More beds needed now, Editorial, Jan. 3

As someone who works with clients who are homeless and sleeping outside, I am extremely grateful to (street nurse) Cathy Crowe and her colleagues for their successful persistent advocacy. As the Star’s editorial board, several columnists and op-ed contributors have written, winter in Canada is cold and if people sleep outside, some will die.

The need for beds is predictable. However, the increased number of homeless people is not the result of a lack of apartments. People end up homeless because they are poor and most receive support from either Ontario Works (OW) or the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Neither OW nor ODSP provide enough rent money to rent anything anywhere in Toronto.

OW provides $384 and ODSP provides $489 for rent, while the average one-bedroom apartment costs $1,600. A single room in shared accommodation starts at $600. The gap between the rent money in both systems and the actual cost of rent has been growing for at least a decade and has dramatically increased in the past four years. Benefit recipients are forbidden from having any other income.

Ontario homelessness will increase until the provincial government increases the amount allocated for rent in both OW and ODSP.

Sarah Shartal, Toronto

The recent dangerously cold weather only highlights a much more prevalent problem with housing for our vulnerable population.

I am a volunteer at the Adelaide Resource Centre for Women and I have also been to Sistering on Bloor St. I have seen the women’s drop-in shelters at Sistering and Fred Victor and the conditions there are inhumane.

The women sleep on chairs; a few lucky ones get a reclining chair. There is nowhere for them to store their belongings and very little as far as shower and toilet facilities. It is noisy and crowded, which is detrimental for people already suffering from mental illness. This might have started as a solution for women in need for one night but, in reality, many stay there for many months, since there is nowhere else for them to go except the streets.

I find the constant debate on the percentages of shelter occupancy futile, since none of them meet the threshold of 90 per cent the city has set. This is a very real crisis and should be declared an emergency.

Smadar Carmon, Toronto

Mayor John Tory’s big failure as a civic leader seems to be the fact he’s unable to reconsider his position on the fly. He just doubles down on a bad idea. He did it with the Gardiner Expressway. He’s doing it with the Scarborough LRT. And he did it again by initially refusing to get the homeless access to Toronto’s armouries during this cold snap. Meet the new Mr. Dithers. Same as the old one.

Richard Kadziewicz, Scarborough

Why can our governments at all levels find adequate accommodation and support systems for 15,000 illegal, undocumented and unscreened border crossers from the U.S., but are so willing to abandon our homeless to the cold Canadian streets? We treat animals better than the homeless, many of whom are suffering from drug-addiction and mental-health issues.

It is time to deal with the homeless more humanely. If the rising number of homeless people in Colorado after pot legalization is any indication, then our governments must urgently develop a plan to deal with the homeless here. Churches and other organizations can only do so much with limited funds.

Larry Comeau, Ottawa

I am ashamed of our mayor and his cohorts who initially refused to consider opening the armouries to the homeless. I am ashamed of their so-called experts who fuelled this refusal with inadequate data and empty excuses. I have lost faith in their promises of future services.

New Year’s celebrations were cancelled because of the dangerous cold. The Calgary Zoo took vulnerable penguins inside to protect them from the cold. But Toronto’s policy-makers and politicians offer our homeless neighbours no such protection. The issue is being framed as a communications gap but is really a fundamental policy and practice gap. We are governed by people who have lost their moral and ethical ground in their efforts to shore up inhuman policies.

Laura Sky, Toronto

It is a terrible injustice that so many of Toronto’s citizens must scramble to find a warm and safe place to sleep at night. I applaud the city for opening several emergency shelters in this frigid weather and hope it can get this system working much better as soon as possible. More effective communication is needed.

However, the call to open the armouries to the homeless is not appropriate. The armouries are not empty buildings. They house units of Canada’s Armed Forces Reserve and are used every night by these units and their associated cadet organizations.

Who belongs to these reserve units? Mostly young people, largely high school and post-secondary students and many of them from neighbourhoods surrounding the armouries.

These young reserves get stable, well-paying, part-time jobs serving their country and also have the opportunity for summer work. The teenage cadets participate in free skill- and character-building activities after school and on weekends. So the armouries contribute in positive, concrete ways to employment and youth activities in their high-needs downtown neighbourhoods.

Having served in the Reserves many years ago, I know that homeless shelters and evening training activities can’t go on at the same time. When the Fort York Armouries were used to house the homeless, our training was paused. Also, the armouries are not designed for overnight accommodation, so sufficient showers and washrooms are not available, particularly for women.

The effect of opening the armouries to the homeless will be to close the armouries to the surrounding community — taking from one group to give to another.

Heather McClory, Toronto