Gordon Atkinson lost almost everything he owned when fire swept through his basement apartment last fall in a blaze police believe was set by a serial arsonist in the city’s west end.

Although, looking back, he sees the fire and the brief period of homelessness that followed as a blessing in disguise because it led him to his new home.

“I love it. I love coming home and turning the TV on and watching a movie or two. I just love this place, it means a lot to me,” said Atkinson, 64, of the bachelor apartment he now rents in a north-end Toronto Community Housing building, thanks to a client intervention worker at the Out of the Cold program, who helped him find housing.

“I’ll tell you one thing, it is better than the basement suite I was living in that burnt down,” he said.

Out of the Cold was meant to be a temporary solution to a major problem, but 32 years later it remains a vital part of homelessness services in the city. This season the program logged 13,009 overnight stays at 16 locations, down from 13,679 the previous year, according to a new report by Dixon Hall Neighbourhood Services.

Out of the Cold is run largely by volunteers at faith centres across the city, on a rotating schedule, with most sites open from November to mid- or late-April. People can rest on mats, are fed and given warm drinks and tokens and can get access to health and housing services.

It was created as a stopgap in a city with inadequate emergency beds, but three decades later, hundreds of people still take part in the nightly migration for temporary shelter, despite a recent expansion of the city’s winter respite programs.

David Reycraft, director of housing services at Dixon Hall, said the slight drop in usage is linked to the city opening temporary winter respite sites, including the now closed Moss Park Armoury and Better Living Centre, but the numbers show that efforts to combat homelessness are still falling short.

“None of these sites were built with the intention of housing homeless people” and should not be counted on to make up for a lack of affordable housing and support services, he said.

On Monday, the city’s year-round emergency shelter system was 92 per cent full, with 6,453 out of 7,041 spots taken. More than a third of available space is in motels and without those beds the system would be at 95 per cent capacity.

Reycraft said Out of the Cold clients are not always comfortable in emergency shelters and have complicated mental and physical health needs, something they are hoping to learn from. Dixon Hall, a multi-service agency that gets city funding to track program usage and provide staff, recently got support from Employment and Social Development Canada to track what services their regular clients are using throughout the city. The project is underway and expected to wrap up in early 2019.

They also have two dedicated client intervention workers and launched a pilot program where clients got focused supports, resulting in 12 of 24 regular participants getting housed.

Atkinson’s new place is an airy bachelor, decorated with donated furniture and Edmonton Oilers and Edmonton Eskimos sports paraphernalia. There is a tiny balcony, facing large trees and a nearby Tim Hortons where he reads the Toronto Sun every day. “Ok, you put the Star,” he jokes.

A journalist by profession, Atkinson was born in Elk Point, Alta., and came into the world with a hole in his heart that would require surgery at the age of 12, and a natural curiosity that would take him across Canada, in search of stories.

He is a member of the Onion Lake Cree Nation, on the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta. He has worked for the Toronto Sun and several First Nations news outlets and in 1990 covered the Oka Crisis, a Mohawk-led protest over the development of land in Quebec that raged on for 78 days.

“There were people from different cultures, not just native people. It told me that there was a lot of people who were sticking up for my people,” said Atkinson, who said he was intimidated at first by the weapons and soldiers, but then made friends and settled into the work.

The night he lost his last home he woke up to the sound of the fire department knocking on his door. He escaped with his life and a few possessions. A 20-year-old man was later charged with six counts of arson causing damage to property and eight counts of arson, having disregard for human life.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Atkinson briefly stayed with family, then the emergency shelter at men’s’ agency Na-Me-Res. He headed to the winter relief program on a tip he could get help finding housing, which is how he met Christine Foster, a client intervention worker with the Dixon Hall Out of the Cold program. This season, said Foster, she got 37 people into new homes and several more are close to signing leases.

Foster said the people they serve have often experienced chronic homelessness and might not even have identification, so a dedicated worker is vitally important if they are to have any chance of finding and keeping a home.

“It is like jumping through hoops of fire. You are always up against roadblocks,” she said.