|Homelessness/Housing||Economy||Raise The Rates||Cops||Government||Solidarity||Casework||Action||Support OCAP||Archive|
Open Letter to Toronto City Council: Shelter Closures Threaten Deadly Winter!
Submitted by ocap on Tue, 10/27/2015 - 23:29.
Image description: Picture of bus shelter at Yonge and Dundas, where a man froze to death in the winter of 2015. Flowers are laid across the bench and a sign reading "HOW MANY MORE?"is propped against the glass wall
October 27, 2015
To the Members of Toronto City Council:
The meeting of City Council on November 3rd and 4th will deal with the proposal to clear out the homeless from George Street. You will be dealing with a recommendation from the Executive Committee to pass this measure.
The ‘revitalization’ process that you seem ready to set in motion constitutes a reckless and brutal attack on the homeless. It’s far from clear just how your Administration imagines it’s going to be able to relocate the hundreds of men that will be removed but we may be sure that the intention is to push them to the fringes of the City in the interests of an agenda of upscale redevelopment.
On October 6, we sent each of you a letter asking you to tell us who among you would be ready to accept a homeless shelter in your wards and how you would propose to ensure that transportation and services would be provided to those being relocated. Not one of you replied.
As appalling as the clearing of George Street is, it must be stressed that it is part of a broader process of social cleansing in which the decades long shelter system in the central part of the City is to be dismantled. It seems you are preparing to proceed with this without stopping to consider how homeless people driven out of the core can possibly function and survive in the outlying areas. Even worse, the City’s failure to find a replacement for the Hope Shelter, which closed in April, indicates that the goal of suburban relocation may be illusory and we may see shelters closed without any alternatives being provided.
We call upon you to halt the George Street Revitalization until you are able to guarantee adequate replacement facilities in the same area of the City. The consequences of failing to do so are desperately serious. The Daily Shelter Census shows that your policy of keeping occupancy levels at 90% or less continues to be disregarded. A look at the situation in any of the major shelters in the City shows that things are even worse than the Census indicates and that the system is bursting at the seams.
In January, four homeless men died in a period of just over a week. The level of crowding and the threat of further closings is creating a deadly risk that this winter will produce an even greater number of such tragedies. We will be coming to City Hall on November 3 to demand you reverse your present course of abandoning and driving out homeless people and to impress upon you our intention to fight such plans every step of the way.
-Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
Video detailing OCAP's attempt to get Toronto City Councilors to commit to opening new shelter spaces in their wards: http://ocap.ca/node/1259