A Toronto man is building warm places for people experiencing homelessness to stay while on housing waitlists through his 'Tiny Tiny Homes' non-profit.
This is a great idea and I’m happy to see it actually happening instead of just talk.
Also I really appreciate the man they interviewed. He’s right, if people see people like him keeping their space clean and acting as good citizens, hopefully they’ll see that a lot of homeless are just in a rough place and not bad people.
I'm glad hes addressing he'd like to move them from the parks. Like it or not, people don't love seeing tents and shelters in their public spaces and there are some health and safety concerns with needles and human waste. Hes both building shelters and trying to move them to less impactful locations. I think this will overall get him more support from the public if the public starts seeing results like cleaner parks and an illusion of housing. The shelters are far better than tents but still not a forever solution, as the article states.
I come from a country where the parks got taken and turned into permanent shanty towns. I don’t know why anyone would want that in their city, or for them to be roaming the subway. That is not a solution, that only makes other city services worse. This is a better solution, so long as they’re picking good spaces where they won’t get taken down by the city.
I saw one out front of our business, on Front St Toronto, and several lined up along the edge of one of our downtown parks.
The information on the home and from the guy talking to by-standers is that there's a bicycle on the front of it - so it's apparently allowed to stop "anywhere" because "it's a bike". No opinion on that, just repeating what I heard.
Our owner had a chat with parking enforcement because it was during summer - CafeTO - and was taking up one of the few parking spaces nearby. Parking said (at the time) that they couldn't do anything/don't know what to do.
No opinion here, just answering the previous two comments.