What do encampments offer that shelters don't? A chance to build community

Globe and Mail

09-05-2025

Maggie Helwig is an author and the rector of the Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. Her latest book is Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community.
I have been in some way involved with unhoused people in Toronto for several decades now – for the last 12 years, as the priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, a small Anglican church in Kensington Market. The parish has been providing meals and a safe space since long before I arrived, and has had a noticeable encampment on the yard outside (most of which is not church property) since 2022. I've been privileged, in that time, to share to some degree in people's lives, and to understand some of the real experiences of encamped people, who are so often seen through the lens of insulting stereotypes.
I need to be clear – overwhelmingly, the reason people don't 'go inside' is that there is no inside they can go to. The shelter system has run overcapacity for years now, and every night over a hundred people, sometimes nearly 300, call Central Intake and are 'unmatched with shelter.' The low-barrier winter-respite centres always fill up immediately whenever they are opened. In the winter of 2023-24, the TTC buses which were supposed to take people to warming centres with vacancies had nowhere to take anyone, so they became de facto shelters. Even when there is a space, which there occasionally is, it is often tied up in arcane rules and complex systems, not realistically available to the people most in need of a bed. As for actual housing, it is for most unhoused people a distant dream.
But it is also true that the shelter system, as it exists, is not a sustainable living situation for many people. When the City of Toronto decided to clear the encampment from our churchyard, they reserved for this purpose, in order to cover themselves legally, a precise number of shelter-hotel rooms, matching the precise number of people they thought lived in the encampment (though their number was not accurate). Some people accepted those rooms. Others did not, in some cases because they had already been evicted from shelter-hotels repeatedly for trivial offences like missing a bed check. But whatever choices they made that day, every person who was evicted from the churchyard is now living in an encampment again. Some, in fact, have come back to the church. Whether they left the shelter-hotels 'voluntarily' because conditions were unbearable for them, or whether they were evicted, the result is the same.
People have slept in tents in the ravines and beneath highway overpasses for a very long time, but large encampments in visible public places really began to appear in 2020, when emergency shelter capacity was even more reduced by COVID precautions, and have continued as economic crisis drives a startling increase in the number of people without housing. Encampments were, and are, a desperate survival strategy in a crisis. And yet, something else emerged. People who had struggled in the emergency shelter system, who had experienced violence and theft, evictions and 'service restrictions,' often retraumatizing conditions, people who had been bounced between hospitals and shelters and the streets, people who had slept in isolated doorways or alleys, found something in encampments which they had found nowhere else: a place of mutual support.
One of the misconceptions most commonly repeated to me is that people live in encampments rather than shelters or housing 'because they want to use drugs.' It does not take much research to discover that one of the primary reasons people give for not wanting to live in shelters is that there is too much drug use there, and that drug dealing and gangs are a huge problem in Toronto Community Housing (TCHC) as well – not to mention the fact that the majority of people who use street drugs are housed people who are using in their own homes. But there is a reason that people may find encampments a preferable way to live – because they offer simple human community.
In the years I've spent living alongside the encampment at the church, I have been privileged to witness, and to some degree be part of, such a community. It is a place where, at the simplest level, a trusted person can watch your things when you need to go somewhere else, so you are less exposed to the constant loss of important belongings. It is a place where someone will comfort you when you cry. A place where people give each other haircuts, look after each other's dogs, clean each other's wounds. A place where people think about other people, and what they might need or want. One of our long-time residents, who had a particular gift for finding the still-good items thrown away by housed people, gave me a scavenged skirt which she thought would suit me, and which is still one of my favourite pieces of clothing.
It is a place that responds in a crisis – when a distraught woman with a head injury crawled into a tent one night, and it caught fire hours later, another resident risked his life to pull her out. When someone was accused of a sexual assault, the residents confined him to a tent for an hour until the police arrived, so they could be sure that he could not evade arrest. When people come looking for shelter at night, in the cold, with no shoes and nowhere to go, one of the residents will always take them into their own tent and try to keep them warm. When someone is frightened or lonely, or when someone is having a bad reaction to street drugs, there will almost always be someone else who will help. Someone who understands.
It's a place I have turned to for emotional support myself, when I have been exhausted, burnt out, when my husband's dementia has been a source of grief and anxiety – a place which is always honest and open, where sympathy is extended not on the basis of any merit or prior claim, but because we all know that life is hard, and that hearing another person's pain is something we can always offer.
None of this would be possible in a shelter or a shelter-hotel. Partly it is because most of these places are run with a custodial, almost carceral, mentality – an underlying belief that the people who live there are problems who must be disciplined and contained by a rigid framework of rules and control and hierarchy.
But it is also because emergency shelters, like most of the rest of our society, are firmly structured around the belief that people are isolated units, structured around the individualism which marks modern capitalist society. It is perhaps only those who live at the edges of capitalism, who are the system's victims, who really understand how much we need each other, that none of us – rich or poor, unhoused or housed, sick or well – can truly survive alone.
If you are in a dormitory with a randomly-assigned bed, and strict rules about when you can and cannot be there each day, and no social space easily available, it is almost impossibly hard to develop community. And if you are in a shelter-hotel, most of the offences for which you might be evicted have to do with trying to be a community – having a friend in your room, spending a night off site with a friend. But people want and need community, people are made by and in community. And when shelters fail, whether because people cannot live in them or because they do not allow people to build toward health, it is usually for some variation of this reason.
Living the encampment experience has made me think often of StreetCity, the experimental housing project which operated in Toronto from 1989 to 2003, and was the subject of a powerful film in 1998 – a project in which people were given autonomy, spaces to form community, a voice in the governance of their own home. The successor project, Strachan House, maintained some of these qualities and values, and provided a stable home to people designated 'hardest to house,' until the building, never adequately funded, became unviable in 2022; unfortunately, the model has not travelled effectively to a new location.
In theory, we could turn back to that model more generally. We could build shelters in which people were not subjected to arbitrary curfews and rigid, unpredictably enforced rules; in which there was generous community space, a focus on building relationships, a focus on genuinely involving residents in decisions about their own lives. In theory, the City of Toronto, for instance, could eliminate most of its arcane system of qualification for the housing list, and could be more willing to experiment with the tiny home model which has had at least partial success elsewhere. In theory, we could accept that investing in the intensive support required for people with extreme trauma to stabilize will save public money in the long run.
Some of these ideas have been tested in practice, at least on a small scale, in recent years. The Indigenous-led Astum Api Niikiinahk tiny-house project in Winnipeg, which operates with a minimal-barrier entry process, and includes community-building and Indigenous spirituality as central principles, has been a significant success for the people housed there, although the project has acknowledged that they do not have the resources to incorporate some people with significant mental-health diagnoses.
Any of these discussions, however, come up hard against the reality that, as years of inadequate investment in housing and social services are now driving a widespread breakdown in social conditions, many people are responding with anger at our society's victims; that it is barely possible to build even traditional, semi-carceral shelters without a storm of neighbourhood opposition, and it is frequently necessary for politicians to promise higher barriers, more rules, and fewer rights for residents; that viciousness which has perhaps always lurked under the surface is increasingly socially acceptable, and that I have more than once heard 'prison camps in Northern Ontario' proposed as the most desirable solution to homelessness. It is hard, in these circumstances, even to imagine building a new StreetCity, or a more resourced and more widely spread version of Astum Api Niikiinahk. There are days when I fear that soon it will be only in encampments that vulnerable and suffering people can find any space or generosity at all.
And now these spaces are under constant attack. Doug Ford is proposing a bill which would make it possible for the police to enter tents and arrest the occupants if they think that people inside might be using drugs – and in general, the police and most other people believe that all encamped people are using drugs all the time. The bill makes it possible to fine people $10,000 or jail them for six months, or both, for 'public' drug use (including inside a tent), just as they are closing down safer consumption sites. The bill also creates a new offence called 'repetitive trespass,' allowing for heavy punishments for people who return to the same place, probably because it was a place they felt safe, a place they thought was their home.
And the City of Toronto has expressed a desire to 'resolve' the encampment by my church, which means chasing people away again, and maybe putting another security fence around the little space we still have, perhaps dropping some of them temporarily into shelter-hotels, and soon finding them at another encampment, which authorities will seek to 'resolve' the same way. It is a game of human whack-a-mole which only results in more layers of trauma.
What people need is dignified, accessible, low-barrier housing. This is the only lasting solution to homelessness, and that should be so obvious it doesn't even need to be said. But in the meantime – and always – human beings need each other. We need to learn to respect encampments as a place of genuine human society, which, unless and until we create better solutions, can at least be made more safe with better services, including more help with fire mitigation, and less spreading of misinformation to the public. But most of all, we must realize that we are all vulnerable people in a storm, and the more we care for each other, the safer and more well we will all be.