Use of force only triggers ugly cycle of fear
Even if you’re of the mind that people shouldn’t be allowed to live in encampments in Toronto — for safety reasons, for public health reasons or because you simply don’t like being confronted with the reality of homelessness when you’re out walking your Labradoodle — can we please find a way to agree on one thing: forcibly evicting people from their shelters in the middle of a pandemic is wrong.
Yet this is exactly what Toronto police did Wednesday at Lamport Stadium in the city’s west end, at the request of the city itself. Protesters clashed with police as they cleared the encampment there — one of five dismantled in the last week.
According to reporting from the Star’s Victoria Gibson, “On Tuesday, the last occupant of St. James Park was ejected to an unknown location, having denied a city offer for indoor shelter. Last week, three other camps in the downtown area were razed, with some occupants accepting alternative shelter but several others turfed without a clear destination.”
Echoing Mayor John Tory’s remarks at a news briefing earlier in the week, Brad Ross, Toronto’s chief communications officer, told me city encampments have to be cleared in part because public space needs to be “made accessible for every resident to use.”
“We can’t force people to come inside,” says Ross. “We can’t force people into housing. But you cannot set up outside on public property, be it a park or median or boulevard. There’s criminality that occurs in encampments. There are fires. There are safety issues for the neighbours and the surrounding public. The vast majority of the public want to use the parks freely and safely.”
None of this is untrue. Encampments are a complex, intractable issue with goodwilled people all around, both within the activist community and on the city side of things. Anyone who argues otherwise is not doing so in good faith.
That said, what could possibly be gained from the city’s display of force on Wednesday? The Torontonians who were evicted from their encampments will simply set up elsewhere, only this time with fear, anger and mistrust even more entrenched in their hearts, and the same ugly cycle will repeat itself.
A camp will emerge — the city will try to get people indoors; some will refuse; the police will forcibly displace them — a camp will emerge …
It must be frustrating for city officials that some people living in encampments don’t want to go inside on their terms. It must be frustrating for them that there are some people who would rather live in parks than in hotels. It must be frustrating for them that this cycle repeats from one mayor to the next.
I don’t have the solution to break the cycle. But what happened in Lamport Stadium on Wednesday: that can’t be it. The city must do better. This is a fact city councillor Joe Cressy (in whose ward Lamport Stadium sits) acknowledges.
“The recent events at Lamport Stadium were a step backwards. I have spoken with many of my city council colleagues and senior staff to express this,” Cressy wrote in a statement to his community this week. “As a city and a community we must work together to create the conditions, the trust, and the relationships to support people experiencing homelessness to access safe indoor housing.”
But we — ordinary Torontonians who are housed — have to do better, too. There is a popular attitude in Toronto that people without permanent homes are not neighbour material. If you don’t believe me check out a city of Toronto planning and housing committee meeting. I did so this week, and the fear-mongering about people experiencing homelessness and mental health challenges was rampant.
“Mentally unstable men do not mix well with the elderly or with children,” said one of several concerned residents who attended the meeting to oppose a plan for 60 units of supportive modular housing in Willowdale. That’s 60 units in a community of thousands in a city of millions. The good news is the plan for the site passed with unanimous support.
But opposition to such plans is stubbornly consistent. In March, a group of residents in East York made headlines when they opposed a 64-unit modular dwelling for people experiencing homelessness because it would eliminate a 75-spot parking lot — a parking lot that a local man claimed in an infamous TV interview was “the heart of the community.”
A big fear cited on one of the Facebook groups opposed to the East York modular housing plan was that it would lower property values in the area — a frankly laughable concern in a real estate market where even affluent couples with lucrative jobs are priced out of the city if they don’t have family money.
“Everyone supports theoretical affordable housing,” says Mark Richardson of the advocacy group HousingNowTO. “But when any actual affordable housing or supportive housing site gets proposed in their neighbourhood they oppose that specific site.”
Not in my backyard. Not in my park. Not in my parking lot. Where then?