Coun. Vaughan says graffiti worse since Ford’s crackdown
Posted October 25, 2011 1:38 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Six months after Rob Ford donned a grey sweatshirt, a pair of safety goggles and aimed a power washer at a spray-painted wall, one city councillor claims unwanted graffiti has gotten worse in his ward.
“It’s probably double the amount of graffiti in and around the city,” Coun. Adam Vaughan, one of Ford’s most vocal critics, said on the one-year anniversary of the mayor’s landslide election victory.
He said his ward of Trinity-Spadina has experienced a spike in graffiti and vandalism, particularly on Dundas Street, since the crackdown was announced. Ford’s get-tough-on-graffiti stance has also spawned some unflattering portraits of the mayor in back alleys and on posters plastered around downtown.
“It’s provoked almost a daredevil attitude amongst the graffiti guys, the taggers in particular,” Vaughan said.
The mayor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
Spray painting has been taken to new heights—literally—since the crackdown call was issued, Vaughan said. Vandals are painting their tags higher up on buildings to avoid removal, making it harder and more expensive for property owners and businesses to clean off their exteriors.
“The graffiti is going up higher, it’s going on more and more heritage buildings and it’s causing significant problems for a lot of property owners right across the downtown,” Vaughan said.
Laura Schaefer of the Queen Street West Business Improvement Association (BIA) said property owners and businesses are being “doubly victimized”—once by vandals and again by the city.
The Queen Street West BIA helps its members pay for the removal of graffiti on store fronts. Those costs eat up about 10 per cent of its operating budget.
“Overall, a strategy that eliminates unwanted graffiti is very positive but you have to look at individual communities and the impact,” she said.
Property owners must remove a piece of graffiti within a minimum of six days or the city will bill them for the removal cost. In the winter that time frame stretches to 60 days.
“If a business owner keeps getting cited for having a tag on their building then that’s something that’s not currently addressed,” Schaefer said.
Removing graffiti on a heritage building can cost upwards of $15,000, she added.
Gus Michaels, manager of Investigation Services for the Municipal Licensing and Standards division in Toronto and East York, said heritage buildings need special care, but removal costs vary.
“It’s a really wide scope depending on which building you’re dealing with and what the circumstances are,” he said.
Ford made graffiti eradication one of his priorities when he first took office, taking a more aggressive line on unwanted spray paint than the city’s previous reactive approach of acting on complaints.
In February, the Municipal Licensing and Standards division put together a team of 10 existing bylaw enforcement officers to fan out across the city looking for tags and graffiti that can be seen from main streets.
In September council approved a new graffiti management plan, which includes increased enforcement, support of public reporting, support of art murals and the creation of a graffiti office. Read more about the plan here.
The new plan also includes an exemption for one of the city’s best and most-cherished stretches of street art—Graffiti Alley, which runs behind Queen Street West from Spadina Avenue to Bathurst. The area that draws both local and visiting photographers and tourists is now designated municipally significant.
Just what separates graffiti and vandalism from street art is another nuanced issue that needs further discussion, Vaughan said, noting there’s a big difference between unsightly tags and various forms of aerosol art.
That conversation should happen when the city debates amendments to the graffiti bylaw later this year. Read the current bylaw here.
“There’s going to be a recognition that graffiti does include art and murals that are sanctioned and approved and something the city supports, not looking at trying to remove,” Michaels said, “and a focus on dealing more with the illegal activity and the graffiti itself that is unwanted.”
