These folks have every right to be worried. If the recycling depot moves across the street from where they live - their hood will become a living nightmare.
The best thing to do is to LOCK UP EVERY SINGLE GARBAGE BIN in the city.
Scroll down to the YouTube video posting of Hastings Street added February 17th. THAT is what this couple's street will look like if United We Can moves across the street.
4 comments:
Or, the best thing to do is to demand change (better health care, more homes, a higher minimum wage, etc) so that people aren't forced to recycle (and lets not forget, recycling is actually something positive and doesn't inherently attract drug use/property crime/homelessness) cans and bottles in order to survive. And yes (because I can hear this coming) money received from recycling does go towards substance abuse in some cases, all the more reason to have better health care and risk prevention rather than the proposed drug reforms currently being talked about in government.
I'm also wondering, from looking at your bio, who you think is responsible for change in this city and what you'd like to see done?
Locking up the garbage bins isn't sufficient. I've seen them picking the locks.
Get rid of the bins altogether. What happened to that plan?
becka, thanks for you input. Let me respond to a couple items you said...
1. "Demand" more homes
...personally I don't believe that making demands on others (with the exception of demanding civility) or cohersion are the way to go. If there is more demand for a product, the market will respond with supply. The problem here is the cost of these homes, drivin up by things such as sky high property taxation.
As for demanding say, more jobs, I quized one binner I met as to why he is not working at a real job. His response was he prefers binning - nobody to answer to, no rules, no taxes to pay. I think what we have here is more an attitude problem, as opposed to victims. The victims are the people woken up in their homes night after night by rude visitors with no consideration to others..
As far as the "good' this widespread practice is - lets add up the cost of hundreds if not thousands of stolen ($400 each) shopping carts, plus the loss of peace and quiet - I'd call it a wash, if not diminished returns. I say we loose much more than we gain.
25 years ago, unemployment was higher and there wasn't the problem we see today.
My suggestion, take the damn carts away (they are after all stolen property and being usded to create a huge disturbance). At the very least BAN them from the West End west of denman street and leave us alone. Also lock up all of the bins. Otherwise the lanes will start looking like they do at the DTES.
Joe - I'm not sure what happened to that initiative, other than to guess that it would not be a priority of the current mayor. We need to "demand" that it be brought back (getting rid of the bins)...;-)
Thank you both for your comments!
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