‘Nothing is really getting better’: This Toronto park went from zero tents to being the city’s largest homeless encampment. What happened?

On a sweltering August afternoon, Downey, who is in her early 20s, stood beside her setup in a less populated area near the park’s northern edge, as two outreach workers from a local social service agency made their rounds to hand out water bottles and single-use SPF packets. They asked what she needed. The answer was the same as it’s ever been: housing.  

“I’ve tried signing up for transitional housing lists, affordable housing lists, supportive housing lists, subsidized housing lists — all the lists,” Downey later said. But since coming to Toronto from Collingwood earlier this year, she says she’s only been offered a bed in an enormous dormitory-style shelter, which she sees as worse. So, for now, she remains outside.

“There’s tents everywhere, people everywhere,” Downey said, gesturing around the park at the sea of campsites. “All of them are looking for housing, and no one can find anything, because there’s none available.”

Indeed, Downey is among dozens of people who’ve set up camp in Dufferin Grove over the course of the summer months, as Toronto’s overstretched shelters and decades-long housing wait-list continue to squeeze people onto the streets, with homelessness becoming more visible in public spaces from emergency rooms and libraries to parks and ravines. This west-end park is now the largest single encampment across the city map, with more than two dozen tents erected among the usual farmers’ markets, kids’ summer camps and a sprawling sandpit where preschoolers muck about with delight. 

It happened fast. This spring, while there were already hundreds of people living outside across Toronto, there were zero known tents at Dufferin Grove. In May, city hall unveiled a new encampment strategy that would concentrate available housing supports and other resources in a handful of large camps, with work already underway at Allan Gardens and next prioritizing downtown Clarence Square. Along with the extra housing aid, the city planned to deploy security officers to prevent further tents being set up in those locations. 

But while those large encampments have since come down in size, others have meanwhile expanded. As many as 30 tents and other structures were counted in Dufferin Grove as of August, as city workers report more than 400 campsites citywide — a count that’s more than doubled since mid-March. 

It’s an uphill battle that, for years, has prompted fierce debate about the best way to respond — here and beyond the city’s bounds. Major cities across North America have been struggling to respond to rising homelessness as affordability has withered, compounded by other social crises from limited mental health-care access to increasingly toxic street drugs.

In Toronto, decision-makers have previously adopted a more enforcement-heavy approach — arguing, during a sweep of encampment clearings in 2021, that the camps impeded others’ use of public spaces. But city hall’s new strategy, adapted from a pilot project tested initially in Dufferin Grove, increasingly sees housing as the long-term solution. The problem? With limited resources at its disposal, and nearly 90,000 households on the city’s publicly subsidized housing wait-list, officials are picking their battles.

That means despite Dufferin Grove now being Toronto’s largest encampment, it won’t receive the same cavalry of support focused this year on Allan Gardens and Clarence Square, says city hall homelessness initiatives director Gord Tanner. The city only has funding to roll out that new approach in one other location in 2024, and preparations are underway to focus on Kensington Market’s Bellevue Square, a tiny parkette less than half a hectare in size.

“It’s a parkette that includes a splash pad and children’s playground, and there’s a large encampment there of — at last count — 18 encampments and about 17 people. It’s in a very dense part of the market,” Tanner said in an interview. “So, we’ll be bringing some additional supports to that location.”

Dufferin Grove, for now, is considered by city hall to be on a secondary list of seven priority encampments — those that didn’t make the cut for the enhanced intervention, but where the city wants to see a reduction in tents and has laid plans for a more frequent presence from outreach workers. 

But inside the park, that approach feels to some like apathy. 

Lidia Szymczak, a west-end resident watching her kids at the playground on Dufferin Grove’s south side earlier this week, has grown frustrated seeing people struggling on the streets with seemingly no one to intervene.

“It’s kind of like we’re in a spiral. Nothing is really getting better,” she said.

She and her kids frequent Dufferin Grove, and she says she’s had to have difficult conversations recently when they’ve witnessed people visibly unwell around their regular playground. “I just say ‘don’t worry about it, let’s ignore it and move on!’ — because I mean, what am I supposed to say?” 

She wants to see real help — more shelter beds, more health care and treatment for those struggling with substance use and addiction, more jobs that pay people enough to live in Toronto. “We need to really focus on taking care of the people in our city,” Szymczak said.

With the park increasingly home to people in desperate situations, Downey says she’s also seen people lash out or scream, which leaves her nervous — something she noted other park users were likely feeling, too. She gestured to the nearby field where a gaggle of kids kicked soccer balls. “They have their camp and parks here on top of all the tents,” she lamented. In her view, the growing surge of tents inside the park wasn’t an ideal situation for anyone.

Lettie Gariba — sitting with her baby on a blanket beside the wading pool this week — sees housing as the key issue decision-makers should be focusing on.

“Providing any kind of housing is critical,” she stressed. Gariba also urged a careful consideration of how encampments were assigned priority for more housing aid. “Who gets to decide, and what community is getting engaged?” 

At city hall, Tanner outlined a flurry of reasons that could put an encampment on the city’s priority list radar, from festivals or cultural events in a certain location to green spaces being utilized for kids’ summer camps, offering the example of art gallery and city-run camps that use downtown Grange Park. 

But when it came to the three sites picked for the more intensive strategy — which means not only more visits from outreach workers, but setting up a temporary office for city workers on-site, bringing in services from health care to income support, and using security to prevent new tent set-ups — he described the city’s decisions as based on factors from the “vulnerability” of camp occupants to “what the impact to the broader community might be.”

At city hall, the shift to today’s approach to encampments began in late 2021, on the heels of several high-profile encampment clearings in places like the west-end Trinity Bellwoods Park and Lamport Stadium, which devolved into physical clashes between police officers and crowds opposing the crackdowns. 

By August of that year, with a large encampment remaining at Dufferin Grove, city hall began quietly testing a different approach, expanding its outreach and housing efforts with the aim of finding more permanent solutions. It was hailed at city hall as a success, with a similar approach adapted to use at Allan Gardens last summer after the number of tents in the downtown east park swelled. It then became the framework for the city’s overall strategy.

While the support-focused approach was received with some optimism from advocates, some questioned the spending on security to prevent others from moving their camps to the locations with more aid. Greg Cook, an outreach worker with Sanctuary Toronto, also flagged the strategy’s limited reach.

Tanner, looking at Allan Gardens and Clarence Square, noted some successes: while numbers fluctuated, he said Allan Gardens was down to about 10 tents from nearly 90 at its peak and Clarence Square was reduced by about half. But he, too, is frustrated by the lack of resources at the city’s disposal.

One sore point is the city’s inconsistent access to portable housing benefits. While the federal and provincial governments jointly offer these subsidies to reduce the cost of rent, which city hall sees as a critical tool to help people move out of shelters and encampments, Tanner says they’ve been unable to offer those benefits to new households for months — having run out of their last funding allotment in March. He doesn’t know if and when more money might arrive. “It’s very challenging not to have regular access,” he said. 

Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s office, asked about the status of the portable benefit funding, said on Friday they were “working on next steps” and would “have more to say soon.” A spokesperson for Ontario Housing Minister Paul Calandra said households already enrolled in the program would have received payments in July, and did not respond to a followup inquiry about whether cities could expect funds to offer the benefits to new households.

For Downey, an exit route from homelessness has felt out of reach since becoming homeless as a teenager. Back in Collingwood, she said rental listings for even a single room were advertised above $1,000 a month, which was beyond what she could afford on social assistance payments. While she’s filled out what felt like endless applications for housing aid, she knows it could take a decade or more to secure an affordable unit that way. “That’s my goal. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, and I’ve just been outside,” she said.

She’s felt the difference in the city’s approach to different parks, noting the security presence rolled out in other large encampments — something she suggested might make people, herself included, feel safer in the absence of housing. For now, she locks her tent, though she cautioned it was more of a deterrent than real security, with the fabric still able to be easily ripped open. 

“As much as what people are doing — going out, doing wellness checks, giving out sunscreen and water — that’s sort of the most people can do,” she said.

Looking around the park, she knows many occupants of the tents are battling with complex challenges, including a number of people caught in the grips of addiction and substance use. They weren’t easy challenges to tackle, she said — but she urged decision-makers not to steel themselves to the problem.

“They should still be willing to help.”