Apparantly, it is now going to be illegal to swear downtown

Never mind the crumbling buildings which occasionally collapse. The heat is now off developers and speculators who buy buildings and leave them rotting for years until "the market is right" for some high-priced redevelopment. Never mind the ongoing march toward new office space in the core, in the Lister Block, or Eaton's Centre, despite floors upon floors of office buildings which stand empty. Never mind the decades of "urban renewal" which replaced functional mixed-use space for small businesses and housing with now-inadequate civic buildings like city hall, architectural novelties of their time which now display how much shoddy workmanship and lack of foresight went into them. Never mind the slum landlords, the ever-rising price of the HSR (which has its main transit hub downtown), or the truly horrendous amount of land devoted to nothing but parking lots.

Downtown's image problem is clearly an issue of people swearing. What people you ask? The poor, young, homeless, "freaky-looking", troubled, mentally ill or disabled people who congregate downtown because there's nowhere else to go. They are clearly the problem.

I've traveled. I've traveled a lot. And I've seen "great cities" like London and Paris (perhaps the worldwide capital of people swearing on streetcorners), as well as most of Canada's. Strangely enough, regardless of what kind of shape their downtown is in economically, they all have down-and-out people, drugs, graffiti, and worthless kids hanging out causing trouble. Those are some of the many aspects which characterize life in cities, and no matter how many police-state tactics we employ, they won't go away.