When officials took steps to remove an encampment in a Toronto park this week, sympathizers rushed to the park to defend it. One of them wore a sign on the back of his jacket made from strips of adhesive tape: “Love Your Neighbour.”
To supporters of those who live in the cluster of tents near the southwest corner of Dufferin Grove Park, it is that simple. If we call ourselves a caring society, we must stick up for its most vulnerable members. Many of those who end up in encampments have mental or physical conditions that have landed them where they are. Unless we find a humane way of accommodating them, we should leave them be.
Others who live in the Dufferin Grove community see things very differently. Many consider themselves progressives and vote NDP or Liberal. The local Davenport riding consistently goes for one of those parties at election time, when its yards bloom with orange and red placards.
But they are fed up. Though they feel for the residents of the encampment and think governments should be doing more to help the homeless, they say that the encampment swallowed up a large section of the park and made some locals hesitate even to go there. Parks, they say, are for everyone. Nobody, however needy, should be allowed to simply move in and stay indefinitely.
Similar debates have broken out from Victoria to Halifax as Canada deals with a triple crisis of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction. Several cities have declared states of emergency. Clusters of tents and tarps began proliferating in urban parks and other public spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than five years later, many of them linger stubbornly on, annoying some park goers, attracting the sympathy of others and frustrating the attempts of city officials to wind them up.
The argument has been especially sharp in Dufferin Grove, a mixed, west-end neighbourhood of $2-million houses, rundown semi-detached homes, soaring new condo towers and older buildings full of low-income renters. It has raged at community meetings, on e-mail chat groups and in conversations among neighbours.
I live a few blocks from the park and have been watching the argument play out, visiting from time to time to see how things were going. Over the months, I’ve stopped to talk to a few of the people there. I admire their spirit and understand how the independence and sense of community they find in the park must seem preferable to a crowded shelter with a long list of rules. But I also hear from friends who avoid the park because of the disorder that surrounds the encampment. They wonder how on earth we have allowed setting up camp in a public park to become so normalized.
Dufferin Grove sits on Dufferin Street just south of Bloor, steps from a subway station and a big urban mall. It is a community jewel, a sprawling 13-acre patch of green in a dense part of the city where open space is at a premium. It has a sports field, a weekly farmers market, a famous outdoor pizza oven, a skating rink that turns into a skateboarding park in the warm weather and a playground where children dig in the sand.
The encampment there took root last year, reaching a peak of 46 campsites in November. It grew into a makeshift community, with propane burners for heating tents and cooking meals, bikes and scooters for transport and storage tents for overflow belongings. When this spring came, it was still the biggest encampment in Toronto. With the support of a whole variety of aid groups that brought food, warm clothing, new tents and other necessities, its residents managed to find a way to exist in the park, with some staying even through the coldest months.
Wren Chevrier, 40, a former soldier, told me this week she was on her second stint living in a tent in Dufferin Grove. She accepted a place the city offered her in one of the hotels that it uses as shelters but was evicted when the staff found a knife and pepper spray she kept in her room for protection. She returned to the park and set up another tent. The companionship she found there helped buoy her up. “I love having all these human beings around me,” she said.
Al Draghici and Sem Sad spoke on Tuesday about the struggle to find acceptable and affordable housing.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
But as the months passed and the encampment persisted, the complaints mounted. Locals found litter strewn around the park and discarded needles in the grass. They reported brawling and shouting late at night. Some stopped visiting altogether out of worry their kids would see fights or open drug use. Close neighbours were especially alarmed by the risk of fire in the tents. One broke out just this month, leaving only charred remains (fortunately, no one was hurt).
They demanded action. At a community meeting that I went to in January, hosted by local City Councillor Alejandra Bravo, some asked why the city could not simply enforce the law against camping overnight in Toronto parks.
She told them, in essence: be patient. Under Mayor Olivia Chow, a former NDP MP, city hall is taking a softly-softly approach to encampments. It won’t summon the police to help clear them out, as a previous mayor, John Tory, did in other parks like Trinity Bellwoods, not far from Dufferin Grove.
Instead, it sends outreach workers to see if they will go to a shelter or more settled form of housing; firefighters to warn them to be careful with open flames; sanitary workers to maintain the portable toilets set up for their use; garbage collectors to pick up their trash; and security guards to keep some kind of order.
The city calls it a “people-first, human rights-based approach” that focuses “on building trusting relationships, addressing immediate health and safety needs and facilitating access to permanent housing.”
It seemed to work with at least two other parks with substantial encampments. The city says that last year they were “resolved,” the term it uses in place of “cleared.” But the process took time: 469 days in the case of Allan Gardens east of Toronto’s downtown, 285 for Clarence Square near Rogers Centre where baseball’s Blue Jays play.
Moss Park had a sizable encampment after the pandemic started, but by now the city considers it 'resolved,' or cleared.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
And the cost is steep. Dufferin Grove neighbours pressed the city to reveal what it was spending to provide round-the-clock security, maintain the portable toilets, pick up the trash, pay the outreach workers and so on.
Officials said the cost for the three months after they started using the “enhanced outreach” model in the park was about $430,000.
Given that only around 10 people ended up living in the park, the neighbours reckon that the amount reached nearly $15,000 per person per month.
“We are funnelling taxpayer money into GardaWorld,” said business owner Abigail Pugh, 56, referring to the security firm whose guards help patrol the park.
Ms. Pugh says she almost always votes NDP and thinks governments at all levels should focus more on the housing crisis, but feels that letting people camp in public parks is not the answer.
“Parks are paid for by the public purse and they have always been public space,” she said. “By general agreement there are certain things that can’t take place in the parks. Pitching a tent is one of them.”
Dufferin Grove is one of several parks where the city has hired GardaWorld to keep watch.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
What really bothered the neighbours demanding action is that such a small group of people seemed to be holding the park hostage.
The city says that, over the months, it managed to find shelter beds for 56 people in Dufferin Grove and housing for another nine. But a handful of reluctant people remained. According to a city statement, those few individuals “have declined multiple offers of assistance and services provided by the city, including referrals into shelter accommodations.” City official Milton Barrera said at the park this week that a number of the remaining residents “have not even engaged with us.”
Some of the encampment residents have resisted moving to shelters for fear of being robbed or plagued by bed bugs.
One long-time resident told me last spring he would not even take an apartment in public housing – or anywhere downtown for that matter – because he did not want to end up among thieves and drug dealers. The city eventually found him a place in a clean new rental building in northwest Toronto. The Globe and Mail agreed not to name him because he did not want people to know about his continuing struggles, including a recent arrest.
It strikes many of the neighbours I have talked to as absurd that someone can be allowed to break the rules and stay in the park while refusing an offer of a place indoors. They complain that a handful of recalcitrant holdovers have kept the encampment going long past its time.
But a whole other group of park neighbours thinks that trying to expel those who live in the tents is wrong and even cruel. Avienna Esguerra founded a group, Ripple Community Collective, that provides meals to the encampment, tidies up the park grounds, and runs a free store with clothing and other items for the residents.
Ms. Esguerra, 39, says that rather than treat the people in the park as nuisances that need to be removed, the community should look on them as fellow citizens with troubles that anyone could have. “The compassion that we show people at the lowest point in life has to be something that we would hope to also be shown if we were ever to meet those circumstances in our existence,” she said. “It could be any of us.”
She said she had no time for the “wealthy homeowners whose houses line the park, who cannot even imagine what it’s like to not have that safety net.”
A local chats with a passerby at the park. Dufferin Grove's community chat forums have had vigorous conversations about the encampments.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
On a neighbourhood chat group, the debate went on for months. It often became heated and the organizer shut it down a couple of weeks ago, asking neighbours to remember to be kind to each other no matter how strong their feelings.
Some participants shared Ms. Esguerra’s feeling that those protesting about the encampment needed to show more understanding. One suggested trying to “walk a mile in their shoes” and considering what the tent dwellers must have been through. Another said that it did no good “clutching pearls” about needles in the park or complaining about all the money being “wasted” on people in need.
That kind of criticism angered the liberal-minded neighbours who were complaining about the encampment. They resent being described as privileged or hard-hearted. Many say they would actually like to see governments do more and spend more to find a solution to homelessness, but that having people live outdoors in a public park month after month in all weathers helps no one.
One remarked that it should be possible to say that homeless people deserve security and dignity but to say at the same time that the city’s handling of the encampment had gone “badly wrong.” Both were true, he wrote.
Another noted that Toronto is behind other cities that have started removing their encampments. Hamilton, led by a mayor, Andrea Horwath, who used to lead the Ontario NDP, started enforcing a ban on camping in parks after a judge ruled it was justified.
“I observe that the most vulnerable includes not only the homeless but also the elderly person and the child who want to use a sidewalk or a city park without tiptoeing through used needles and human faeces,” Ontario Superior Court Justice James Ramsey wrote in his decision dismissing a Charter challenge to the city’s ban.
Barrie, Ont., too, is taking action on its encampments, declaring an emergency and removing one in its downtown. Mayor Alex Nuttall said in a letter to the provincial government that “these encampments have resulted in health and safety issues for our community, a negative impact on the environment, and damage to municipal property.” The city was shaken when police arrested a man accused of murdering and dismembering two people who once lived in the same encampment as him.
Public frustration over encampments is rising around North America. Even in liberal-leaning California, Governor Gavin Newsom is pushing cities to ban them.
Cece Bella Cohen's tent at Dufferin Grove has a small magenta sign that reads ‘do not seize this tent (this tent is my home).’ Seizure became a more real possibility when the city gave out trespass notices.Eduardo Lima/The Globe and Mail
In Dufferin Grove, the encampment issue came to a head last Friday when officials handed out a trespass notice. It said that the residents were in violation of a bylaw against setting up tents and staying overnight in a park. The notice warned them they could face enforcement action unless they removed their tents and other property by 9 a.m. Tuesday.
That fanned the flames of the debate all over again. About 50 people came to the park on Tuesday to resist the removal of the encampment. They shouted “shame” when those addressing the crowd described the hassles they had put up with when trying to get decent housing from the city.
“Just because people are living in tents does not mean that they should have to settle and compromise on their human rights,” said Al Draghici, a former resident of a different encampment who has since found housing. “We deserve to be able to say, ‘No, this isn’t good enough,’ because I’m still a human.”
The city kept pressing anyway and several inhabitants accepted offers of indoor spaces over the next couple of days. By Thursday morning, there were about a dozen tents left. But the wider problem continues. The city reports that there were 304 campsites in parks and right-of-ways around Toronto as of Sept. 12.
In a letter to the community last month, Ms. Bravo said over 100 parks had tents in them. In total, she said, between 200 and 500 people were “living outdoors in parks, ravines, and under highways – a direct result of our housing crisis. There are an additional nearly 10,000 people sleeping in city shelters each night, who are also in urgent need of affordable housing and support.”
They deserve a hearing for their grievances, but so do the fed-up liberals in places like Dufferin Grove.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that a speaker at the rally in Dufferin Grove was a resident of the encampment there. Al Draghici was once a resident of a different encampment and has since found housing.
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