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sure it is...
but its well documented that we are in decay
here is an article i found that helps explain what I have also seen.
| quote: | Toronto slides off the A-list
Now dirtier and more dangerous
By JOHN DERRINGER -- For the Toronto Sun
Last year, the city endured one if its worst summers in recent memory. SARS was at the heart of it, but I'm not so sure it would've been much better off had the nasty virus not swept the city.
You see, things aren't a heckuva lot better this year. Ask anyone in the beer business, the restaurant/bar business, or just about any tourist-related enterprise. They may blame the weather (agreed, it has sucked), but our problems, I fear, run a lot deeper than that.
There used to be two things about this city that made visitors (particularly those from the States) choose Toronto as a vacation or convention destination: It was safe and clean.
Today, it is neither.
Until the early '90s, Toronto was an oasis, a major city not yet infected with the urban decay so evident south of the border. Then, a funny thing happened. Actually, two funny things happened.
Take Cleveland
While Toronto started to show signs of big-city reality, many American cities started to clean up their acts.
Take Cleveland. (There would have been a joke there 20 years ago, but it no longer applies). The city based an entire entertainment district around Jacobs Field, home of the Indians, and, along with other various urban renewal projects, dragged itself out of the quagmire it had inhabited for decades.
New York City is another example of the change that has taken place in urban America. Although many are tempted to compare Toronto with New York, the comparisons are unwarranted and unfair. New York is, well, New York. And it's like nowhere else in the world.
Twenty years ago, going to New York was like going to Beirut. You went to the Big Apple expecting to get mugged. If you got out with all your possessions, the trip was a success.
All that changed with Rudolph Giuliani. He cleaned up the city through a crackdown on crime, including the most minor offences. Panhandling, burglary and loitering laws were strictly enforced, and the law-and-order campaign worked its way up the crime chain, to the point where the murder rate reached a 40-year low.
It's a pretty simple but effective strategy. Prosecute the small crimes and the bigger ones will take care of themselves. The fact that New York has rebounded so well from the tragedy of 9/11 is a testament to Giuliani's principles.
I never thought I'd say it, but I feel safer in Times Square than I do at Yonge and Dundas.
Toronto Police are unable to enforce loitering and panhandling laws, and somehow our local politicians have put the rights of street people and petty criminals above the good of the city as a whole. The city core looks filthy, and with all due respect to the Downtown Business Association, the new Dundas Square has got "white elephant" written all over it.
Anachronistic eyesore
A once-bustling theatre business has hit hard times, our state-of-the-art-in-1989 stadium is an anachronistic eyesore, the formerly vital Molson Indy is on its last legs and with episodes like the Hummer shooting on the weekend, there is no feeling of personal safety downtown anymore.
Toronto simply doesn't have the natural, architectural or cultural beauty necessary to get it through a time like this. Vancouver is more beautiful. Montreal has a deeper cultural and culinary life. What once separated Toronto from the rest of North America's cities no longer applies. We were the safest, cleanest big city on the continent, and we were a city on the rise. In 2004, Toronto's regarded universally as a city in decline.
And until that decline is halted, expect a lot more summers like this one.
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