As home owners moved out of the North End because of the declining neighborhood, it created a downward spiral of decay. In moved slum landlords who did not maintain the properties to any degree what so ever.
Anyone familiar with the book "The Tiping point" is aware of the effect leaving graffiti on walls or having broken windows can make. This shows to the scum that this area is tollerant of this sort of behavior and then it continues from there.
These slum landlords particularly foreign investors from other cities notably Vancouver purchased cheap properties as part of their immigration process to Canada. Then they let deadbeat tenants ruin their properties even further. Turning them into crack houses and feces invested shitholes "litterally".
All of this while there are still a few good homeowners and an even fewer number of respectful and concerned landlords that tough it out because they don't want to turn their back on a neighborhood which was once good.
I speak of all this because I grew up on the 400 block of Manitoba Avenue, and had the pleasure of having our house broken into on numerous occasions, our neighbor murdered and the house next door turned into a repeat open and close crack house.
With all of this my parents still have held on to their diamond in the rough which was their first family home, and have made investments and maintained the property, and have been able to provide some truly great families with an amazing house to call their home. It's just a shame they have to put up with the rest of the neighborhood.
I truy believe that with the right investment and a small but critical mass of concerned individuals that this area can still be turned around. It was once an ethnically diverse community filled with new immigrants to this country who were willing to work hard and take pride in their neighborhood and community. But when these hardworking individuals acheived their success there were no options to expand into nicer and larger accomodation and thus they moved to other areas of the city, and the death spiral began.
This is why I am a firm believer in mixed communities with a balance of different income levels. Complete areas of wih, or those with total affluence both fail in that the people end up shut out from the world around them, either through fear of the neighborhood or through their own conceited self involvement. Successful neighborhoods are like wolsley with half million dollar homes and rental appartments. Like Osborne with young urban life next to million dollar high rise condos. This is also like some parts of our older suburbs that had both expensive private homes and townhouses and appartments near the edges allowing for the density necessary for the commercial services to thrive or at least survive.
.... end rant
