My colleague was standing on the street corner when I arrived at work on Monday morning after the holidays. As a brutal wind whipped around us, he told me he was waiting for an ambulance because a community member had been found dead in an abandoned truck.

The man was known to us at The Stop Community Food Centre, as he often came for meals at our drop-in. We found out later he had been staying in the truck for the last few months. One of his friends checked on him in the morning and came to The Stop for help when he couldn’t rouse him.

Later, after the ambulance came, his friends, including the man who found him, sat together in the drop-in, still bundled up, barely holding back tears. As other people arrived, the news was shared quietly. The shock vibrated in all of us and throughout this place, even as everyone moved through the motions of the day.

It’s hard to know what makes the difference in social change. What the tipping point will be before a collective shift in direction takes place. What is it that steers us from long-held patterns toward necessary, critical social policy action? A volume of research? Inescapable data? Successful models from other jurisdictions? Apparently, whatever it is, it’s not people dying alone on the street.

Two pieces posted recently in separate media spoke to the broader context of precarious, vulnerable lives in Toronto.

Mitchell Cohen, developer and long-time housing champion, wrote in the Star about the need for action on affordable housing. This is not a problem that requires more study, he said. With 100,000 people on waiting lists for subsidized housing, the problem is clear, as are solutions. Cohen’s call is that we all play a role, take responsibility and make affordable housing happen at all levels, with as many players as we can bring to the table. Housing is the kind of investment we should all want — one that provides unending social and economic returns.

The other piece was Idil Burale’s in Spacing on the work we face as a city grappling with poverty and income inequality. While most of the income distribution programs that would have a meaningful impact on poverty are outside the city’s purview, Burale’s focus was more on the hard questions we will, or will not, face as a city: “Do we have the political and economic will to shift priorities. . . . What might we be willing to give up, as a city, for the whole to be successful?”

She cites Richard de Gaetano, from Social Planning Toronto, who suggests that a useful starting point would be the provocative and essential: “If we all had what we needed, what would it look like?”

So there it is. What would it look like indeed?

Would Toronto still make it to the top 10 livable and resilient cities list if we shifted priorities to ensure no one froze to death on the street? Would we rank higher or lower if we didn’t have 29 per cent of our kids living in poverty?

What would it be like if we all heeded Cohen’s call to take action on housing? How do we translate his belief that we each take responsibility into a pragmatic strategy for all levels of government and all city builders — from landlords to non-profits? How do we make a national housing strategy something everyone sees the merit of, and accept as a given that once housed, some people will need support to stay housed?

What would it look like if you insisted that no kids go to school hungry and that we are all able to feed our families healthy food?

We need to engage each other in the conversation about what it would look like if we all had what we needed. Whether through the poverty reduction work, a better budgeting process, or by acknowledging that taxes buy us schools and roads and knee replacements (and can buy us a healthier city as well), or by calling your city councillor or MPP and talking to candidates during the federal election, we need to shift priorities such that more of us are included, and the increasingly widening income gap between us is diminished. Clamour.

What are we waiting for?

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It’s been a bitter start to the year. We are long overdue for the change we need and the city we can build. Let’s get going. There are too many people living on a perilous, treacherous edge. And it’s cold out there.