She doesn’t need to stay in touch by phone because she’s likely to see her friends in the streets, on the sidewalks or in the parks.
They stop and chat. Make dinner plans. Catch up on the news.
It’s like a large family. When residents need help, they know they can count on someone to support them.
For the past 40 years, Sandra Marcok has lived in the Trinity-Spadina community and befriended many people, particularly the vulnerable.
For 27 years, she’s lived in a Toronto Community Housing building on Sullivan Street. The same building where she raised her daughter who’s now a mother too.
Close to Grange Park, the Art Gallery of Ontario and University Settlement Recreation Centre.
“It feels like a small town,” she says.
It’s not the same with the people who live in the luxury high-rise condominiums.
“You never see people from those developments in the neighbourhood or know that they’re from the neighbourhood because they travel in cars,” she says.
Her building isn’t up for sale. But others are. Making room for upwardly mobile, high-income earners who won’t make the same investment in the community.
She cares about those who are at risk of losing their homes. Their uncertain futures. Uprooted from a neighbourhood that’s sustained them for decades.
“Why put them through that suffering?” asks the 57-year-old grandmother.
They can’t just pick up and move elsewhere. They don’t live in scattered buildings. They live in a small community that’s been around since the 1970s.
That share the same laundry room. The same committee room. The same green spaces.
They don’t want to see that community disrupted. But if the city gets its way, the buildings are at risk of being sold.
It will be like a death in the family.
“Because you care about the people you’re going to lose,” she says.
Marcok strongly opposes the sale.
“The city, the province and the country have a responsibility to make affordable housing available,” she says.
Not to balance a budget on the backs of vulnerable people.
She’s not buying the city’s claim that selling units is the only way to finance the backlog in repairs.
She likes the obvious alternatives. Stagger the repairs or finance them over the long term.
For Marcok, it’s personal. These aren’t just her neighbours. They have become her closest friends.
People she can have fun with. But also depend on when the need arises.
“And they’re standing on quicksand,” she says.
For a number of years, she volunteered with the Out of the Cold program in the community. It’s given her a keen sense of how desperate the lives are of some of its most fragile residents.
She’s irked that a successful supportive housing situation like Bellwoods House is even being considered for closure.
She finds it ludicrous that the city would even think about removing frail seniors with a history of chronic homelessness from a supportive community that doesn’t want them to leave.
“They’re terrified and they’ve had enough terror in their lives,” she says.
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