Fix for encampments is a long way off
My Star colleague Victoria Gibson reported Thursday that the number of people living in homeless encampments has more than doubled this spring over the same time last year. As the weather continues to warm up, we can only expect that number to grow.
Frankly, this sucks. For the people sleeping in those spaces, it is an unhygienic, unsafe and generally inhumane way to live. For the rest of us trying to use our city parks, it’s an obstacle that keeps us away and creates the perception of a great safety risk.
From the Toronto Star office on Spadina Avenue near Front Street West, we have an-all-too-clear view of the issue, because our marquee boardroom directly overlooks the city’s largest and fastest-growing encampment in Clarence Square park, where there were 23 tents as of March 15, and where there was a fire on Feb. 29.
It’s a very visible manifestation of Toronto’s housing crisis, and a constant reminder of the toll it is taking on the city. In a way, it’s fitting in that symbolic role, because of how difficult it is to solve quickly. You can forcibly clear those people from the parks, as Toronto has sometimes done in the past, but they’ll just pop up in another park down the road. Because they have nowhere else to go.
Every night in February, an average of 158 people called Toronto’s emergency shelter intake line looking for a place to sleep and were turned away because there was no room. The waiting list for subsidized housing is more than 81,000 households long. The average rent of an available bachelor apartment in the city according to Zumper.com’s rental market trends tracker, is over $2,000 per month. And so on up and down the line.
So what are we gonna do?
I asked Mayor Olivia Chow this week when she sat down with me at the Star office for an episode of the “This Matters” podcast, and she seemed to argue that encampment numbers are not up, (”the numbers have gone down, that’s worthy of celebration,” she said) despite the clear evidence from the city as reported by Gibson.
But as Chow elaborated, it was clear she was talking about specific sites that had been problems in the past, where the number of tents and people have been greatly reduced. She pointed to Lamport Stadium, once one of the city’s largest and most visible encampments sites, which she says is now mostly gone. Allan Gardens, which according to city numbers had 37 tents in it in March of last year, she says, “now has only eight structures and seven people left.”
She says the plan for the near future is to do what worked at Allan Gardens: to avoid forcibly clearing people, put city workers on the site around the clock in a trailer to ensure safety and offer support, and offer the people living there different accommodations until they find something they will accept. “In Clarence Square park … we are doing exactly what we did in Allan Gardens — you will see the number coming down. We’re putting in someone, a team, 24/7 to help take those folks out of the area, to say — willingly — we found you a place where you will be able to have a shelter and a roof over your head or something even permanent,” she says. “We will try to house most of them.”
She says that plans she has underway to provide more rent supplements to more people are part of how this will work, alongside programs to help non-profit agencies ramp up housing programs that offer more “comprehensive supports” for life skills and mental health. She hopes more support from provincial and federal governments will help expand these programs. And, of course, she’s watching the federal budget next week and hoping for ongoing funds to shelter the 6,000 refugees housed in Toronto’s emergency shelter system.
Gibson reported, from information from the city staff members, that a plan like the one Chow describes will come before city council for approval by May. It sounds decent enough, as far as it goes. But of course there’s not enough housing or rent supplements or supportive spaces to house everyone who needs a place. And so the current Allan Gardens approach is to focus resources on the most visible trouble spots, and bump those camping there to the front of the line for supports that many others also need. Applying the same approach to all the people in Toronto needing a place to live will take a lot more money than is currently available, and time to build more shelters and apartments and other places to live.
That’s not ideal. But then, as the presence of encampments and the broader housing crisis of which it is a symptom remind us, we don’t live in an ideal world. This plan sounds better to me than violent clearings. But a solution is a long way off.