Former residents celebrate Tent City

There’s still work to be done, homeless community agrees at anniversary of area closure

Ron Simmons, known as “the Colonel” in some circles, was one of the first people to make Toronto’s Tent City his home — and although he’s currently housed, he says there’s still much work to be done in Canada to mitigate homelessness, 15 years after residents were evicted from the makeshift community.

“There needs to be more affordable housing,” he said on Friday during a lunch organized for Tent City veterans and the homeless community in Toronto at large.

On Friday, people congregated to pay tribute to a time in place over a decade ago where a group of Toronto’s homeless community pieced to- gether shelter in lieu of subsidized housing, places Simmons referred to as “Satan’s house.”

The issue became a lightening rod for advocacy and involved a shanty town on private, waterfront land owned by Home Depot. A plan to relocate the community, or sever the parcel of the land in question, giving Tent City residents a sliver of land to live on, failed and the city pulled the plug. Presently there is a parking lot at the end of Cherry St.

At the time, the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee provided recourse to the group and treated the situation as a national disaster.

And on Friday, this sentiment rose to the surface once again.

“I think things are way worse,” said Cathy Crowe, a well-known street nurse who was in attendance. “In fact, it’s very likely that more tent cities would have cropped up if there wasn’t such a backlash towards peo- ple turning to survival tactics like that.”

The reality on the ground is police routinely removing people who brave the elements, she said.

“Tent City was a huge hopeful, bright light when it happened.”

The ambition was to develop the site, using it as a model with the potential to mitigate high rates of homelessness across the country, said Beric German, a co-founder of the now-defunct TDRC.

German chided the lack of a national housing program in place.

“Housing is a right,” he said, “not a commodity,” adding that the government’s solution is to fund private housing over public.

“Housing is going through the roof,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more unaffordable. If there was a national housing program it would begin to deal with that affordability issue.”