T.O. secures Novotel in shelter plan
Downtown hotel to be used as space for city’s homeless until December
The city has agreed to lease the Novotel on the Esplanade for a year as part of its winter emergency shelter plan.
The 205-room hotel is one of the largest shelter sites the city has secured since the pandemic began, as staff struggle to find willing partners.
The site is expected to open at the end of February.
New information posted to the city’s website Friday explained that the site will be temporary and operated by Homes First Society.
The lease runs until December 2021.
“The starting point is we are still in the midst of an emergency and a global pandemic right now and if we don’t continue to ramp up our efforts to provide safe physical distancing options for those who are homeless we will put not only Toronto’s homeless, but all our residents at risk,” said Coun. Joe Cressy, who is also the city’s board of health chair.
“People who are homeless require simply more than a place to sleep. They require wraparound health and housing supports in order to transition out of homelessness. In so many ways, this new shelter hotel is not just a shelter, it’s a clinic and it’s a health facility.”
The site will include 12 staff on site at all times in addition to supervisors, help to find permanent housing as well as health care and other services, including those currently being offered by outside organizations to those living in encampments.
The city will also provide a security team of four to six guards onsite as well as two community safety patrol teams for the area between Yonge Street and
Parliament Street and Lakeshore Boulevard East to Richmond Street.
The city has not had an easy time finding needed spaces to adequately distance shelter clients during the pandemic.
“It is important to note that even with the adequate budget for spaces for the 500 individuals sleeping outside, the remaining challenge has been the ability to find willing hotel vendors to participate in the shelter system,” staff reported in a budget briefing note dated Feb. 4.
Cressy said of the 40 additional sites the city has opened over the past 10 months, they are spread across 13 of 25 city wards. He said they are trying to make sure services are available both in and outside the downtown core.
But he said people experiencing homelessness, who tend to congregate downtown, have told them that they need to be near services provided to them in the core.
He agreed negotiations for new sites have not been easy and said when an agreement becomes possible the city needs to jump on it.