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There are long bouts of silence as he walks, making his way through a stretch of one ravine where many makeshift homes are clustered together.

“They say they keep an eye on each other,” Cook says of the area’s inhabitants. “They don’t even know each other’s names and they don’t really hang out, but they keep an eye on the other guy’s stuff.”

Canada’s most populous city, where the cost of housing continues to rise, doesn’t keep track of the total number of such encampments, but it does try to record the makeshift homes it has removed.

In 2017, the city removed 313 encampments from parks and ravines, citing a bylaw preventing people from camping in parks overnight. The year before, it removed 204 camps, 142 in 2015, and 110 in 2014.

Jane Arbour, a city spokeswoman, notes that the numbers have increased in the last two years because there were more city workers trying to get those living in parks and ravines into affordable housing.

The plight of Toronto’s homeless came under scrutiny late last year as several spells of extreme cold highlighted a lack of shelter space. Facing repeated calls to take action, the city opened temporary shelters to try to deal with the problem. Everyone, from the local government to frontline workers, agrees a long-term housing solution is needed.

Despite the extra shelter beds, however, those who don’t have a home sometimes prefer the outdoors to the spaces offered by the city, Cook says.

His point is illustrated by a conversation he has with a man before heading into the ravines. The man used to sleep outdoors in a parkette, as well as underground garages, and although he now spends nights in a shelter, he tries to get out by 5 a.m.