Where can youths go?

Published: 7 January, 2011

• MEASURES are being taken to move on groups of youths causing trouble in Finsbury Park (Dispersal zone crackdown on troublemakers, December 24). Apparently, it is the intention to extend the dispersal zone if the trouble persists. 

What naivety! Are these youths going to be chased from street corner to street corner? The cause of the problem is obvious. These young people, many known to be from unsettled family backgrounds, have nothing to do in the evenings apart from standing threateningly at street corners.

The lack of facilities ties in neatly with the point made by your soccer correspondent, Tony Dallas, who asks: “What is your [football] club doing for you?” and encourages “players and officials to give more of themselves”.

Contrast such sentiments with the dismal performance of Arsenal FC. The impact of the club on the community is trivial. Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change.

Indeed, if we fast-forward three years, the evidence suggests that the situation will become much worse when the social housing is completed in Queensland Road. 

At that time, hundreds of youths from the social housing will have all-but-none access to any sizeable green space and only limited access to the Sports Centre (and certainly not in the evenings when Arsenal will hire it out at extortionate rates). 

But that will be okay for Arsenal because it will have by that time pocketed the money from the development and, on the basis of past performance, washed its hands of any responsibility.

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