Man murdered outside Danforth café
Volume 45 No. 4
April 19, 2016
ONE MAN is dead after an alleged drive-by shooting outside an East Danforth café in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 17. Police were called to the scene, just west of Coxwell Avenue, at 1:30 a.m. , where they found a man without vital signs. He was taken to a hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries. The victim has been identified as Abdullah Farah, 20 years old, of Toronto. The shooting happened in front of Cloud 9 Café, previously the site of the Rotana Café – where 21-yearold Abdiweli Mohamed Yusuf was shot and killed last May, and where Beach resident and firefighter Dominic Parker was fatally stabbed in 2013.
A small group of residents rallied across the street in the afternoon, calling for officials to deal with violence in the neighbourhood, and to shut down the business. Reports surfaced online that Cloud 9's landlord had terminated the business' lease, but that could not be confirmed by press time. Ward 29 councillor Mary Fragedakis, Ward 30 councillor Paula Fletcher, and Ward 31 councillor Janet Davis, whose wards converge at the corner of Danforth and Coxwell, all made calls on Twitter for the café to be shut down. Join us at beachmetro.com for the latest on this developing story.
PHOTO: PHIL LAMEIRA
Yacht Club gets funky at Malvern’s M-Factor competition Between the cheers and the applause of a packed auditorium, John Green, left, Matthew Ireland, and Dylan Rochon-Terry of Yacht Club perform during Malvern CI’s M-Factor competition. Five bands and five singers performed in the April 8 event, judged by a panel of music experts (KC Roberts – KC Roberts and the Live Revolution, Malvern alumnus Jack Steinwall – Funny Funk Band, and music teacher Lisa Turcotte). Carly Ream-Neal was declared the winner in the vocalist category while Orange Tabs won the band category.
High cost of Toronto's hot real estate market hits home By Anna Killen
JOAN ESKINS is not one to shy away from a little home improvement. A lifelong Torontonian, the petite, detail-oriented woman owned a home decor store on Queen West before retiring and moving to Oakville, where she spent several years renovating a spacious, midcentury modern bungalow. But when she and her partner decided to downsize and move back to Toronto last year, she wanted a space that wouldn't take too much work to bring up to standard – instead planning to spend her free time travelling, making new friends, being a grandmother. “My partner and I walked in and said, 'Well this is really cute,'” said Eskins, of the Beach Hill home she purchased. “Everything is done.” The home, which she viewed at an open house on a Saturday in No-
vember of last year, was one of several she'd visited since she began seriously looking about six months prior. She had put in an offer on one of the houses she’d liked, but her bid was a few thousand dollars short. “We lost out because of the fierce market,” she said. “So when we came to this place, I said, 'OK we should put in a good offer.'” That good offer ended up being more than $100,000 over the asking price, with no conditions attached – meaning she wouldn't be commissioning her own inspection of the home. The seller had provided a 2013 survey and 27-page inspection report, which she went through and said looked fine. Eskins and her real estate agent presented her offer the day after she first viewed the house in what’s known as a ‘bully offer’ – a preemptive bid submitted before the advertised date of sale – and won
out over three other similar contenders. At the open house, she had been told there would likely be other pre-emptive offers coming in on Sunday – the listing noted that preemptive offers would be registered and considered that day at noon – so she and her partner met with her realtor to strategize what they needed to do to get the property. “These days you lose out if you have any kind of conditions on an offer,” she said. “The listing price was $699,000 and we thought $750,000 and (my realtor) said, ‘No you won’t get it.’ So we ended up offering $828,000. And we got it.” Anecdotally, in Toronto’s hot real estate market, Eskins’ two-day home buying experience, her offer above asking, her waiving of conditions, is not uncommon. Earlier this year, Beaches-East York MPP Arthur Potts stood in the legisla-
PHOTO: ANNA KILLEN
Joan Eskins with the retaining wall she's been ordered to repair or replace at her recently-purchased Beach Hill home.
ture and described his experience buying a home in the Beach – he saw it on Friday, again on Saturday, and had an offer in Saturday afternoon that was above asking and didn’t include a condition for a home inspection. “If I had to wait around to get a
building inspector to take a look at it and reassure myself that it was worth the money, I never would have got it. So we just jumped right in,” he said. Real estate woes continued on Page 5