Toronto wants to allow micro shelters — just not on city land
CBC
A year after Toronto staff sent a cease and desist to a man who built several tiny mobile homes for those experiencing homelessness, the city is moving closer to embracing micro shelters with its own potential pilot project.
Until Thursday, the city was accepting proposals for a two-year micro shelter pilot project, to be part of the city’s 10-year plan to deal with homelessness. Among the applicants? Ryan Donais and his non-profit Tiny Tiny Homes.
Donais received a cease and desist last winter telling him to remove micro shelters he placed in St. James Park, though he eventually worked with the city to ensure everyone was given somewhere else to stay.
While he’s glad to see the city bring an open mind to the transitional housing solution, Donais says the requirement that applicants come forward with land as part of their application is not realistic.
“I think the only way this works is when the city uses their land,” Donais said in an interview with CBC Toronto.
“It's completely unreasonable to rent land when the city has vacant land that they can use.”
But the city says it looked.
According to spokesperson Elise von Scheel, the city spent a year evaluating 44 different sites and determined none met the size and location criteria for a micro shelter community.
Additionally, she said, staff found a micro shelter program would delay the construction of other housing projects that would serve a large number of people.
“We recognize the need to be innovative and nimble to address the homelessness crisis,” von Scheel said in a statement.
Coun. Chris Moise, who previously asked city staff to explore micro shelters on underused TTC parking lots, said the land requirement is a chance for the city to see what options might be out there.
“We're just trying to do our due diligence by trying to make sure that we turn over every stone that's available to us in the city of Toronto,” he said.
That land stipulation has been a hurdle for other applicants as well, like Two Steps Home, according to Robert Raynor, the non-profit’s lead advisor.
Two Steps’s goal is to find land that a developer has purchased to build on and use it as a micro shelter community until shovels are ready to go in the ground.
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