To Mayor and Council,
No! No! No! You will not support the development of a facility designed to house 30 to 50 "dually diagnosed" men and women in our Dunbar neighbourhood.
We are two gay men who lived in the West End for the past three years. You your misguided attempts to "clean up the Downtown East Side" you merely pushed the addicts into the West End. What once was a clean, friendly community is now filthy, littered with garbage and rampant with increasing crimes as addicts continue to break into our buildings and trash any thing they could find to sell on the street.
We were accosted daily on Davie Street by man and women who cared nothing for "money for a coffee" but refused the food we gave them and demanded cash to feed their drug habit. They sleep in doorways and infest our alleyways with litter and their very ill bodies. Their bodies and minds need help. Dispersing them over a wider area of the city will only degrade the lovely neighbourhoods we now have and care for.
After three years of putting up with increasing crime and endless police sirens and ambulances we left our beloved deteriorating West End for find a cleaner, quieter neighbourhood with a community of people who care for each other. We now live without litter, without panhandlers and without "crazies" on our street. You think by building an unsupervised centre in other neighbourhoods such as Dunbar is going to solve the problem?
NO! NO! NO! I will fight you, City Hall and this plan with my every breath.