Homelessness and COVID-19: A Looming Humanitarian Disaster
BY RIMA BERNS-MCGOWN
Photo by Grigory Kluglov/Flickr.
I’ve been trying to keep an Indigenous woman housed. I’ll call her M. Frontline workers tell me there are more than 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto right now. It starts with one person—in this case an Indigenous woman with mental health issues—losing her housing, followed by another, and then another . . .
M is in her sixties and has lived in her apartment building in East York for over 10 years. About six or seven years ago, M began to experience mental health issues and could not work any longer. She applied for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). At the time of her eviction, M’s rent was $1,250 per month. That still leaves cost of food, cell phone bills, and clothes and utilities to be paid for.
M did sex work because her mental health issues left her unable to find other work.
I want you to stop and take this in.
This is Toronto in 2020 and even with ODSP, M can’t survive unless she has another income. She was forced to do the only thing she could to survive and that was sex work. Which left her open to abuse.
Not surprisingly, some of her clients were abusive, with their harassment extending to her neighbours.
The neighbours involved the landlord, who went to the Landlord and Tenant Board, asking to evict M.
And then the pandemic hit. Obviously, the sex work dried up.
The premier said that no evictions would be enforced. People could keep their rent if they needed to eat. This, in turn, enraged the landlords, and by the end of August, evictions were open for business again.
Landlords were told by the premier to work it out with their tenants, but often “working it out” means arranging repayment plans that are too onerous for anyone to manage. With some people living month-to-month in the first place, and lots of others losing income or jobs during, how can they pay steep arrears and still eat?
In M’s case, the community got involved and, incredibly, worked with M’s neighbours to create an agreement that allowed the neighbours to take care of each other, and of M. This meant that M would have access to support when she needed it. They noticed that when supporters gathered around M, the harassers stopped coming.
The community asked the landlord to give this new approach a chance to work, but the landlord wouldn’t listen. They kept watch so that when the sheriff came, they could form a human chain across the entrance to M’s building and prevent her eviction.
It worked once. The second time, the sheriffs came at 8:40 in the morning, in two unmarked cars and with a guard of 11 police officers. Police had told the community that they don’t assist in enforcing evictions. But there they were, making sure that community members weren’t able to form human chains. They called it “keeping the peace.”
Around the same time, next door in Crescent Town, the corporate landlord evicted a Black woman, unlawfully, as it turns out. They called police to enforce that situation as well, even though it was clear, even at the time, that the eviction was dubious. Indeed, the courts overturned it a few weeks later: the landlord, Pinedale Properties, was forced to return the unit to the aggrieved woman and to pay her restitution. Again, the police said they were “keeping the peace” and reacting to a trespasser.
But we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Housing is a human right and the shelters are full in Toronto, and across the province. Frontline workers are telling me that when they call the shelter system to find a bed for a client, they are often told that everything is full: the shelter-hotels, the shelters, the respite centres, the drop-ins. Sometimes the street is all there is. The nights are cold already. The street is dangerous.
“It is crucial to understand that most of the people experiencing homelessness never thought they would be.”
Homelessness has been a crisis in Ontario for a while now. The numbers of people sleeping rough in Toronto doubled over the course of a couple of years, from 3,000 in 2016 to 6,000 in 2018.
The City of Toronto now estimates that there are 8,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto alone. Frontline workers put the number at over 10,000 and counting.
COVID-19 has exacerbated the crisis, and it is doing so across the province. Cities, small towns, rural areas that never saw themselves as having homelessness are forced to deal with the fact that they do, and that they are often ill-equipped to handle it.
People have lost jobs or income. Some who have jobs, but get paid on an hourly basis, make less money because they are working fewer shifts.
Life is also much, much more expensive. Low-income Ontarians used to shop around for the best deals, which might have meant hitting up numerous food stores to cross-check the price of bananas. Now, because of the pandemic, they can’t do that. It means their meagre incomes don’t go as far as they used to.
During this crisis, food bank use has been spiking—habitual users coming back more often, but also new people who’ve never had to use them before, with entire families in tow.
It is quite apparent that we are not, actually, all in this together. We are having very different pandemic experiences, depending on where we live, what we do for a living, and whether we were financially secure when this all started.
Those who are securely housed and can work from home have a greater ability to keep themselves safe. They often have a choice as to whether they send their children to virtual or in-person school. Some are able to save money, and to use it to pay down debt. In that sense, they are financially better off than they were before the pandemic.
Not everyone is in that enviable position. Others must take jobs that put them on the frontline in one way or another. They have no choice but to be in harm’s way when patrons refuse to wear masks or as they pack onto crowded buses. If they are paid by the hour and have no benefits, such as personal service workers, they might have to take jobs at more than one location in order to make ends meet, increasing the time they spend on unsafe transit along with the likelihood of their contracting and passing on the virus, especially as numbers climb.
When people live in tall apartment buildings, they often have no choice but to take crowded elevators up and down.
When you don’t have benefits and you don’t have sick pay, sometimes you will go to work even when you don’t feel great because you have to put food on the table. You certainly can’t afford to risk losing your job to stand in line at a testing centre, or take the day off in case that fever turns out to be COVID-19. So you don’t.
We now know that Black and other racialized people are disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. Not only because they get worse healthcare, but also because they are more likely to have precarious, poorly paid work with no benefits (that’s how systemic racism works). This means they are also more precariously housed.
Which is why the majority of people experiencing homelessness are Black or Indigenous. It is crucial to understand that most of the people experiencing homelessness never thought they would be. They work hard. They often hold down a job, multiple jobs even, despite being unhoused. They just don’t make enough money to afford a roof over their heads.
Sometimes people become unhoused because they suffer an injury. Or, they experience violence at home. Or, they lose a job and can’t find another one.
Often addictions begin as a response to homelessness; not as a cause of it.
“In an attempt to create more safety from COVID-19 for shelter residents, the City of Toronto created a Foucauldian nightmare at Exhibition Place, full of glass cages and what look like loungers that won’t lie flat.”
It is November and there are encampments across the city—mostly in the downtown core, because that’s where the services are (the overdose prevention sites, the food banks, and the community that many unhoused people have come to rely on). When people don’t feel safe in shelters because of COVID-19, and because many of them have underlying health conditions, they often prefer a tent to the isolation of a shelter-hotel miles away in the far east or west of the city, even if there is a spot in one (which there generally isn’t).
It cannot possibly be surprising to anyone that when people who have long had to deal with the harshness of the streets, and who may also have mental health issues and/or addictions, are in encampments without the basic necessities of life—washrooms, showers, food and water, warmth, safety—there are going to be clashes.
There are going to be short tempers. It is going to be messy.
The city is overwhelmed. There is nowhere for people to go.
Residents in neighbourhoods near shelters and encampments are angry and testy at the needles, the violence, the garbage, the sheer humanness of people without homes using parks as campgrounds. Nimbyism is rampant. The usual self-righteous safety concerns are trotted out. Police are called to slash tents and awnings.
The province is steadfastly looking the other way and whistling. It has thrown some money at cities to cover their increased social services expenses, including homelessness, during the pandemic, but not nearly enough. And Doug Ford doesn’t seem to understand how deep or how complex the issue is: warehousing people is not an answer, not even temporarily.
Sometimes the city seems ham-fisted and tone-deaf. In an autumn attempt to create more safety from COVID-19 for shelter residents, it created a Foucauldian nightmare at Exhibition Place, full of glass cages and what look like loungers that won’t lie flat. Predictably, housing activists, encampment dwellers, and frontline workers weren’t impressed. Panopticon, anyone?
One of the reasons we are in this mess is because governments stopped building affordable housing in the mid-90s, and they stopped repairing the housing we had. Doug Ford quietly deep-sixed the previous government’s plan to end homelessness by 2025 and slashed funding for new affordable housing.
A second crucial reason is that massive development companies have been using housing as a way of making profits, an extractive industry, if you will, like pork bellies or oil futures, which has the effect of artificially driving rental rates up and people out of their homes.
If housing really is to be a human right, both those trends have to stop. It is vastly more expensive to support someone experiencing homelessness than it is to pay their rent and help them stay housed. Emergency shelters are costing the city $6,667 per person per month during the pandemic. In non-COVID times, they cost half of that: $3,347 per person per month.
Even in unaffordable cities, rent is a lot less than that. So why are we permitting people to be kicked out of their housing? It is terrible economics matched with the formulation of a humanitarian disaster that is cruel, manufactured, and utterly unnecessary.
As of November 25, the COVID-19 evictions will begin. Vulnerable, often racialized people will lose their housing because they have lost jobs and income, and because they have been abandoned by their premier and by successive governments.
Winter is coming. The coronavirus rages on. The opioid crisis is deepening. Something is very, very wrong with this picture.
DR. RIMA BERNS-MCGOWN is the Member of Provincial Parliament for Beaches-East York. She is the Official Opposition Critic for Poverty and Homelessness, and a member of Ontario's first Black Caucus. Before getting elected, she was a professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga where she taught diaspora studies and served as Research Director of The Mosaic Institute.