un/SHELTERED: How to get from “dire” to dignified housing
On January 20, Maytree and West End Phoenix hosted “un/SHELTERED: Finding Solutions” at the Toronto Reference Library. The event spotlighted the urgency of the housing crisis and innovative solutions for unhoused individuals in Toronto. It featured a panel discussion.
Moderated by CBC’s David Common, the panel brought together:
- Alex Bozikovic, architecture critic at The Globe and Mail;
- Diana Chan McNally, a community and crisis worker in Toronto; and
- Steve Teekens, Executive Director of Na-Me-Res, an organization supporting Indigenous men experiencing homelessness.
The discussion tackled the realities of homelessness, from systemic barriers to the importance of including the voices of unhoused people in finding solutions. Panellists explored pathways to achieving “housing dignity,” where everyone can access a safe, affordable, and private place to call home.
Panellists also emphasized the need for diverse, community-driven housing solutions and called for immediate, systemic changes to address the housing crisis.
The conversation underscored the complexity of Toronto’s housing crisis and the pressing need for collaborative solutions across sectors.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Common:
Well, we got up on the stage without falling down. So, first success. We’ll take it where we can. Thank you very much all of you for being here. I got off the subway at Bay because I grew up not near here, but I went to junior school very near here at Jesse Ketchum at Bay and Davenport. I went there because I had an all-day daycare connected to a school, that was perfect for my single mother. So nice to be walking back through the neighbourhood again. And I’m glad to be here on stage with this excellent panel. I think we’re just going to kick things off by trying to define the world in which we find ourselves and define it through the work that the three of you do. Diana, if I can start with you, what is the world out there, particularly in Toronto when it comes to the challenges that we’re facing?
Diana Chan McNally:
Oh, dire. The end. It’s incredibly dire. We already heard that we have about 12,000 people in the shelter system, but I was just looking at the numbers in the City of Toronto budget, and what it says is that we had over 20,000 people call for a shelter bed in the city, 73% of whom weren’t able to access a bed when they needed it. That is outrageous. And municipalities, I think, have had to bear the burden of this housing crisis on their own without the resources necessary and with revenue sources, which frankly aren’t able to generate what’s needed to actually address this crisis.
I really have to point the finger, especially at the province at this juncture. We have an utter failure on housing by this government. We have policies in place that make it easy to expedite evictions, and we have no care for people who end up victimized essentially by this bad policy and end up on our streets. We have 80,000 people in Ontario who are homeless. That’s, again, incredibly dire. To me, the world that I’m looking at right now is not looking good. I’m not prepared. I don’t think any of us are prepared who are really deep into this for how bad it’s probably going to get. This is just, I think, sadly the beginning. That was a downer. I’m sorry,
David Common:
Steve.
Steve Teekens:
I wish I had some positive words, but when I travel around Ontario… I remember the days when Toronto was a place to go to be homeless and access resources and shelter and street services. But now pretty much every small city in Ontario in larger municipalities, they all have homelessness now. And it’s very pervasive. It’s not hidden like it used to be. I was just in Kenora on the weekend. It was minus 35 on Saturday there. All the homeless people I saw there, they were all indigenous, all First Nations. Not a single one was non-indigenous. It’s just a major problem everywhere we go. I think once Ontario divested in social housing back in the early ’90s, that’s when we started this trajectory that we’re in now.
David Common:
That can also be said right across the City of Toronto, I think, as well, and the Greater Toronto Area, Oshawa is one great/terrible example of that, right? Alex?
Alex Bozikovic:
Well, I guess if I can add to the general bad news, while Diana and Steve are doing their work, my job is to write about things and to look ahead. And I think the forecast for the next couple of years is grim, not only because the prospects for increased resources being devoted to shelters and to supportive housing are not great, but also because the amount of housing we’re building in the city and across the province has dropped precipitously and it’s far less than what we need right now. I think what we’ve seen over the last generation is that the continued and growing shortage of housing has weighed on people further and further up the income ladder and people who have more are displacing people with less all the way down. And that pattern is only going to get worse as housing gets even tighter over the next couple of years.
David Common:
In my job, we talk about the words “housing crisis” constantly and, “Oh, well, the red tape’s being cut. A million and a half homes in 10 years and now, yeah, we’re on track. We’re hiring everybody. It’s going to be fine.” And yet it’s not fine and people still can’t find an affordable place to live. People are being priced out. People are being pushed out. Why is it in the face of what seems like political will, at least superficially, that things aren’t changing? And I would put that at all income strata… Maybe not all, but many more than… yeah.
Alex Bozikovic:
I think that’s a fair question and one short answer is that the problem that we’re in has a number of different causes and it has been building over a long period of time. And addressing these problems which have to do with both a lack of social services and a lack of housing generally is just not something you can do overnight. We’ve gotten ourselves into a deficit on both of those fronts, if you will, that’s taken us 30 years or more to build up. And you don’t get out of that in a day.
David Common:
Give me one of them. What’s one thing that we’ve had a long-term deficit in?
Alex Bozikovic:
Please feel free to argue with me here, but I think it’s safe to say there are these two broad categories. One of them has been a lack of services for people who are vulnerable, people who are homeless, and even people who are perhaps on the verge of being homeless. Those services have generally been weakened for the past generation in the city, across the province, and in many places across the country. That’s one thing. And the other thing that’s happened is that the places where the most people want to live or need to live right now in this country are essentially Toronto and Vancouver.
And in both of those places, we have just not been building anywhere near enough housing to keep up with the number of people who want to be there. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, perhaps we couldn’t see that because the impacts hadn’t been felt to quite the same degree. There were cheap apartments to be had 25 years ago and now there aren’t. That building deficit, this hole we’ve been digging for ourselves is getting deeper and deeper.
David Common:
Steve?
Steve Teekens:
Okay. Well, from my perspective, at least from the Indigenous lens, the housing crisis started nearly nine decades ago and it started in First Nations communities, and the evidence starts with the 1939 Ewing report. There’s been about 19 or 20 federal commissions studies and auditors reports that have come up that all highlight the same First Nations crisis in housing.
It’s been divestment by many governments across Canada and First Nations communities for a long time. I know in Ontario now, 80% of First Nations peoples live in urban settings. And why? Because there’s overcrowding in our First Nations communities. There’s no safe drinking water. There’s all kinds of social issues, and a lot of First Nations communities have had to deal with chronic underfunding for a long time. Often when First Nations take our governments to courts, they win. It’s a shame we have to take our governments to courts to fight for our rights that should be inherent.
When they want our mineral resources and all that, they’ll just find ways to go in and take it, but never mind sharing and helping First Nations to be prosperous. Also, documented in the Globe and Mail since 1959 to 2011, there’s been 404 stories on the housing crisis in First Nations communities. It’s documented, but who’s listening. Right? Na-Me-Res got into housing maybe 20 years ago, and we offer deeply affordable housing. It’s not easy to develop housing for people that are homeless and vulnerable. We wrap around the supports for them and we also bring in cultural supports. It works very well. The only problem is we never get enough volume of new housing to meet the demand.
David Common:
One thing I’m hoping we could get, Diana, from you is because you have very direct regular experience with people who are experiencing homelessness. If you could translate their experience with them in the room to people who purport to be the decision makers and solution makers on this, what would you be telling them about an individual’s experience and where the systems failed and where it could do better now?
Diana Chan McNally:
We often talk about homelessness in the context of people having these past traumas in their lives that have impacted how they navigate the world, so they’re, quote, unquote, “Dysfunctional.” There’s mental health barriers. There’s substance use barriers, which in some cases that may be true but is not universally so. And what we generally see is that when people become homeless, that’s when mental health issues start to present. That’s when people start to use substances. We also have to understand that trauma is not in the past. It is a constant 24/7 experience in your life, where every moment of every day is constant survival. I don’t think people really understand that when you are homeless, you have to have this bizarre, just very… The schedule that you have to keep in your head of where you can go to use the bathroom when it’s open, where you can go to get the meal around the time that you might be hungry, where you might be able to shelter at night, formal or informal.
People walk for kilometres every single day to access these very basic things that we take for granted because I can just eat what’s in my fridge. I can sleep in my bed at night. I don’t have to traverse the entire city all of the time and not sleep regularly trying to get those very basic needs met. People often talk about homeless folks as being lazy. It is the most strenuous job there is, trying to meet your own basic needs in survival mode all of the time. And I don’t think that’s understood very well.
David Common:
I can’t help but think that as they’re doing that walking, as you’re doing walking, you’re going past condos that are investor-owned and empty and maybe for sale, but can’t be sold in the midst of a housing crisis. Nobody wants them. Does your mind just blow up sometimes?
Diana Chan McNally:
My mind has been exploded for a long time. I’m still just trying to take the pieces and put it all back together. We were talking about historically what’s been going on with the housing crisis. You’re talking about 30 years, Alex, of us essentially saying that government is out of the business of housing. This is no longer in the realm of the public good. We’re going to leave it to the private market to create the housing that we need, and where are we with that? How’s that been working out for us for the past three decades?
Obviously, it’s exacerbated the crisis because if we stop seeing housing as a home, as a necessity for healthcare for your well-being, and instead as something that’s an asset. Something that can be financialized. That’s where our mind goes to when we talk about housing now. We don’t even see it as a home anymore. And when I walk past all of these places, that is that physically manifested. It’s housing as an asset and not as a home. It’s upsetting to me because somebody could be living there, but we’ve decided that the real value of housing is money that nobody is living there.
David Common:
But how do you then unwind that if it’s also a retired person, an older person, and that asset is the money they’re going to use to support themselves.
Diana Chan McNally:
It’s complex. Definitely. I get that.
David Common:
And not everybody’s like that, to be fair.
Diana Chan McNally:
We’ve seen that there’s a lot more youth who are ending up homeless, but what I see actually in Toronto are seniors. I see more and more and more seniors. We have this idea of boomers and their assets and they’re sitting on this nest egg. Sure, there’s some of that and people need that money because, frankly, money is thin for everybody right now. On the one hand I’m like, “Okay, I get it. You need to have a decent quality of life for your entire life.” And your pension, what you’re getting from the government, is not necessarily going to be enough. And when I see people who are just getting that government money, they’re the ones who are ending up on the street because what they’re getting over the age of 65 is not nearly enough to make rent.
David Common:
What is the number for ODSP now?
Diana Chan McNally:
Oh my god, what is it? I think it’s 23 or 24% of people who are homeless are disabled, on disability benefits or on OW and should be on disability, but there’s barriers to that.
David Common:
You’re looking pensive.
Steve Teekens:
Well, I just know that, unfortunately, in Toronto and elsewhere, housing and property is viewed as a commodity and it’s not viewed as a resource where people can live and thrive and raise their children and raise their families and live to be healthy. It’s very unfortunate. I really get disappointed when I hear about ideas of new housing policy. They really privilege developers, because as someone that works for an organization that does not-for-profit housing, I think the government’s totally missing the bus there on that opportunity because I know with our housing, when we sign a deal to make it affordable, 80% of what market rent is, we’re well below that because we know that’s still not affordable. I sign a guarantee that we’ll make it affordable for at least, I think it’s 25 years. I sign that, but I know it’s going to be deeply affordable for far longer than that. Probably generations.
When not-for-profits own and develop their own housing, that’s an asset that’s going to be in the community for the long run and we’re not going to flip it after 25 years when the guarantee of affordability expires and flip it for profit. In 25 years when all these deals expire for the affordability phase, we’re going to see probably more people becoming homeless or being out of the rental market because they can no longer afford it. It’s really just moving today’s problem into 25 years from now for the next generation to have to deal with it.
Alex Bozikovic:
Yeah, I think that’s right. The only thing that I would say to complicate that is ultimately the people in government and city government who are trying to negotiate a degree of affordability into new market housing are not getting more of that. They’re not getting more homes and not getting longer periods of affordability because that stuff costs money, right? And ultimately it’s about a scarcity of resources. In many cases, in Ontario and specifically in Toronto, how we’ve chosen to fund those small number of affordable homes that are coming within these new market housing developments is by taxing the rest of those homes, right? Those 200 apartments in a building are effectively helping to pay for a degree of affordability in the five or the eight that are there.
And I think there are two problems with that. One is that along with a number of other ways in which we directly and indirectly choose to tax new housing makes that more expensive for those who are actually paying market rate, which is not helping and it is making it harder to build. So less is getting built, which is not helping anybody either. Also, ultimately there’s just not that much money to go around in that way. These are problems that are collective problems that we all should be contributing to municipally through our property taxes, and to your point, Diana, provincially and federally, too. These are problems that our senior levels of government should be stepping in to address rather than doing these little stopgaps.
David Common:
To be blunt, if we go down into Bloor-Yonge subway right now, there’s a very good chance we’ll find someone there who’s trying to stay warm. I saw someone on the way in here. Not in that subway station, a different one. Her eyes were closed and everybody was looking at her. Then her eyes opened and everybody looked away, because that’s what many of us do. We feel helpless. We don’t know what to do, and so we look away and pretend that it does not exist. Well, that’s not a way to solve a problem just because people feel that they are not empowered to solve it. Let’s shift from talking about the problem, which is important, to talking about places that you might see solutions. Steve, I would start with you.
Steve Teekens:
Okay. Well… Jeez, what a big question. Beaches get formed by one grain of sand at a time. With our housing that we create for the users of our shelter and homeless services at Na-Me-Res, we usually do on average about 20 units per new development that we do. Because I don’t think it’s wise to have, say, 50 to 100 formerly homeless guys all in one spot, right? The neighbours won’t like it. They don’t like it when we even have 20. I think 20 is manageable. Usually we look for opportunities to acquire buildings where we can accommodate around that number. Sometimes a little less. Sometimes a couple more, and we just do it a little bit at a time. And I’ll tell you, this time last year we had three new housing developments in the works. We just opened up one in July and I was so happy. It was nine units.
We made nine guys, who used to use our shelter services or our street outreach services, no longer homeless. They have rents that they can actually afford. Just because someone may have experienced homeless once in their lifetime for a period of time, that label shouldn’t follow them for the rest of their lives. Often people are in transition and all it takes is affordable housing and maybe a little bit of assistance to help them realize whatever their goals or opportunities are in their lives. And if you put that roof over their head that’s deeply affordable and they can afford to feed themselves and all that, then that will help them to have hope and maybe realize whatever dreams they are or maybe even play it forward for others.
David Common:
Where’d the money come from?
Steve Teekens:
Good question. The money came from all over the place. We’re really good proposal writers. Some of it came from CMHC. Some of it came from Miziwe Biik Development Corporation, which is the indigenous affordable housing funder in Toronto. There’s a new federal Indigenous funder called NICHI. These aren’t huge pots of money either, but we also had to help with the City of Toronto’s Housing Secretariat. The City was helpful as well with some of the incentives they had, which waived development fees and some of the property taxes and that sort of thing. It came from a mishmash. It wasn’t just one.
David Common:
Was money the hardest part?
Steve Teekens:
No.
David Common:
Then what was?
Steve Teekens:
The hardest part was getting to the point where you get a building permit. During the heart of the pandemic-
David Common:
You sound like every developer I’ve ever met.
Steve Teekens:
Yeah, really? Okay. Well, I’m glad they share that problem as well. I thought they had a little more privilege than us. Basically, during the pandemic, we purchased a property with our own dime. When you own the property, you can generate the equity that you build in those properties and use it to acquire others. The banks love lending you money. We purchased a property on our own dime, had it ready to roll, applied for permits, and then we waited and we waited. It took us three years after all the hoops we had to jump through along with the statutory community consultations where we have a gang of neighbours often that aren’t so friendly, that usually come and share their racist views.
After we endure that, we go to Committee of Adjustment. Again, we hear that gang of neighbours that don’t like us share their weird ideas, and some of them are dumb enough to even publish a racist ideologies and written record so we know who they are. We jumped through those hoops and then we got our building permit, then the construction can start. That one project from start to finish, which is still in the works, we’re looking at maybe five years, it’ll be done. The ones before, maybe about three years on average. From start to finish after you get through all the permitting process to the end of occupancy permit, about three to five years.
David Common:
And time is money, right?
Steve Teekens:
It is, yeah.
David Common:
This is somewhat in your space. Did you want to add anything to Steve?
Alex Bozikovic:
Yeah, I guess. I’m not going to be here to plead the case of the development industry too much, but I think-
David Common:
Just stand away from me if you do that.
Alex Bozikovic:
Please don’t throw anything. I think it’s actually really useful, Steve, to hear you say that because the folks like you who are attempting to build deeply affordable and supportive housing are still coming to terms of some of the difficulties that exist in our politics and in our planning, which basically comes down to a hostility to change. Right? This is true in Toronto, and it’s true almost everywhere else in North America. Where we see houses, people expect to see houses. People don’t expect to see bigger buildings where there are smaller buildings and they see that sort of change as inherently problematic and wrong. And we have over the last 50 years put together a lot of stuff that reinforces that point of view. And the landscape that we live in now is one where most of the city that we live in physically isn’t supposed to change.
Big buildings go where big buildings are. Of course, if you’re a tenant in an existing apartment building that’s 20 stories tall, somehow it’s fine to evict you temporarily, tear down your 20-story building and build a 40-story building because that is good planning and makes sense somehow, which has never made any sense to me. Long story short, I think we’ve got a lot of rethinking to do about how we choose to organize ourselves physically. And I think the short version of that is that we need to be willing to accept a lot more change and change of different kinds to allow more people in all kinds of housing to find places to live and to find places to live in the neighbourhoods and in the blocks and in the streets that have amenities. That have the stuff that people need where they can find work that are nice places to live. It’s a tall order.
David Common:
You listened to Steve’s experience and what a proposal for change came up against. Do you just force change?
Alex Bozikovic:
Well, there’s stuff that’s happening. The City of Toronto now is making some efforts to change its approach to development. I think maybe the results have been a little bit overstated so far, but there are efforts being made to sort of reform all of these complicated processes, all of these hoops that need to be jumped through by big developers and also apparently by Na-Me-Res. I think that kind of reform, we just have to be careful, I think, because there’s been a conversation… As you say, we’ve been talking about this stuff. There’s been so much discussion about planning reform and zoning reform and development charges now, and all of this stuff that nobody really cares about.
David Common:
And it’s a foreign language to most people, right? Yeah.
Alex Bozikovic:
And not a particularly interesting one, right? It’s a lot of jargon. But I think the danger that we’re in now as a society is that we’ve had these conversations, and most of us who are more comfortable, especially older folks who haven’t been in the housing market for a while, don’t appreciate the degree of the problem or the degree to which the problem has gotten worse, even in the last 5 or 10 years. I’m in my 40s and my experience 15 and 20 years ago, it might as well be a century, the degree to which the market has changed even for people who are doing pretty well. What I would argue is that we need to continue to be really aggressive about the change we need to make and not settle for small things, and not to assume that because it’s now maybe allowed to build a triplex in more parts of Toronto that the problem is solved, because I don’t think that it is.
David Common:
You’ve got an open field. Go ahead.
Diana Chan McNally:
Well, okay, we’re arguing from the development side. I’m going to argue from the end user side, which is to say the people I’m working with who are homeless. Aside, I have degrees in design for some reason, which I do not utilize except to judge some of those competition. I instead-
David Common:
I don’t.
Diana Chan McNally:
Okay, there we go. I don’t know why. It’s fine. Okay, a little bit of an aside. I wrote my thesis on the ROM of all things. I’m a museologist. I didn’t just make that up. It’s a real thing. It’s somebody who studies museums. When Daniel Libeskind scrolled on his napkin and designed what is now the structure of the crystal of the ROM, no one talked to anyone who works in a museum about how this would impact collections. When you’re a museologist, you think about climate control, you think about UV light exposure of the artifacts to these different things that can degrade them ultimately. And that structure, you cannot climate control it. It’s impossible. It’s impossible. Its very existence actually degrades the objects that exist within it. It’s a very problematic building. People say it’s ugly. I don’t really care about that. I just don’t think it’s very functional.
That is such an aside as a story, but it is to say we don’t talk to homeless people about what they need in their housing. We never ask them, and that has to be the priority. A lot of the designs that I think came out are very interesting. A lot of them are modular. They can be adjusted to suit the needs of people.
But I’d like to see that go a step further where we actively talk to people who are homeless as a part of the design process to ensure that whatever we’re creating is logical, makes sense to them. And moreover is something that’s accessible, since we know that so many people who are homeless are currently living with disability, or if they remain homeless, will absolutely live with physical disability as a result.
David Common:
If we asked, what would we hear?
Diana Chan McNally:
Probably that you need a lot of privacy. Steve, to your point, people don’t actually want to live in giant congregate spaces of every community member they’ve ever met. A lot of people who are unhoused want to be out of those communities or want to be able to mitigate how much they’re exposed to them. Not in recent years, but 10 years ago when I was working, a housing unit would come up in a supportive housing structure and they’d say no, because they didn’t want to be with other street guys. They were like, “If you can get me into somebody’s basement, that’s what I want. I just want to have my own space away from everyone and then I can just come back and spend time with my community when I want to and create those actual boundaries.”
It’s not just that I can tell you exactly what they want, but I think what’s important is that you actually need a variety of housing. Yes, you need that supportive housing. Yes, you need the ability to be on your own, relatively independent, and not be surrounded by other community members. We need all kinds of different solutions because all of us actually have different housing needs and preferences as well.
And we should understand that about the population I’m working with is that it can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach.
David Common:
You bring up some of those designs, and I think for people who haven’t seen them, you can pick up the West End Phoenix and it’s featured there. And, of course, there’s, as Dave was saying, a bunch of copies right at the front door. For the three of you, what were the “oh” moments when you saw some of those?
Alex Bozikovic:
Well, I think in all of the proposals that we’ve selected for the short list, they respected the brief or the expectations, which included such things as privacy, power, water, access to a washroom, which are not necessarily givens, particularly with what is seen as temporary housing. But also that people understood to some degree the importance of community. Each of these creates a group of homes that is not enormous, but is also in which nobody is entirely isolated. You’ve got groups of 5 or 8 or 10 people with supports, with services, but which there’s a degree of community. And with luck, a chance for people to build and enjoy community and to work together and do stuff and build a home together to some degree.
David Common:
It’s important that you said the word temporary because this should not be the long-term solution. Can I go to you, Steve?
Steve Teekens:
Okay, well, when I reviewed all the entries, first of all, I was pleasantly surprised to see people put a lot of thought and energy into trying to create a solution to get people off of the streets and out of the park sleeping in precarious places. That was a little refreshing. Now, I’ll divert from there. I wish there was more innovation. Maybe the bright ideas haven’t come out yet. There was nothing really that gave me that aha moment and, “This is it.” Again, some of the things that I did like that I thought, “Oh, what a good idea,” was potentially using existing parking garages as spaces to place structures such as shipping containers or build spaces there and bring in the supports for folks. But then I thought, “Wow, will the city ever allow this with all their regulations and the politics around it?”
That’s a whole other mess. I thought that was innovative. It could be a solution if the political will was there that we could do it tomorrow. I like that there was thought into all the amenities that would be needed to live comfortably in a space. Then some of the structures that I saw, some were portable and I liked that. If you set up in one neighborhood and then all of a sudden feel overwhelmingly unwelcome, you can move along somewhere else until you feel that feeling again and then go somewhere else. That was interesting.
Diana Chan McNally:
I would say what struck me about some of the designs was flexibility. Modular was a big part of that, being able to swap out certain amenities. Certain walls would have panels with particular amenities like a sink, but if you didn’t need that, you could swap it out for something else. I like that kind of flexibility for people because then we can at least create structures that meet each individual person’s preferences. So I like that. I think dignity, seeing that some of the spaces were actually quite beautiful and well designed and really honouring people’s autonomy, but also bringing in social skills, things like gardening, communal activities as well.
Again, understanding that these are communities, these are human beings. You have psychosocial needs. I have psychosocial needs. These things are being integrated into the designs themselves. That, to me, was really important. Again, I can’t say necessarily it’s what everybody would want, but we’re thinking about it and we’re thinking more than just, “Here is a basic four-walled structure with a roof.”
Also, we have these other things that meet your other needs even beyond that and beyond those emergency needs. I saw that in some of the designs and I quite appreciated it.
David Common:
I’m going to switch gears for a moment and talk about the need for political will for any of these things to actually happen. And for there to be political will, you have to have public motivation. You have to have the public pushing on the politicians, on elected officials, to make things happen. And yet we have legislation or could have the use of legislation that would permit the provincial government to say, “We’re going to clear encampments.” Now, I don’t know for certain, but I know that this provincial government, like all provincial governments pull and pull and pull. I think there’s a fairly decent chance that they have support for that idea.
Now, rightly or wrongly, people may not understand the issue. They may think there’s some sort of magic rainbow that people are being cleared to. But at the end of the day-
Alex Bozikovic:
Over there.
David Common:
Over there, yeah, away from what I’m going to see. If that happens, perhaps some people will be less uncomfortable because they won’t be walking past people in pick your place. But if they’re not walking past people in pick your place, does that remove the public motivation to create political will?
Diana Chan McNally:
This is a can of worms, man. I’ve been working with homeless people and with encampments specifically and people’s rights for years now. The pandemic is ongoing, but in those initial years, we saw the public discourse change where it was understood that these folks need housing. That is the end goal. It’s the only solution ultimately that’s going to do anything about what we’re seeing outdoors. But empathy has been wearing thin. I don’t know what’s going on with people, but I know you know that there’s a lot of anger and frustration that is being aimed at people who actually have the least amount of resources in our society. I feel like the public opinion has now begun to shift where this law and order approach, which may be broached by the province if this legislation comes into being. I do think there is significant support for that, unfortunately.
But at the same time, I have to admit Bill 242 will criminalize homelessness, but really we don’t even actually have jails and space in jails if that is what they’re proposing as a solution. The jails are full just like the shelters are full. What you’re going to see is that even if police, and I’m not a fan of police, I’ll just say that openly, but I also know a lot of police because I’ve had to work with them over the years. They don’t like doing this work. But the ones who will enact the legislation, they’re just going to push people around in public. It’s not going to actually disappear the issue. The person who’s afraid of the encampment in the park close to their kid’s school, maybe that encampment is actually going to move closer to your house because it’s just going to be this whole process of shifting where people are in public without actually invisibilizing the problem. And frankly, you might like it even less in the end result if it’s closer to where you are.
David Common:
I had the same conversation a month ago, but instead of homelessness, you substitute supervised an injection site. Anyway, very similar conversation. Steve?
Steve Teekens:
Yeah, unfortunately, we have a premier who will make public statements like, “They need to get off their asses and get a job.” Or, “Communities don’t want used needles in their parks.” The way this trajectory is heading, instead of finding used needles in the parks, we’re going to be walking over dead people in the parks. I think people will like that a lot less than they would finding used needles. Diana and I were just talking earlier. I know at Na-Me-Res we have staff that work in the jails that bring cultural supports to Indigenous inmates. I know a number of the provincial jails in this province are overfilled. Some of the cells have more people than they were designed to occupy. That’s not the solution. We all know it, and it’s going to create more problems. If we can’t build housing quickly enough, I don’t think we can build jails quick enough to accommodate the increase.
Diana Chan McNally:
And we don’t want that.
Steve Teekens:
And we don’t want that. No.
Alex Bozikovic:
Well, and jails are more expensive than shelters to run, aren’t they?
Steve Teekens:
And the reason we have staff that work in the jails is… I view jails as a pathway to homelessness. Just think, if you went to court and you don’t have the resources to get yourself bail or have someone that’s reputable to give you assurity, you end up sitting in jail doing dead time until you have your trial date. If you’re sitting there doing dead time for months, you can’t afford to pay rent because you can’t get out there to pay your rent. So you become homeless. If you’re there two years less a day, the maximum sentence for provincial jails, once you get out, you’re not going to have a place to go unless you have family that will take you back with open arms, if you have that luxury. It’s a pathway to homelessness. It’s going to be a creation of a vicious circle if we criminalize the homeless.
Diana Chan McNally:
Can I jump in, too…? You just said jails are more expensive. Yes. Social services are also more expensive. I always think about the work that I do is I need to put myself out of the job. I should not be doing this work. We should not be doing this work. It’s ludicrous actually, that we are. But for some reason… Again, to this idea that we financialized housing, we consider it an asset, not a home. People will say, “Oh, we can’t pay for someone else’s housing. That’s ridiculous. They need to do that themselves.” Well, guess what? Your taxes pay for homelessness no matter what. You pay for it through my salary, through bulking up the shelter system ad nauseum
Alex Bozikovic:
Emergency room care.
Diana Chan McNally:
Emergency room care, policing. You pay for it anyway and you’re going to pay more. So get over that idea that housing is strictly to be financialized and just build the thing. Just build it. Build it. It’s cheaper for everybody, and it’s healthier too.
Alex Bozikovic:
We know this, and I think the work that Dr. Andrew Boozary is doing in getting the University Health Network to get into the business of delivering social housing. There’s a tradition of this, what is the word? Housing as prescription. Is that the right term? That might seem counterintuitive, but the basic argument is, and it is a very strongly factually supported argument, that if the hospital system is going to be delivering care to somebody who needs chronic care and is in and out of the ER and needs chronic care over time. That costs a lot of money. And the amount of money it would cost to house that person with supports is a lot less. And obviously they are a lot better off with the security and safety and care of that situation.
We put a lot of money into healthcare. The insight is maybe some of that healthcare money should be directed to just housing people instead of triaging their needs and keeping them living in distress. Whether that’s politically viable, we’ll see. But it makes a lot of sense. And I think it makes a lot of sense to most people
David Common:
Just as we wrap up our conversation here, who or where is doing something right on the solutions end that we should adopt here?
Diana Chan McNally:
I like Peterborough. It’s not that the solution that they’ve created is innovative. It’s tiny home community. It’s the way they did it that I think is really important to what I was saying before about engaging the end user. They talked to people about what they needed and they heard that people wanted to stay where they are because it was an nexus of all these different services and places that they were able to go to. It was a logical location. And the city worked with them and did a lot of community outreach with other neighbours in the area and created this community in such a good way that now the people who were formerly opposed to the encampments being in the park in Peterborough, are now defending encampment residents and their right to remain there, because they’ve been brought in and formed a community and the city facilitated that.
I love the way that they did it. Again, it’s not the design, actually, that mattered so much there. It was the engagement. And we often see that those principles which are human rights principles. Sorry, I’m pointing at you, Liz, but they are. They are often missing when we talk about housing and homelessness.
Steve Teekens:
I’ve struggled to look elsewhere to see unique ideas that we can maybe borrow from. What I do know is that Na-Me-Res housing with us, I’m not saying we’re the greatest or anything. We have lots to learn and we’re fairly new to housing. We’ve only been doing it about 20 years. With our housing, when we acquire property, we make sure that we put in strong durable building materials, so we’re not always renovating if we go with cheap things because you have to have a budget for that. And if-
David Common:
Now you don’t sound like a developer.
Steve Teekens:
Our houses would be houses that any one of us in the room would want a unit in because they’re really nice. The dignity factor is humongous. I know there’s this new term that the provincial housing folks use, which is supportive housing. They label our housing as that. I don’t. Because I think it lets them off the hook. We have housing with supports. When someone becomes a tenant in one of our housing, we automatically assign them a caseworker whether they want them or not. Sometimes they don’t even want them, which is fine. But if they come into a slight crisis in their life, that person will be there to help them to guarantee that they maintain their tenancy and they don’t become homeless again. If they have disputes with their neighbour, which sometimes happens, they’ll mediate between the two of them. It seems to work very well.
They’re integrated in very nice neighborhoods here in the city. I know one bunch of neighbours in Parkdale, they didn’t want us there. They thought we would turn their neighborhood into the slum. We had the nicest house in that street. We keep our houses up to date. We always make sure all the renovations are done. We have pride in our housing. I think there’s something to be said when people have pride in the dwellings in which they live in. They’re going to take care of them. They’re going to get upset if the person that lives across the hall is messing things up, and they’re going to let our staff know so that they can make sure that they still live in a nice place.
I think that works very well. Another really nice factor is these guys, if we offer them deeply affordable rents, it gives them a real opportunity to grow roots in this city. Quite a number of our tenants have been there since day one of moving in. Some have gone to college or university. Some of them work for a number of not-for-profits in the city, or some are just on disability for the rest of their lives. That’s just a fact of life for them, and that’s fine. At least they can stay in a place where they can have their dignity and be proud of the roof that’s over their head.
Alex Bozikovic:
Yes, indeed. Some big checks need to flow to Na-Me-Res. But I think it’s really a good way for us to wind this up. Because through this process, one thing I’ve been thinking about is the implications of this kind of housing, which is, as you mentioned, temporary for longer-term housing, for permanent housing, and the growth of a more robust system of social housing in this city, in this province, in this country. And I think a key to that is going to be doing it well. And I see some signs of hope with the Toronto Community Housing, which is an organization that has a very problematic history in a lot of ways, but has struggled partly because social housing has been perceived, in many quarters here, as being not great. As being shabby in some sense.
And the way in which social housing is built, where it is built, the kinds of communities it goes in, the buildings and the public spaces that go with those buildings. All of this stuff needs to be well-built and well-maintained, so that people can live well and so that people perceive that non-market housing, let’s say, belongs everywhere and is not something to be avoided. I think there’s some good news at Toronto Community Housing now and that some of their new buildings are really aspiring to hire the best designers they can to make really excellent, robust, solid buildings with good public space that encourage integration and that will provide people with a good quality of life. I admire that effort and here’s hoping that works and we can have more of that.
David Common:
Very good. Thank you very much. I’d like to thank Liz and Dave and thank all of you for coming. There’ll be an opportunity at the end to chat with these three, but a particular thank you to Diana and Steve and Alex. Thank you all. Appreciate it.