I first heard of it through a neighbour and a friend: The Shepherds of Good Hope, a local charitable organisation, have bid on three buildings in my neighbourhood, with the intent of making them into rooming houses for 'graduates' of their youth outreach and drug rehabilitation programs.

I was shocked when I heard about it then, and I remain so today. I felt no better when I listened to reports this morning, telling me that over two hundred concerned citizens gathered at a community meeting last night, most of them to voice their opposition to the plan.

The Shepherds explain that they're simply trying to provide a safe environment for disadvantaged individuals who have demonstrated their desire and ability to make a new start in life. I don't doubt that they mean well, but let me tell you that things never turn out the way these people intend.

I grew up an abused child, surrounded by alcoholism and drug abuse. I know for a fact that at least one active sex offender lived on my street. I have had the mentally diseased as neighbours. After twelve years of this, my family finally managed to move to a new neighbourhood, only to find that the problems still dogged us -- alcoholics and drug addicts up and down the street, broken homes more common than intact, drug use and criminal activity in the school yards.

So let me say this to the Shepherds of Good Hope: I know you mean well, but your good intentions will only bring unnecessary suffering to good people. The graduates of your program deserve better than this. These morally bankrupt, dangerous, so-called 'middle class' people are never going to change. They're only going to make life miserable for the honest, hard-working few who are trying to build a bit of goodness into their life. We shouldn't let people like that share the streets with us. Send them back to the suburbs where they belong.

I spent half my childhood in a wealthy suburb, the other half within spitting distance of Island Park Drive, a picturesque neighbourhood punctuated with embassies and oversized homes. As a veteran of so-called respectable neighbourhoods, I can say from experience that this is not the environment a hard-working, honest individual might choose. I don't know anything about statistics or demographics, but I know what I saw. And let me tell you that being the child of a diplomat or the vice president of a major commercial enterprise doesn't make you any less susceptible to the kind of 'moral failings' we accuse our poorer neighbours of possessing.

On the contrary, it seems that the added weight of hypocrisy and moral pretence make it more difficult to face up to diseases like drug addiction and alcoholism, or to even admit to the existence of abuse, let alone to take steps to fix it. Why do statistics show an inverse relation between criminal activity and a neighbourhood's income? Because the rich hush it up.

Don't believe me? Ask me about the family who quietly ushered their son off to boarding school after he dropped a cinder block from a highway overpass into a passing driver's lap. Ask my high school friend to tell you about the nights she spent awake, listening to the endless screaming fights of the parents next door. Ask her where the mother of that family went for her four month 'vacation'. If you do ask, make sure you have some time; the list of such tales is very long.

Some folks seem to think that the task of protecting their children consists of cloistering them in an antiseptic environment, hiding from them the conception that life might sometimes be hard, even dangerous, that difficulties might confront us all. Affluence seems to be the only measure of success. Put enough of these people together in one place, and they can ruin the whole neighbourhood.

So what are the Good Shepherds to do? Faced with the hypocrisy of a community in denial, where can they look to provide a safe and secure location for their wards? I don't know. I suppose all we can ask is that the occupants of these rooming houses add the hostility of their surroundings to long list of challenges to be surmounted, and do their best to carry on.

Bad neighbourhoods exist. Of course they do. But good neighbourhoods are far too rare - rarer by the day as group after group defends their privilege by shutting others out. I wish there were a better, more deserving place for the Shepherds of Good Hope. It shames me to know that after all the difficulties they have confronted, the hypocrisy of a community chasing some chimeric notion of gentility should stand as yet another obstacle.

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