Homelessness is a constant and pervasive problem in Toronto. Over 200 hundred people experiencing homelessness died last year alone. According to the city’s 2021 Street Needs Assessment there are around 7,347 homeless in Toronto, a staggering number, and by other measures an underestimate.
Shelters and encampments
Our shelter system is at capacity in many areas, and, during the pandemic, it took a lawsuit to open up temporary shelters in hotels (which still came with its own set of inequities). The encampment evictions during COVID were criminal, what a horrible reaction to the homeless problem during an incredibly fragile time.
The city has a Temporary Shelter Transition & Relocation Plan, and it shows innovation in temporarily repurposing sites rather quickly to meet the crisis of COVID, but the crisis of homelessness remains, and the city must ensure these temporary measures transition into permanent solutions, not a return to the status quo. Toronto also needs to step up its action on properly regulating multi-tenant housing, which is an important source of housing for low income renters.
Integration
The vast majority of our homeless have either mental health issues and/or addiction issues, and need treatment, not to be treated as criminals. The modular homes recently installed on Cedarvale will help house people quickly, but concentrating the homeless in shelters and low income housing is known to cause more criminality, and does nothing to attempt to re-integrate the homeless into society. Other nations like Finland place their homeless in proper rental housing amongst regular folk, with much better results.
Solutions
There are things that can help alleviate or mitigate the problem, like a ban on rental evictions, appropriating empty buildings to convert them to shelters, buying out hotels to convert them to shelters, or even allocating a space with amenities as Brandon, Manitoba did (or like the Port Lands encampment, although preferably somewhere not contaminated with benzene). In the end, however, the goal must be to PREVENT homelessness through robust social supports, not react to it after people have already slipped through the cracks.