Mayor Chow:

   For some three months now, we have been attempting to get from you some indication of whether or not you would support the efforts of the Downtown East community to prevent KingSett Capital from building a luxury condo tower at Dundas and Sherbourne. We have urged you to publicly endorse the position that this initiative would cause deep harm to a poor community and to back our call for social housing at this location instead.

   During this time, we have sent you letters, come to your office without anyone even talking to us and exchanged inconclusive emails with your representatives. After this drawn out process, it becomes obvious to us that your only interest in this matter is to try and avoid it.

   The question leaps out of why a new Mayor who campaigned, in large measure, on just solutions to this city’s housing crisis, would be so ready to avoid involvement in the situation at Dundas and Sherbourne. In the absence of any response from you, we’re going to hazard a guess. We think that you are only prepared to back initiatives that fall well short of challenging the developers and their agenda of destructive greed.

   The fight against KingSett that we are involved in doesn’t confine itself to token gestures or weak compromises. It involves a straight choice between the interests of a developer and the needs of a poor community and you seem unready to take the side of the community. You appear to be quite prepared to allow the process of upscale redevelopment to proceed.

   Your stubborn silence over months has convinced us that our efforts to reach out to you as a potential ally were a mistake. From now on, we will continue to confront KingSett and its political enablers in City Hall without any illusions. We freely admit that this may involve actions that are, to use a term you employed recently, ‘unsanctioned.’

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