Our relationship to urban space is an ever evolving dance. Our movements are shaped by ever-shifting assumptions about who belongs where, and why. There is a metaphor that has plagued me recently. Whenever I ride my bicycle, there will inevitably be a vehicle blocking the bike lane—in contrast to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s recent claims. When this happens, I cannot help but think of the housing crisis.
Both instances are part of this urban land dance. But, at its most basic level, such a moment reveals an instance where a subject with less power (a cyclist, in this case) is blamed for problems created by a subject with more power (or horsepower, in this case). The same is true when we consider encampments, shelters, or social housing. When the Premier of Ontario tells people without housing to get off their asses, he is epitomizing the bike lane metaphor (or perhaps, conundrum). Let me explain.
When I navigate the bumpy transition to bypass the illegally parked vehicle, I must make a few (split second) decisions. The first option is to manoeuvre onto the roadway, trying my luck with the cars. The second option is to hop the curb and ride the sidewalk. Third, I can stop entirely. Supposing I want to get where I am going, I am forced to make one of the first two choices. What is so fascinating to me is that no matter which path I choose, I am nearly always the object of someone’s ire.
An ill-tempered pedestrian asks me if I’m “too good for the road” (I’m unsure if this is a moral question or perhaps a comment on my skill on the pedals). And drivers honk, yell, or worse, buzz my handlebars with their side mirrors. It’s sometimes a wild ride. But what is always the case, without fail, is that the parked car gets by unscathed. Not once has a pedestrian or driver stopped, leaned into the passenger window of the parked car and offered a tactful, “buzz off.”
Those without housing do not choose or prefer to survive in local parks, in waterlogged tents or cardboard shelters. They are not merely lazy or avid fans of camping. But they are, quite consistently, and from the highest halls of power, blamed for the problems they did not create.
The pathways for accessing affordable housing have been clogged like the Bloor Street bike lanes, and many citizens (and politicians) overlook the blockages. The avenues toward employment are barricaded by the threat of losing what little social assistance there is, when the readily available jobs are precarious and likely won’t last the month.
The road to health is pitted with mental, physical, and systemic barriers, none of which our underfunded system is equipped to address. This is why the career known as “street nursing” has grown by a factor of 100 in the last two decades. And despite all these roadblocks, citizens blame the traveller who has been forced to “stop.” Those who attempt to carry on, advocates like Rob Dodds, recently interviewed on CBC Metro Morning, or those behind the 230 Fightback movement, are subjected to hate, stigma, and warnings about their lack of “professionalism.”
I believe the bike lane metaphor is a problem of memory. The spatial parameters of what we call a downtown thoroughfare have been only recently adopted. The car was not always king. The introduction of jaywalking laws, for instance, were lobbied for heavily by the newly emerging automobile industry in the 20th century. Roads used to be places where we had to share space, taking care to move our bodies, or horse-drawn carriages, alongside our fellow citizens, none of whom were hidden behind tinted glass. No fuzzy dice. No “hot baby” decal on the bumper. Similarly, we forget what the pathway to housing used to look like. We forget that, after World War Two, veterans fought for the right to housing, and thousands of units were made available across North America.
Some further reminders: neoliberal policies gutted social assistance and public housing. In Canada, the mid-1980s saw the federal government build over 16,000 affordable housing units each year. By the 2000s this commitment had shrunk by about 95 per cent. In a similar period, federal benefits for low income Canadians were cut in half. Simultaneously, in Ontario, Mike Harris cut social assistance rates by 21.6 per cent almost overnight. Accounting for inflation, social assistance rates have now been cut by well over half since the 90s. In the USA, permanent rent subsidies, a popular form of providing access to housing in the 1970s and 1980s, were almost entirely abolished. The frustrating thing about writing about these shifts is that such knowledge is readily available and has been reported on for decades. And yet it continues to be overlooked, forgotten.
The City of Toronto is currently way behind on their Shelter Safety Action Plan. The shelters have been full for years, yet the work toward change is, in a word, slow. In response to an already-delayed shelter at 629 Adelaide St. West, neighbours have been busy writing letters about the “violence and social chaos” that shelters precipitate. They invoke the “Golden Report,” authored by Dr. Anne Golden in 1999, which set out an action plan to address the lack of affordable housing and the failing social assistance program. Spoiler alert: not much happened. After all, Golden had been hired by Mayor Mel Lastman, who famously declared there to be “no homeless in North York,” just hours before Linda Houston died due to a lack of housing.
What the citizens who write such letters get right is that warehousing human beings is not the solution—it never has been. What they get wrong is their concept of “dangerous.” If shelters and safe consumption sites make people feel unsafe and limit “community cohesion,” then let us consider what it must be like to not have access to shelter or safe consumption sites. If memory served these residents, they would be quick to invoke not Dr. Golden, but the memory of Linda Houston, Bobby McLaughlin, Richard Roy, Paul Croutch, Drina Joubert, and thousands of others. If we are to make any headway in the path toward affordable housing, sheltering the most vulnerable residents of our city is a necessary step.
But perhaps more importantly, rather than fighting against shelters, why not fight for something? 230 Fightback, who I have alluded to earlier, is choosing this way. Theirs is a movement to secure 214-230 Sherbourne St. for social housing. This site, featuring a historic rooming house which stood abandoned for years as activists petitioned for the city to expropriate it, was purchased by KingSett Capital in 2022. The City of Toronto has not deemed it worth paying for, even when KingSett offered to sell it back to the city last year. In other words, the Adelaide St. neighbours are right, the city prefers to pay for shelters instead of meaningful social housing. The reality is the problem is so much worse than the one Dr. Golden saw, and the reality is this city needs more shelter spaces and more social housing.
What housing activists continually do is revive our capacity to remember. Their ongoing work is an invitation to see the abandoned lot or encampment as an opportunity to lean into the passenger window of your local representative and say, “excuse me, you’re blocking the road.”
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