Quietly this past June, when few people are paying attention to such issues, Toronto City Hall

bureaucrats finally surrendered to an astounding admission.

The City of Toronto's shelter system is permanently short 100 beds.
Over two years ago, OCAP activists and street outreach workers began strenuously arguing this
point on a regular basis in the streets, in the corridors of municipal power, and to anyone who would
listen in the media. Now two people without homes have died outdoors in Toronto in the space of 24
hours, one of them reportedly regularly turned away from shelters for alcohol related behaviour issues.
I personally argued for similar numbers as evidenced, for instance, in the now defunct Toronto
Star publication The Grid. After a Rob Ford lead City Council vote to reduce shelter space by an
additional 110 beds per night in January 2013, I stated: We were already 110-125 beds short [before
the cuts], now we're going to be close to 225-250 short.
Eventually, City bureaucrats argued that these were projections not actual cuts and conceded
that they were wrong to forecast that 41,000 fewer bed spaces would be used in 2013.
Still, in public statement after public statement people like Shelter, Support and Housing
Administration (SSHA) General Manager Phillip Abrahams and Assistant Manager Patricia Anderson
added noxious fuel to Mayor Ford's fiery insistence that our increasingly urgent calls for more shelter
space were simply cheap publicity stunts.
In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary from frontline workers like myself, verified by
multiple media outlets calling the Peter Street central access point for shelter availability, Abrahams
and Anderson repeatedly stated that there were dozens if not hundreds of empty shelter beds available
for use each night. And they provided fancy looking charts to Council and the public which seemed to
back their assertions.
Friends and I, knowing that people were regularly turned away and concerned about the sharp
increase in the number of homeless deaths we were recording, dug into the way City Hall was counting
empty beds.
We inquired with our friends without homes, frontline workers at the Peter Street centre and
with workers and management at shelters where the City could request the opening of flex beds on
any given night. (One public health care worker even managed to get a hold of a leaked list of each
location and the number of flex beds theoretically available according to SSHA.)
Flex beds are beds added beyond a shelter's normal capacity and can mean temporary cots or
mats on the ground between beds in already overcrowded spaces or in rooms that serve, for instance, as
dining halls during the daytime.
Abrahams and Anderson constantly said there were 172 flex beds available and that they were
never completely filled up.
I called them magical beds, beds that the City counted to suggest available space but that no one
ever actually slept in.
Abrahams and Anderson were so arrogant in their insistence that space was available that they
handed Rob Ford a win on the issue even though he lost a Council vote on the matter 36-3.
On April 4, 2013, Toronto's City Council voted nearly unanimously, with the exception of the
brothers Ford and Doug Holyday, to order SSHA to come up with a plan almost immediately to reduce
nightly shelter capacity below 90%.
This was in turn a reaffirmation of a City Council resolution originally passed years earlier but
somehow forgotten by City bureaucrats.
Rather than opening up an additional 384 beds, as calculated by the Star's Daniel Dale, in a
place like Toronto's Armoury (as was done after Tent City was shut down in 2002), SSHA played a
game of three card monte by changing the way it counted beds.
Previously, SSHA figures did not include family motel units available on a less emergency

basis, units which generally operate well under capacity.

Now those units were included in the overall bed count in order to bring system crowding under
90% as mandated by Council.
At least as disturbingly, SSHA began counting all flex beds as part of the daily shelter figures,
even when those flex beds were not made available to people piled in and around the Peter Street
centre.
Stunningly, in the same June report in which SSHA called on Council for an analysis of the
financial impact of delivering an additional 100 permanent shelter beds, it also quietly admitted that it
has been fudging flex bed numbers all along.
At least 72 activated flex beds are not regularly occupied, according to the report, primarily
because they are in places like Seaton House, which the City has long recognized as already way over
sustainable capacity and which, accordingly, almost no one will accept even when offered.
Simply put, since overcrowding at Seaton House already officially makes for violent and
unsanitary conditions, many people rather take their chances hot and muggy or wet and frosty
conditions outdoors.
In fact, this dynamic is so well known that frontline workers at Peter Street almost never even
offer these magical beds to people inquiring into shelter for the night.
This is true even during horrific weather events such as the deadly wind storm Toronto
experienced with the remnants of Hurricane Sandy in the Fall of 2012.
For people suffering without homes and for activists who put their energies and bodies on the
line in 2012 and 2013 and won overwhelmingly at Council, this is all rather discouraging.
All was not completely lost, however. SSHA did eventually open up some additional space for
women, bringing nightly capacity down from its 99% high in 2012 and 2013.
Additional lives were likely saved when the City finally caved to demands that Metro Hall be
opened during extreme cold weather alerts, an option used by 793 individuals a total of 2778 times last
Winter, according to City stats.
Still, as people die outdoors while Toronto as a whole braces itself against another winter blast,
it is worth noting that while Toronto City employees played accounting games, the elevated number of
homeless deaths we noticed in 2012 continued apace for 2013 and 2014.
While it may seem impolite, we cannot avoid an uncomfortable truth, rhetorically appropriated
from another context: bureaucrats lied, people died.
It is incumbent now upon a new Mayor and City Council to finally and immediately make an
additional 100 beds available by opening up the Armoury or a similar space until it can finally get
around to doing what really needs to be done and what would actually save money for all levels of
government: the provision of legitimate and dignified housing for all.