On November 13, 2025, Toronto City Council approved a motion, introduced by Councillor Brad Bradford and amended by Councillor Paula Fletcher, requiring the removal of encampments located no closer than 50 metres from schools, playgrounds, or daycares within 24 hours of being reported.
The motion stipulates that individuals living in encampments must receive a maximum of three shelter offers before being forcibly removed.
Diana Chan McNally, is a community and crisis worker and member of the Housing Rights Advisory Committee. “There isn’t access to shelters right now. We don’t actually have enough shelter space, let alone shelter space that is appropriate for people to be able to even fulfill that requirement,” McNally said.
Leslie Gash, Executive Director of the Toronto Shelter Network, echoes this concern. “There is not enough shelter supply,” Gash said, adding that the federal and provincial governments “have not stepped up to provide funding for both shelters and housing.”
Recently the Federal government has made cuts to shelters for refugees, leaving the system under severe strain.
According to Toronto’s Encampment Outreach and Response protocol, the city may only consider removing an encampment if a person has been offered and rejected a “reasonable” alternative.
This approach is reinforced by legal precedent. In Regional Municipality of Waterloo v. Persons Unknown (2023), the Ontario Superior Court ruled that a municipality by-law to clear encampments could be unconstitutional if there are not enough accessible shelter spaces available.
“There is no three-strikes rule on your human rights,” said McNally. “They don’t get taken away because we’re tired of offering you something that we don’t even have available.”
Housing advocates see this motion not only as an attack on human rights, but as emblematic of deeper systemic failures in our housing regime across all levels of government. Experts Brian Cheung of More Neighbours Toronto and Eric Lombardi of Build Canada note that the scarcity, and in many cases complete absence, of shelter spaces reflects this broader inadequacy.
Fighting NIMBYism
These challenges are compounded by strong “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiment across Toronto, which frequently blocks or delays both temporary shelters and long term housing projects, further exacerbating homelessness and the city’s affordability crisis.
“Every step towards building shelters, which are not a solution but a temporary alleviation, is made ridiculously hard because there is massive controversy about it,” Cheung said.
The City of Toronto has attempted to speed up the process of building new shelters, but these efforts are routinely met with fierce opposition from local residents’ associations that rally against them being placed in their neighbourhoods.
Cheung points out that in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, for example, the New Toronto Initiative is suing the City and Councillor Amber Morley over plans to build a seniors’ homeless shelter in the area. Housing advocates argue that actions like these significantly delay already strained shelter projects, making it even harder for the City to respond to rising homelessness, which, as McNally notes, has doubled from 2022 to 2024.
“If you’re seeing encampments becoming a reoccurring problem, it probably means you should be supporting the homeless shelter they’re trying to build in your neighbourhood because otherwise they will be in the park,” said Lombardi.
Even when encampments are cleared, Gash observes that many individuals often end up back in the same spot because the housing supports they are supposed to receive in shelters simply aren’t available.
Experts argue Toronto’s homelessness crisis is not a result of individual misfortune but a symptom of a deeply flawed housing system that has led to skyrocketing costs.
Affordability and red tape
McNally notes that the majority of unhoused people did not struggle with drug or mental health problems when they first became homeless, disputing a popular public narrative. Instead, these challenges often developed as housing insecurity persisted. As a community and crisis worker, McNally observes that every person she has met in an encampment was driven there by unaffordable rent, unstable employment, and the rising cost of living.
Her real-life experience is reinforced by data from the City of Toronto. The 2024 Street Needs Assessment found 81 per cent of respondents said that rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing would help them exit homelessness, indicating that affordability is a major barrier to permanent shelter.
Cheung and Lombardi argue that Toronto’s high housing costs, contributing to homelessness, are driven by onerous regulatory requirements, from zoning laws to lengthy permitting processes, that delay housing construction and disproportionately hinder non-profit developments.
Vast areas of Toronto are zoned for single-family homes only, pricing low-income households out of large portions of the city. In addition, homes that do not “preserve neighbourhood character” or that exceed height and density limits are often prohibited from being built, further restricting housing options.
Permitting processes are lengthy, involving multiple layers of approval, community consultations, and development charges that can deter construction altogether.
Cheung points out that even when projects are prioritized, systemic barriers remain a major obstacle. A co-op development in the east end of Toronto, which received gifted land and had development charges removed to accelerate construction, still took six months just to secure initial rezoning approval. The fact that a priority project encounters such delays underscores the immense challenges facing other market and non-profit housing initiatives.
While zoning laws apply universally, Cheung explains that non-profits, a key provider of affordable housing in Toronto, are uniquely affected by them.
“Non-profits often only manage one or two projects at a time, so they are particularly vulnerable to complex approvals, bureaucratic hurdles, and rising costs,” he said. “It’s not like a private developer where they can re‑tool the project … Private developers can manage to ride out those slowdowns because they have a portfolio they can fall back on.”
This highlights how large developers are better able to absorb delays and expenses that can stall smaller non-profit initiatives.
Market rate housing, however, is also connected to homelessness in Toronto.
“We believe supply matters for cost. People may ask, if it’s not affordable housing, how is it going to affect people at the bottom end of the income stream,” Cheung asked rhetorically. “From our point of view, we definitely believe in filters. Even if you have something that’s a more expensive place, if people have that available it means they are not going to be taking up accommodations or housing that would be lower down the quality spectrum.”
“As a person occupying a 10-year-old building moves into a new building, it frees up that 10-year-old unit, which is cheaper than the new building,” he added. “Then someone from a 20-year-old building can move into the 10-year-old unit, creating a chain of spaces. At the end of that chain, you might have a 30-year-old building with a unit freed up that is now available to someone who is low income”.
Lombardi points out that Toronto is in a “chronic position of under supply,” which pushes “the marginal person to downgrade their living standards.”
“As we get lower on the income perspective and lower on what people can already afford, by allowing the housing prices to continue to worsen you are invariably going to push people off of the housing ladder in general, and that is a very steep drop to be able to get back on to it as things like rent grow,” he said.
The province and city have underinvested in social and supportive housing, public opposition has blocked or delayed the construction of homeless shelters in certain neighborhoods, and the limited supply of market-rate housing has driven up the cost of all other types of dwellings.
As Lombardi notes, the current system is built to protect “incumbent home owner wealth and large developers” from smaller competition, which could otherwise help alleviate housing costs for those most in need.
As all four experts emphasize, “the solution to homelessness is housing,” yet Toronto does not have enough of it and is not on track to.
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