Homeless kids face greater risk of returning
There were 1,291 kids in shelters at the peak of the crisis in late April. And the problem is markedly worse than it was just a few years ago. At the start of 2016, Toronto’s shelters housed 483 children. Though the overall number of shelter residents has increased in that time, growing from 4,156 to 6,070 as of July 1, the percentage who are children has also gotten bigger.
In recent weeks, the Star has spent time with numerous families in the system to understand the realities of child and family homelessness as the city grapples with a health crisis.
Even in usual times, the effects of child homelessness can carry into adulthood, as illustrated by a street needs survey conducted by the city in 2018: a third of respondents said their first experience with homelessness was in childhood. And homeless children are at greater risk of the situation repeating later in life, the city says.
Still, as child homelessness has risen in Toronto, some advocates say the issue hasn’t gotten enough attention.
“It’s under the rug,” said Cathy Crowe, a street nurse who was involved in a 2010 documentary project that chronicled the lives of homeless children in four Canadian cities. She fears that the economic shakeup caused by the pandemic may lead to a new wave of families falling into the shelter system. “It’s time that the city develop a specific approach, fund and act.”
When Hornila and her family first arrived at the shelter as refugees, she said her son started resisting any rules she tried to impose.
As she spoke, the eight-yearold rounded the corner and wrapped his arms around his mother. He said he’d been shy, and lonely, when they’d first arrived. But as he’s adjusted — making friends, learning English, and picking up an affinity for drawing — the world has shifted, in ways that some kids in the shelter haven’t quite grasped.
“They just want to play together. They don’t understand COVID-19,” Hornila said.
The shelter’s kitchen is outside their room, so she had to bring her kids out with her — and around their friends — when preparing meals. The pandemic has presented new hurdles for families in shelters — among them, the challenge of navigating online learning in rooms that aren’t connected to the internet.
Although Ontario families will be given the option of continuing online learning this fall, Hornila said she didn’t know how she would manage if her son didn’t return to school inperson every day. Getting back to work full time is her family’s way out: saving up enough money to rent a place of their own.
As of late July, the shelter where Hornila and her kids live in Scarborough was home to 112 kids — and 35 were elementaryschool aged. To make sure her son could keep up with school this spring, Hornila said she bought a limited internet connection.
But at a different shelter downtown, another family said the task was just too hard. “We didn’t even do classes online,” said Stanarah, 9, who’s been living in the facility with her mom, Alisha, sister Ayesha, 17, and brother Eligh, 8, for more than a year.
They struggled, like Hornila, to connect to the internet from their room — and faced a choice whether to venture out into common areas during the height of the pandemic.
The kids’ schools were aware of their living situation, Alisha said, and had been supportive of them. Ayesha’s guidance counsellor spoke to each of her teachers after learning about their situation — meaning the 17-year-old had a bit of extra time to hand in her work. But Ayesha said her own goals after high school felt less important than figuring out where they would live next.
“To be honest, I’m stressed. Because I don’t know what I want to do after high school,” she said. “I have to worry about other things.”
Toronto shelter services worker Sunita Persaud, who works at Birkdale Residence and Downsview Dells, said staff try to provide whatever support they can to kids in the shelter system, but the frequent disruptions that housing instability can cause in children’s education and the supportive figures around them can still have lasting impacts.
Most parents do everything they can to support their kids while living in the shelter system, she said. But some face their own language barriers or literacy challenges.
Some children enter the system already struggling academically — for reasons ranging from their environments to undiagnosed learning disabilities. A good relationship between a shelter and the local schools can help with enrolment or expediting special needs placements, she said.
Any challenges they’d faced with the education system wasn’t from a lack of support by the schools, but a lack of resources. Large class sizes with fewer teachers per student, for example, can lead to homeless kids who may struggle with transitions falling through the cracks, Persaud said.
“The children will display many emotional stress factors in the classroom and learning becomes secondary as they struggle with their own underlying issues,” she observed. “For some, they may be feeling unsettled, isolated and trying desperately to fit into their new environment.”
Toronto District School Board spokesperson Shari SchwartzMaltz said there was no easy answer to how to support kids living in shelters, because each case comes with its own complicating factors. For example, in cases where the child’s safety might be a concern, a school they were transferred into might not receive that child’s Ontario Student Record when they arrived, she said.
For homeless kids, school offered a routine they could rely on, Persaud said. It offered them a sense of normalcy, and an escape from close quarters, packed in with their parents or siblings in a single bedroom. Then came COVID-19. “As you can imagine, residing in a one-bedroom space with multiple siblings can become overwhelming and frustrating
Social service workers who spoke to the Star in recent weeks reported a range of impacts on kids living in the shelter system. Some become embarrassed about their living situations. Others attempt to stay at their old schools, but become disconnected — an issue worsened by the fact they can’t invite at times for the average person,” she said. “Imagine children who are homeless in lockdown during a nation-wide pandemic in limited space.”
That’s the reality for Alisha, Stanarah, Ayesha and Eligh, who live in a single room with a pair of double beds. Their shelter was among facilities that experienced at least one COVID-19 outbreak.
But even before the pandemic, the family’s living arrangement caused friction, particularly over the messes that resulted from so many people living in one room. “We fight a lot,” Stanarah, the nine-year-old, said.
While Eligh, the youngest, said he liked the shelter and being able to play with his friends, Ayesha said that the situation began to wear on her after a while. new friends over to play.
“Their whole life is destabilized,” said Angie Peters, president of Toronto’s Yonge Street Mission.
Kids lose their neighbourhoods, their friends, their schools — anything that had been an anchor for them. Some may be acutely aware that their clothes or lunches look different from their peers. And back at the shelter, they may be exposed to other families’ challenges, including anger, arguments or erratic behaviour.
“This is not the shelter’s fault. This is what happens,” Peters said.
Trudy Scott’s daughters had been timid since they arrived at the Scarborough shelter.
They stuck close to their mom, telling her they were scared to go downstairs with the other kids. The three of them only arrived in July, after leaving a subsidized housing unit in Alberta.
Scott hoped moving to Ontario would give her more opportunities to work and go back to school, after she dropped out while pregnant in Grade 11. An aunt could potentially watch the girls while she studied, but didn’t have space for all three to move in.
So they ended up in the shelter, which Scott hopes is the best place to help her family find an affordable place of their own. “I don’t have nowhere to go. I’m here to get help, so I can get a home. And I need my kids to have a roof over their head,” she said.
As more children have fallen into similar circumstances, advocates have sounded alarms. Between 2005 and 2016, family shelter occupancy went up 27 per cent across the country — with a particular spike on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. And monthly shelter data for Toronto’s system, showing occupancy from 2016 to 2020, shows that numbers have worsened again.
Before the pandemic hit, the number of children living in homeless shelters across the city hovered around 1,500. The number of kids in the system climbed as high as 2,039 one month in mid-2018, while the city grappled with a sudden influx of refugees and asylumseeking families: at that point, children represented 28 per cent of Toronto’s overall shelter population.
Child homelessness has come down since the height of that crisis, but Toronto’s problem with kids in shelters is still markedly worse than it was 4 1⁄ 2 years ago. Children have made up between 17 and 20 per cent of the city’s overall homeless population in monthly counts during 2020. Back in early 2016, kids represented just 12 per cent of the overall shelter population in Toronto.
“You will always hear about how many refugees are in the shelter system, but very rarely will you hear that so many are children. They are often being defined by their immigration status as opposed to their identity as children,” said Steve Meagher, who manages a shelter for refugee families in the west end. “I think if we saw these children as children first, as we should be seeing them, we would be compelled to do more to support families in moving forward out of homelessness.”
In a way, the pandemic has eased the pressure: very few new migrant families have entered Toronto’s shelters since the coronavirus hit, and Ottawa imposed restrictions at the Canadian border. But core issues, like a lack of affordable housing options in Toronto, still present obstacles for families looking to get out.
Alisha, who’s been on the waitlist for Toronto Community Housing for about eight years, said she had struggled to find homes in the private market due to credit issues, her lowincome status and their family size.
“Being here a whole year and not finding housing is very hard and very frustrating,” she said. “We see families come and go, and I feel like there should be more they can do … because a lot of the bigger families, we’ve been here a long time, and nothing is happening for us.”
“I’m trying to get out,” she added, “but it’s hard to get out.”
Toronto’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration says the only solution to the city’s concerning rise in homeless families is to provide permanent housing. But it also acknowledges the complexity of the problem, and that diverting families from entering the system in the first place would mean a multi-pronged approach that looks at issues from evictions to child welfare and education.
The city touts its HousingTO Action Plan as a way to focus more on prevention and diversion while increasing supportive and affordable housing stock, and also claims that with the exception of poverty reduction strategies that targeted low-income families specifically, family homelessness hasn’t been “at the forefront” of federal and provincial policies. The city’s action plan pledges to develop interventions for groups with specific needs, such as youth, seniors, refugees and newcomers.
In the same shelter as Alisha, 32-year-old Pollyana is also hitting hurdles. While living there, she has daycare for her oneyear-old twins Giulia and Pedro; her six-year-old, Rafael, will attend first grade this year.
But Pollyana fears losing that daycare spot when she moves out. Having that support for even six months after they leave could allow her to get back to work, she said, and save money. But shelter workers had told her it wasn’t their decision.
“It feels like they give help, but when (we) leave, they take it away,” she said, noting that the problem wasn’t isolated to their shelter. “We feel very supported here, but when we get out for the next step, all the support is gone.”
She stressed that she didn’t enter the shelter system because she didn’t want to work. She and Rafael moved from Brazil several years ago, and she hoped to give her son a better life. The plan was to get her qualifications to practise physiotherapy in Canada, as she had in Brazil.
But then she found herself pregnant with twins, in a country where she had no family around to help. “I came down again,” she said.
She’s trying to stay optimistic, pointing out that the shelter had given her time to figure out next steps.
Rafael loved the shelter, she said — he called it their “house,” and when new families arrived, he would show them around and point out the playground. “I know he’s safe,” Pollyana said.
Hornila, the mom in Scarborough, said the shelter offered their family a sense of community in a new country. But 17year-old Ayesha said she wished the city paid more attention to kids living in shelters, and getting their families out.
“When you’re seeing 1,000, 2,000 kids in the shelter? That’s not good,” she said. “That’s the worst. And they should work on us, and help us to get a place.”
“I think if we saw these children as children first, … we would be compelled to do more to support families in moving forward out of homelessness.”
STEVE MEAGHER REFUGEE SHELTER MANAGER