A BUBBLE ABOUT TO POP
FROM OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
The emergency shelter tent on Fraser Avenue is being squeezed by tension, from the pressures of an unaffordable housing landscape on one side and the ire of Liberty Village condo owners who wish its clients would find somewhere else to live
Nobody would call the controversial 10-month-old respite centre in Liberty Village fancy living. But three months of sleeping in the vast tent-like structure just behind Lamport Stadium left Ben Brown wondering why he found it so much more palatable than his wife did.
The overwhelming maleness of its population would surely seem a partial answer. But Brown, 40, came to a more ironic conclusion. He can better hack the clamour and constant lack of privacy of respite life, he said, because he has been through it all before – at a posh British boarding school in the Surrey Hills south of London.
“This is just like boarding school only with more chance of getting the shit kicked out of you,” Brown says, a shiner below his right eye and a gentle English accent suggesting relevant expertise to the claim.
His privileged background is a long way away now, on the far side of a devastating opioid addiction and much personal loss, but it illustrates a favourite point of homeless advocates. Anyone can end up on the street, says Enrique Cochegrus, who handles communications for the St. Felix Centre, which operates the Liberty Village respite, along with another from fall to spring near Queen and Spadina, and a drop-in on Augusta Avenue. He’s seen engineers, professionals with advanced degrees, people perhaps like someone you know brought low by myriad and complex circumstances. You’d be surprised.
And yet for a chorus of frustrated residents in Liberty Village, too many of those drawn to the centre since its opening in December have been true to negative stereotypes – irresponsible drug users, petty criminals, and those who clearly need more serious mental health help than they’re getting. It’s a group, the residents say, that has challenged the bustling area of tech companies, breweries, coffee shops and rising condominiums with open drug use, discarded needles and a rash of thefts.
The frustration frequently shows on the Liberty Village Residents’ Association’s Facebook page, a 12,000-strong group that’s largely dedicated to anodyne requests for restaurant recommendations and DIY advice. The respite, a low-barrier centre that accepts virtually all comers, reliably brings out an edgier tone.
“Can you please move it to somewhere far from kids and families?” one complaint goes. “I used to send my kid to soccer practices in that stadium, but I stopped sending them because of the addicted people around the stadium, some of them are very scary.”
Others dismiss the backlash as classic NIMBY, the concern of gentrifiers who thought they’d bought the charm of a modern metropolis without the realities of city life. As inability to afford rent is the number one reason given for being in a respite, some claim that pricey enclaves like Liberty Village are helping create the problem residents are complaining about.
Even if the respite disappeared, it’s only a short walk west over to Dufferin Street and Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood in a different economic reality. CAMH is just a few blocks north. Liberty Village will never have a moat to protect it from a city full of needles.
“You live in a city now, with all the grit and ‘undesirable’ things that may come along with it,” wrote someone pushing back on Facebook. “That’s why your parents fled to the suburbs. And this is the result when developers invite young suburbanites to live in sky suburbs on the edge of the downtown of a major city.”
But Louise Nardella is no aggrieved newcomer. She owns The Source Shop, a film industry equipment business that’s been present in the area for 23 years. She was leery from the moment she saw the 9,000-square-foot structure going up in the stadium parking lot, she says, though initially she most feared the loss of parking, already a problem for her clients.
It’s the rise in crime, though, that now startles her and her neighbours on Jefferson Avenue, just east of the site. The photographer to one side of her had a camera stolen from inside her studio and the nail salon to the other side has been repeatedly broken into or vandalized. Her own car has been twice hit by thieves, and she’s filmed someone riffling through her mailbox. None of this happened before the shelter, she says.
She doesn’t claim to have the answers. But to drop a 24-hour homeless respite centre into a dense, live-work area with limited parking, full of families, shops, pets and late-night workers, well, she doesn’t get it. “It’s just the dumbest idea ever,” she said.
When demand can’t be met
The Liberty Village respite – which looks something like a cross between a rubber tent and a small aircraft hangar – is one of three identical “semi-permanent” respites the city has erected in the past year, in response to the worsening homeless crisis and criticism of its previous seasonal respites meant to provide additional beds during the coldest months.
A report in May 2018 from the city ombudsman raised numerous concerns about the winter shelter system, including inconsistent standards and poor communications, which resulted in false head counts and people being unnecessarily turned away. Built at a reported cost of around $2.5 million per site and housing 100 people each, the three new buildings represent a move to bring more uniformity to respite care, while also making it available year-round.
The other two new sites are on Lake Shore Boulevard East near the Distillery District, and on Strachan Avenue, directly across from the Princes’ Gates. Though identical, the tent-like sites have different managers and different rules. The folks at St. Felix Centre, for one, decline to let reporters into the Liberty Village site. But Dixon Hall, which runs the respite on Lake Shore Boulevard East, opens their doors on request.
As you enter, showers and bathrooms are on either side. But it’s the great mosaic of 100 camping cots that grabs your eye. They’re Canadian Tire’s finest, a staff member explains, though admittedly not very comfortable for everyday use. Each bed is located in its own colour-coded, taped-off rectangle to give visitors a sense of personal space. Some run east-west, others north-south, to reduce the feel of a warehouse and create a pattern less conducive to spreading sickness.
But the most impressive feature of the place – as seen on a recent Thursday morning, anyway – may have been how clean and deeply quiet it was. Some guests grumbled that a reporter’s presence had put staff on their best behaviour, but the general calmness – punctured intermittently by residents’ barking dogs – seemed too complete to be summoned on a dime.
Dilshat Tonyaz says he has no complaints. A boyish-looking 38, with short hair, a neat black cardigan, sport shorts, and striped socks pulled up to mid calf, he looked like a well-scrubbed teenager about to sit down on the couch for a cozy day by the TV.
The cots aren’t comfortable and he needs earplugs and sunglasses to sleep. Otherwise, he professes gratitude for food and for the roof over his head, which is about all he needs.
He has no interest in material objects, he says. His family doesn’t like that he’s in the shelter, but he accepts it as God’s plan while he awaits his destiny. He is coy on any earthly reasons why he’s there. “God’s plan is my plan,” he says.
Two weeks into his own stay, Jason Smith is less sanguine. His life went south when his work painting airplanes dried up, forcing him to couch surf for a year. After running through old friends, he stayed with his siblings, then stopped for fear of being a bad example to their kids, he says.
As a Trinidadian immigrant, he doesn’t have much family in Canada. And an old criminal record and no high school diploma make getting a good job tough. He was starting as a dishwasher the Wednesday after we spoke.
Though he admits to having had issues with alcohol in the past, he counts himself among a small minority of homeless who aren’t addicted to hard drugs. People like him, intent on getting out, are ill-served by what he calls the minimal services geared to people with minimal ambition beyond a fix. “These respites are a big joke,” he says.
Such complaints aside, demand for cots is unrelenting. All three of the new respites have run at or near 100 per cent capacity since opening. Bed check is at 2 a.m., says Patricia Kavanaugh, manager of respite services for Dixon Hall. If there’s an empty cot, the space is reassigned almost instantly, sometimes to someone in the city intake centre at 129 Peter St., sometimes to someone waiting on-site. “Usually by 3 a.m. we’re full again,” she says. Many stay indefinitely. There’s no space in the city’s longer-term shelters to put them.
The number of people sleeping in Toronto’s longer-term shelters averaged 6,886 per night in August, nearly 38 per cent higher than for the same period in 2017. According to the city, the increase is driven by a combination of economic factors, including surging rents that dwarf increases to social benefits. A large rise in refugees has also caused a jump in shelter seekers, making it harder for people in the city’s 530 respite beds to move up to more secure housing.
Not that all respite users seek entry into longer-term shelters. For a variety of reasons – from having a dog to being part of a couple to balking at required case management – some respite users choose to stay in emergency shelters instead. Or feel forced to. “People with mobility devices like wheelchairs don’t have a lot of options,” says Kavanaugh. “There are only three all-women’s shelters in the city with an elevator, and one of those elevators has been broken for well over a year.”
“This is just like boarding school, only with more chance of getting the shit kicked out of you”
Vastly different Torontos
There’s a reason why the Liberty Village site sparks the most controversy among the three new tent-like respites. The Princes’ Gates site, and particularly the Distillery District site, are out of the way. The latter, for example, is on the far side of the Gardiner, dwarfed by an industrial silo and surrounded by parking lots. Even some nearby residents don’t know it’s there, Kavanaugh says.
The Liberty Village respite, by contrast, is on prime real estate just off King Street, representing an unmistakable collision between two vastly different Torontos, and perhaps the most visible example of the homeless problem in the city. “It is where the housing crisis hits the road,” says David Reycraft, director of housing services for Dixon Hall and co-chair of the city’s external advisory committee on housing.
In the hot seat, St. Felix Centre has upped its community patrols, a team of responders in distinctive lime shirts who keep a high profile around the neighbourhood, responding to disturbances and reports of needles. “The green shirts are everywhere,” a guy named Trevor who eats at the shelter but stays elsewhere mutters as they roll up to quell a shouting match. A landscaper working in the nearby park said he finds far fewer needles since patrols have increased. But in other ways, more outreach breeds more anger. A pilot program to walk people from spots near their businesses to transit and parking drop-offs in the evening just confirms to some that the area has degraded.
Brown, the old boarding school student, understands the hard feelings. The shelter, he says, is an eyesore. “I can’t blame them for being cautious or upset about it,” he says. But, he continues, the respite’s residents are more concerned about upkeep than some realize. Accidents happen, he says, but leaving needles out in the open is a serious breach of etiquette in his community too, so much so he’s dubious of the veracity of a widely circulated photo showing a half-dozen needles scattered outside a door near the shelter. Staging such a shot wouldn’t be hard, he says. And shelter residents, many like himself who are always scanning the ground for discarded cigarettes, would be among the first to see such a mess.
“It could be you at any time”
For all the undeniable friction created by the shelter, it has many supporters, too, who continue with widespread volunteering and donations, Cochegrus says. Among the most notable support has come from Project Comfort, a group of nearby residents formed in response to the respites moving in.
Patrick Quealey, a former diplomat and current member of the group, has a range of criticisms about the process that brought a respite to his neighbourhood – he lives closest to the Princes’ Gates site. The city made scant efforts at notifying residents about what was happening; it seemed to choose the sites with all the deliberateness of throwing darts at a map; and he doesn’t see a credible plan to get people off the streets in a sustainable way. And the resulting rise in crime seems undeniable.
According to data from the Toronto police, 14 Division, the 13.6-square-kilometre region that includes both the Liberty Village and Princes’ Gates respites saw a 39 per cent increase in breaking and entering for the year through mid-September compared to 2018. And while causality is hard to prove, the correlation is damning enough for many.
But Quealey says he’s not comfortable just complaining. If it looks like the shelters are here for the foreseeable future, as he believes they are, he thinks it’s better to work with the new neighbours than shun them. Project Comfort sponsors barbecues and bingo games at the sites, hosts workshops, puts on clean-ups and does outreach on social media.
He’s motivated, he says, as much as anything by the belief that so many of us could be in a similar spot with a run of bad luck. “Just because you’re sitting there with a good job and an expensive condo....It could be you at any time.” Cochegrus says they focus on helping each guest on a journey to a more safe and secure situation, but he doesn’t pretend the respites are solutions for homelessness writ large. Still, he’s hopeful the strong feelings they’ve engendered among a powerful and plugged-in population will help summon discussion and political will for investments that bring about wholesale change – which for him will come through building more supportive housing that entwines needed services with affordable places to live.
“They treat us with dignity”
His quip about boarding school aside, Brown is in a place he says his younger self couldn’t have imagined, a slide greased by family deaths, financial calamity, depression and drugs. He and his wife, Stephanie, are frank about being addicts. It’s cost them careers and the company of their “A-student” daughter, who stays with his sister-in-law. And in June, it cost them their apartment. They were sleeping in a shed before the respite.
Brown is grateful for the food, for the bed, and maybe most for the compassion he’s found in Liberty Village. “They treat us with a certain amount of dignity, something that is sparing on the streets,” he says, sitting on a bench in the park outside the shelter. In front of him is a leather-bound organizer, all the more important since his cellphone was stolen on his second day there.
“There are good people in there trying to do good things,” he says, looking at the tent. He means the staff and the residents both.