Andrei Zodian's talking points
Delivered at the NYCC meeting July 11, 2006
-map - high density - discriminatory (15% city, 6.8% NY)
-the community has long ago reached the saturation point in social housing and is besieged with high rates of violent crime
-not just the security of the residents but also that of those living in the proposed project
-security vacuum created by the abandoned police station
-for a long-term solution, the community does not need more policing, which, as we all know, is a quick fix always thrown at communities in distress, but rather alternatives
-what can better increase literacy and thus expand the residents' horizons than libraries and other educational or recreational improvements?
-not too long ago, I watched a CBC special presentation under the cycle LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures: City of Justice.
-George Eliott Clarke: Africville in 1960's Halifax, a city deeply divided across racial and class lines, and this has marked him for the rest of his life.
-How many lives must be affected in the same way before we take notice that something is wrong with concentrations like this?
-To claim that guidelines agains concentration of housing are discriminatory and contravening the Human Rights Code is not only hyprocritical, but rather a back-handed attempt to surround the city staff in a cloud of fear and preventing them from exercising their common sense and applying existing guidelines; it is also insulting to those representatives of racial minorities who were present here today and voiced thier strong opposition to this development, identifying it as "ghetto politics"