I received y (full colour) copy of the Summer/Fall 2015 Ward 27 News with the carefully orchestrated colour photo of Ms. Kristyn Wong-Tam, the councillor for Toronto Centre-Rosedale.
Don’t get me wrong it’s a beautifully drafted and layout piece of print propaganda, but propaganda is what it is and it is so offensively disingenuous that I actually had difficulty getting through it without crumpling it up and discarding it into the trash.
I particularly take offence to the page 4 write up regarding College Park, where the councillor, who has been in charge of this derelict piece of real estate from which the City has gleaned tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in development fees, building permit fees, hook-up fees, levies and let’s not forget all those property taxes that it has been enjoying from its partnership with Canderel (one deficient developer that I’ve openly challenged for years hear at simplycharles.com/simplycondos.com).
The City has proven the worst of the two and that is no small feat!
Multi-million dollar townhouses in a city-designed “derelict park”.
In the Councillor’s factually inaccurate bragging on everything that she has done, she failed to point out that way back in 2005, Canderal started selling units in Phase I of College Park, promoting a $3.5 Million Dollar redesign and retrofit of what has historically been a very special respite in Toronto’s bustling downtown shopping core
It house “Barbara Ann Scott” fountain (in the summer) and skating rink (in the winter). After that tower was sold out and the second tower launch around 2007/8 the redesign of the park remained Canderal’s and the City’s prime marketing focus!
And later, once both 50+ story residential towers were completed and Canaderal contacted me asking what I would recommend that they do with the staging area behind the buildings (they were thinking of low end stacked townhouses) and I shared with them my vision of spectacular 2000+ square foot extra wide townhouses (I gave Canderal the specs and design concept, based on their promise to me to give me Exclusive sales rights only to catch them advertising them behind my back obviously planning to cut me out all together).
Well, during one of my more colourful phone messages (which I’m somewhat known for) their credibility lacking vice president of marketing and their president at the time, recanted (after having already sold 5) and gave me a one week exclusive to produce buyers.
As usual, I delivered the buyers but under repeated false representations of these two so called executives about there being fences across the front of the town homes.
They even called the partnership that they were sharing on these townhouses, “The Parkview Townhomes“.
They also used the park as the main selling feature of Aura, the tallest residential tower in the city, again with the City collecting millions of dollars in development fees, building permits, levies, taxes and those ever-so-important property taxes.
I want you to imagine just how much the city has gleaned in the decade or so that they’ve milked this myth about a $3.5 Million Dollar Park rejuvenation!
As soon as the “Parkview Townhouses” were built (I bought one and brought 6 clients into the deal), the City totally ravaged the park, shutting of the water to all the greenery, allowing the cute little building where kids put on their skates to literally dilapidate, destroying the fountain and leaving the park resembling more of a war zone than the revitalization project that they had gleaned so much cash generating mileage from!
Today, (and for the past 5 – 6 years) the park has been almost totally destroyed and all those taxpayers that bought into all these cash cow buildings for the city have paid their full taxes despite the park having been totally destroyed.
The City and Ms. Wong-Tam have unlawfully (if it was a business that employed such a “Bait & Switch” marketing campaign there would be criminal charges) gleaned millions of dollars for the city but consciously deprived the park of it’s life force!
Today, it’s a meeting place for vagrants, where a young woman was raped in broad daylight recently (in broad daylight!!!) with the main police station right across the street!
In her propaganda piece about the park in this year’s Ward 27 News, Ms. Wong-Tam boasts all of her accomplishments using such resoundingly euphoric rhetoric, is an outright insult to all of those taxpayers who paid for homes overlooking and/or being adjacent to the once beautiful park.
So a week or so before the Ward 27 self-promoting ad rag was delivered (and just in time for a photo op) Ms. Wong-Tam and volunteers showed up and painted the plywood sheets covering the little shack that used to house children and their parents while they enjoyed the Barbara Ann Scott skating rink!
Ms. Wong-Tam’s propaganda piece goes on to brag about all of her great accomplishments in “Allan Gardens“, “Chorley Park“, “Ramsden Park Revitalization” and her “crusade against poverty“, the “Downtown East Revitalization“, but I can only assume that all these other bragging points are more than likely as disingenuous as her rants about all the good work she has done at College Park.
Taxpayers living around College Park have been played for fools, buying into a park that the City intentionally (they have tried the lie about needing to shut it down for Aura but Aura was build over a year ago and it never did encroach on the park) gutted!
Today, we live with constant street trash hanging around the park as if they own it. They bring their booze (I thought open liquor was against the law) and dope (including large bongs to smoke out of) and hang around the park yelling obscenities and insults to us unfortunate owners who now have to live with them.
They urinate in the bushes while mothers and fathers stroll their children. They litter the park as if it were a garbage can (despite there being garbage cans available).
The park is a black eye on a city that promotes itself as being “a city within a park“.
What gets me is the grandstanding and the outright contradictory evidence to the smooth talking lingo that Ms. Wong-Tam and her chorines spew out to the uninformed. If you read this year’s summer/fall 2015 Ward 27 News you would have to admire all that is going on.
When you know the facts about what is actually going on, you have to acknowledge that politics is an unsavoury game!
I’m Charles
