Juno News - June 18, 2022


Toronto’s hotel shelter policy is wreaking havoc on residents


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

146.51357

Word count

706

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sue Ann Levy is a Toronto Councillor who has been fighting for years to get the city to do more to help the city's homeless problem. She has long been concerned about the lack of shelter space for the city s homeless, and now she is calling on the mayor to do something about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.640 Crime, lawlessness, feces and urine everywhere.
00:00:06.800 This shelter behind me has completely changed the Esplanade neighborhood,
00:00:12.160 a tourist spot and a historic district.
00:00:16.560 This shelter at the Novotel Hotel was supposed to be
00:00:20.960 only a stopgap measure of a year during the COVID pandemic.
00:00:25.120 It is now going into its third year and the residents who live right beside it and around it
00:00:33.200 say they've had enough. They're terrified, they're afraid to go out at night
00:00:38.320 and they have witnessed enough EMS vehicles day and night to last a lifetime.
00:00:46.800 There's thefts, there's assaults happening.
00:00:49.760 A lot of break-in and a lot of windows, restaurants being break-in in.
00:00:55.520 In the middle of the day I was coming home from doing groceries,
00:00:58.560 walking up this street, I was being followed and he walked down Church Street,
00:01:03.840 followed me along here and I took shelter in the restaurant.
00:01:07.600 Yeah, I saw people, three or four people with needles just slumped over on the ground
00:01:14.240 and this is in the broad daylight, this is like on a Saturday afternoon.
00:01:17.360 The noise level has gone up because the fire trucks
00:01:20.480 and the ambulances that have to keep returning.
00:01:22.640 Bindia, the Indian restaurant, friends of ours own that
00:01:26.480 and they've already been broken into six times.
00:01:29.680 I mean that's outrageous, you can't run a business under those conditions.
00:01:34.000 A lot of the people in this neighbourhood, I've noticed they've become timid.
00:01:38.640 We don't feel as secure because once I was followed a little bit too close by someone.
00:01:44.960 Now I don't, A, go out at night unless I have my son-in-law with me or a male escort.
00:01:52.720 I never go out, not even with my daughter, not even two females. 0.99
00:01:57.360 Safety is a big issue, hearing the sirens all night, not being able to walk at night,
00:02:01.760 having defecation all over the street.
00:02:04.240 Since we are also a tourist area, it's not a very good image.
00:02:09.120 They've set our recycle bins on fire in the past.
00:02:11.760 We've had to hire extra security guards to walk at night, which will make our fees go up.
00:02:16.880 This shelter and another were the subject of a recent Auditor General's report
00:02:23.520 in which she noted that the city had wasted 15 million dollars giving money to the owner of this shelter,
00:02:35.760 the Novotel, the Silver Hotel Group, for vacant rooms and other amenities that weren't part of the contract.
00:02:45.440 The question remains whether the city will ever recoup that money.
00:02:50.080 I believe, in my opinion, our mayor, John Tory, has left us out to dry.
00:02:56.480 The city is not helping. It's pouring money into there, but it's ignoring the real basic situation.
00:03:03.200 16 million overbilling is not an error. I mean, that's stealing and that should involve jail time.
00:03:08.320 So where's the collection of that money? Where's the suing of the hotel owners over that?
00:03:12.560 I used to like John Tory. I think he seems to be like a genuine, caring person,
00:03:17.440 but his direct policy has caused a neighborhood to be in sort of an unstable situation,
00:03:24.480 which is unfortunate, and I don't see any response from him.
00:03:29.760 Our residents have not been given an opportunity to be heard at City Hall.
00:03:36.240 Their issues are ignored, glossed over.
00:03:39.440 I tweet out and I've heard from one of his PR people, Brad Ross, who said,
00:03:46.880 they have every right to be here. I said, that's about all I've gotten. No response from Tory.
00:03:53.120 He doesn't have a town hall meeting. We don't know how he feels about this.
00:03:56.000 There's a bit of arrogance on the part of the person who was our previous councillor, Joe Cressy.
00:04:02.720 He chose to ignore people he did not agree with. So as a taxpayer, my question is,
00:04:09.920 why are we not using existing property to shelter the homeless if we can't find housing for them?
00:04:15.840 Why are we paying lucrative million dollar contracts to hotel owners?
00:04:19.600 Several residents noted, and I believe as well, that Homes First, the operator of the shelter,
00:04:25.280 is not managing it well. The homeless people are given a free ride while residents have to pay the price.
00:04:34.880 When is this all going to end? Who knows? For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.