backlog.

Also on the bright side, today we know, thanks to visionary planners such as the late Jane Jacobs, what works when you rebuild such communities.

We know the people who live in them have to come from a variety of backgrounds and income levels and private housing must be mixed in with the public.

We know there have to be enough different uses of the land -- residential, commercial, educational, recreational -- to ensure a constant flow of families, students, workers, pedestrians, bicyclists, shoppers throughout the day, and into the evening.

That alone, helps reduce crime.

Transportation in and out of such communities has to be adequate and has to make sense -- with accessible public transit and clearly marked streets that don't just peter out into dead ends and barrier walls, providing a haven for drug dealers and gangsters.

We know how to do it. The problem is how do we pay for it?

The answer is that while it will be expensive, requiring contributions from every level of government and the private sector, it's precisely these kinds of investments in our city that make economic sense, create jobs, change lives and make Toronto better.

In the end, we will get the city we are willing to pay for, and investing in these communities, responsibly, will be worth every penny.