Taking back their streets
Durham Region.com
Jillian Follert OSHAWA -- Tucked away just south of downtown Oshawa is a neighbourhood known for being one of the best and one of the worst in the city, depending on who you ask. Bounded by Olive Avenue to the south, Simcoe Street to the west, Athol Street to the north and Albert Street to the east, this neat grid of 50- to 100-year-old houses is the very essence of old Oshawa. It's a place where neighbours know each other by name and front porches are a gathering place. Corner stores and churches are built among the houses and neighbourhood kids dash from one backyard to another. 
It's also a place where residents have spent years waging an exhausting war on crime. Police say a perfect storm of factors -- one-way streets, nearby social services, inexpensive housing, and zoning that permits rooming houses -- allowed the neighbourhood to become a haven for drug dealers and sex trade workers. Residents talk of finding used condoms, needles and crack pipes littering sidewalks and front lawns. Rooming houses teem with up to 20 tenants at a time, their faces rotating on a constant basis. Sex trade workers walk the streets as eager customers slowly circle the block. But things are looking up. The residents have united and they say change is happening, this time for good.
When Al and Andrea Leibrock bought their Celina Street home 11 years ago, they had no clue what they were getting into. "My husband was from Ajax and I was from Kingston and Montreal," Ms. Leibrock says. "We didn't know anything about the neighbourhood. The houses were cute and inexpensive. We fell in love with ours as soon as we saw it." It wasn't long before the couple -- and their children -- were being approached by sex trade workers and johns. Ms. Leibrock said her daughters couldn't walk down the street without furtive glances over their shoulders. Yet the family stayed, and change slowly started to happen as residents banded together under the banner of the Celina Albert Street Neighbourhood Association (CASNA). Efforts to revive the neighbourhood have been a roller-coaster ride. At times, crime has all but vanished for months at a time, only to return worse than ever when another rooming house opens, or new dealers and sex workers move into the area. But residents say things are reaching a critical mass as more people become involved with CASNA and both police and politicians take note of the neighbourhood's challenges. "Now I maybe see one or two girls a day, instead of one every 15 minutes," Ms. Leibrock says. "It's been an amazing change." --- CASNA started with Rob, a longtime Celina Street resident whose gruff exterior belies his passion for community activism. He asked that his real name not be used, because he worries about his family's safety. In a neighbourhood where people's front doors have been kicked in by drug dealers, publicly identifying yourself as the liaison between the police and the residents is cause for concern. Rob started the association because he saw the neighbourhood declining and refused to move. The only other option was to fix things. "This is my home. If anyone's moving, they're moving," he says simply. He and his family have lived in their tidy house since the late 1970s and are fixtures in the neighbourhood, the people everyone goes to for advice, information, or a friendly porch to gather on. CASNA's steady progress is evident in the growing number of owner-occupied homes on the street, their carefully tended gardens, fresh paint and children's sidewalk chalk drawings, in stark contrast to the crumbling rooming houses where much of the crime is centred. "Right now, things are better than they've ever been, but also worse than they've ever been," Rob says. "We don't have nearly as many rooming houses as before and we don't have as many girls on the street; all that is improving. But the problem houses we do have...well they're a big problem." The rooming house at 190 Celina St. is a case in point. Police are there several times a week. It's not unusual for neighbours to be ordered to stay indoors because the tactical unit has surrounded the home. Those who live nearby report having vomit thrown at their children and witnessing people having sex in cars parked at the curb. "I cross to the other side of the street when I'm walking my dog," confides one resident out for an evening stroll. She eyes the house warily, saying one of its inhabitants threatened her neighbour's children. "I'm scared of them, a lot of them are on drugs and they're unpredictable," she says. "But they're not scared of the police and they're definitely not scared of us." --- Celina residents need look no further than their neighbours on Albert Street to see that permanent change is within reach. That street has seen revitalization take hold as former rooming houses are snapped up and converted. Four years ago, Ken Carruthers and his wife did just that, taking a six-bedroom lodging house and turning it into a picturesque single-family home. "All my friends asked, 'why would you buy a house here'?" he says, smiling knowingly. "I told them, it's up and coming. This is going to be the new Cabbagetown. It's a great location, it's close to the 401 and the GO train, it's close to downtown. And, the houses are beautiful." Jean-Pierre Bouchard says Albert Street was awash in "used condoms, old needles and prostitutes left, right and centre," when his family arrived in 1994, and credits community activism with its turnaround. Residents say Celina is on track to see the same change happen, as long as there is a sustained effort. --- CASNA's contact list now includes nearly all permanent residents of Celina and Albert streets, and the side streets that link them. Under Rob's watchful eye, association members have forged lasting friendships and have become more active in local politics. "Working as a group, we can do so much more than if we were just individual people who were upset about things happening in the neighbourhood," Rob explains. Thanks to intense lobbying efforts, City bylaw officers recently cracked down on unlicensed lodging houses -- the R7 zoning means they're allowed if licensed -- and tackled property standards issues such as overgrown grass and piles of trash. "We work on a complaint basis so we need to hear from people about problems in their neighbourhoods," said Jerry Conlin, the City's director of municipal law enforcement. "We get complaints and feedback from CASNA on a regular basis and that's very helpful." The neighbourhood association has also forged a strong relationship with Durham Regional Police by acting as eyes and ears on the street when the cops can't be there. Residents jot down the licence plates of suspected johns, allow undercover police officers to park in their driveways, monitor the comings and goings of rooming house visitors and hand out bottled water to cops on bikes. On one summer evening, two separate police cruisers roll to a stop in front of Rob's house and wave him down to the curb. He chats easily with the officers, catching them up on the day's events in the neighbourhood. --- Weekly neighbourhood walks are another CASNA initiative that's gathering steam. Every Monday at 7 p.m., anywhere from 10 to 30 residents meet outside Albert Street Gospel Hall to take a stroll through the streets, many towing kids in wagons or walking dogs. The goal is twofold -- to show the community that residents are watching the streets and to give those with concerns a chance to meet like-minded friends and chat about solutions. "We want people to start saying hi to their neighbours and getting to know them," says Albert Street resident Bonnie Groome, who started the walks with her husband Tom. "We also want people who might be doing negative things to know that there are families and children here, and we're not going anywhere."â?¨ A long list of other projects are in the works, including a Neighbourhood Watch program, community barbecues and "john boxes," where passersby can anonymously deposit descriptions of suspected johns and their cars. It's a different tone from years ago, when residents took the remarkable step of posting signs to warn johns about the risk of contracting venereal disease. Today, residents acknowledge the solution is not a matter of simply pushing drugs and prostitution off their streets. "If you move sex workers and drug dealers from our street to someone else's street, it might make it nicer for me to live on Celina but I'm very much aware that it will be a problem for someone else," says Susan Kreider, a resident who feels eliminating poverty as a root cause of crime is the answer. If you or someone you know is struggling with an addiction, there is help and there is hope.
Please go to the Angels D & A Referral Centre and call your nearest help line
or contact any of the Angels Treatment & Aftercare Team.
“We are always ready to help!”
| 
