I n Canada’s cities, the unhoused are scattered in forgotten areas, banned from central public spaces like parks.
In the case of Toronto, for example, sections of the municipal code state that no one is allowed to install tents or permanent structures in parks and that no person is allowed to sleep in one—even when they have nowhere else to go. This can be an alienating experience.
When the first wave of COVID-19 swept through the city, though, parks were one of the few places for people to gather. Shelters for unhoused people were reduced to one-third of their capacity. Doctors prescribed tents to homeless patients as a way to avoid congregation in indoor settings, and the city temporarily suspended enforcement of the ban on camping in public parks. People who had previously been warehoused out of sight in shelters joined those who had been camping in hidden locations—like under expressways or in ravines—and set up large encampments in several neighbourhood parks across the city.
This exceptional moment created an opportunity for more frequent encounters between the unhoused and housed in public spaces. For more than a year, between the summers of 2020 and 2021, large encampments inhabited at least five neighbourhood parks in Toronto, existing side by side with picnickers, playgrounds, and outdoor music events, in some of the only spaces where it was possible for people to gather without fear of the virus’s transmission. Encampments became an increasingly common part of the city’s daily public life, and the people living in them mixed with others. It was a chance to connect across divides.
But as the pandemic pulled housed residents out of their homes and into parks and other outdoor recreational spaces, something far from solidarity also took shape: housed neighbours called the city and police to remove encampment residents and their tents.
The presence of unhoused people in public parks—despite policing, despite anti-camping bylaws, despite discouragement from city officials and hostility from some neighbourhood associations—was a survival tactic but also an unprecedented spatial claim that called into question how public is a public park after all.
T he Encampment Support Network—ESN, where both of us volunteered then—was one of the grassroots organizations that sprang up in Toronto in response to the increased visibility of urban encampments and the violent ways in which they are often displaced. Our response, along with those of groups like the Bike Brigade, ALAB Resource Clinic, and Toronto Tiny Shelters, brought together activists from parallel struggles, including rent strikes and Black Lives Matter.
Started by artists, service workers, and activists—many of whom were laid off and were on temporary pandemic payments—ESN quickly found a place for itself by not just arranging provisions but also by demanding access to public infrastructure, such as water, toilets, showers, and public housing. Neighbourhood committees formed around encampment locations, including Moss Park, Trinity Bellwoods, Alexandra Park, Cherry Beach, Lamport Stadium, and Dufferin Grove. ESN organized daily outreach to encampments, which included handing out survival supplies, such as tents, drug harm reduction kits, sleeping bags, ice, Gatorade, and coffee. Through the work of artists in the group, the activism took on a creative quality, including a podcast, sign painting, a memorial tent, and a website.
It was a battle to cast a net of protection around highly visible and vulnerable unhoused communities, to try and diffuse the stigma around drug use, sex work, and other underground economies. ESN advocated on two fronts: toward the city—to point out all the ways it was hostile to and failing unhoused people—and toward housed urban citizens—to foster a sense of shared neighbourhoods to counter the hostility and fear, often under the guise of concern for public health and safety, that the unhoused regularly experience.
This effort was based on an understanding that housed and unhoused people are all part of the public and can share spaces like parks. Working in solidarity with those who occupy parks as living spaces is part of what it means to be a citizen of the city.
ESN recognized encampments as a radical move in a context where land is assigned separate uses, where housing is inaccessible to those who cannot buy into the market, and where the police maintain spatial control and enforce policy and regulation. The visibility of encampments and support from neighbours was in stark contrast to the usual attempted erasure, banishment, and invisibility experienced by the unhoused.
Hawk, a resident of Trinity Bellwoods Park, speaking to the city’s ombudsperson, compared the difference of living in a public park during COVID-19 with his seventeen years of being unhoused and living in all kinds of camps. When he set up in Trinity Bellwoods, “it was like summer camp,” he said. The support and atmosphere of harm reduction available in parks, with meals being handed out by local organizations and open city washrooms, contrasted with the “deep dark places,” like hidden encampments. “I’ve had to hide in the ravines, gangrene on my scrotum, frostbite hands, almost lost feeling.”
In all his years on the street, Hawk had never seen anything like the encampments in parks during the pandemic. But as the city moved people out, he would always leave ahead of park evictions to avoid triggering his post-traumatic stress disorder. He also worried that people newly homeless during COVID-19 would be “tricked into being swept away again.”
As a veteran of being unhoused, he felt a responsibility to others: “I think about them all the time. The city needs to change things because the people pushed into the ravines, under highways, are the city. They are the city.” The unhoused not only belong to the city but define the city. The continued presence of the homeless is an existential question that delegitimizes exclusionary property and housing systems.
Hagbard is a former ESN (Parkdale neighbourhood committee) member who now lives in city social housing. During the first summer of the pandemic, he was staying at a temporary-shelter hotel near a highway, a long bus ride from downtown. The Comfort Inn is surrounded by parking lots and plazas with ubiquitous car dealerships, restaurants run by newcomers, and Tim Hortons coffee shops. As a way of coping with this “lonely hell,” Hagbard improvised a “private beach,” from discarded construction materials he found beside dumpsters, near a six-foot grass median between the parking lot and the hotel. He used bags of sand left over from tiling and laid down some tiles and concrete for a little seat. “I could just sit there, take off my shoes, and run my toes through the sand.”
In his beach in the parking lot, Hagbard was shaping the city into something more humane, an act reminiscent of the Paris uprisings of 1968, when students ripped up paving stones to form barricades to resist police and found sand underneath. Sous les pavés, la plage!—Beneath the paving stones, the beach! This became a symbol of the movement’s desire to disrupt capitalist urbanization and find a connection to a different life underneath—the right to the city being the right to shape the urban environment collectively. Hagbard claimed his humanity by taking off his shoes and relaxing in an alienating automobile-dominated landscape.
Hagbard’s beach was an individual act, but it was part of a collective effort to reimagine community and the city as not defined by property relations, land-use bylaws, or an alienating housing system. The encampments gave us a glimpse of a different city, where land is accessible to the unhoused, fit with infrastructure, until everyone has a home. The political vision behind them is one that imagines mobile infrastructures of care, networked with people, extending across all types of spaces, whether inside shelters, outside in encampments, or in permanent affordable housing.
At first, ESN outreach volunteers were unsure of how to show up in these improvised spaces. The creation of real trusting relationships required continually overcoming the deep skepticism of people used to living invisibly in the margins. Tents were peoples’ homes, albeit in a public space, and so forming networks required a constant balance between sharing space and maintaining boundaries, between not wanting to interrupt peoples’ homes and personal dynamics and spending time meeting inside the encampment space.
Jesse (one of the co-writers of this essay) remembers the awkwardness of attempting to forge solidarities across this social divide—across differences in politics, culture, values, methods, perspectives, and understandings of the world. Eventually, formal meetings happened more within the camp and were sometimes difficult, lengthy, and unpredictable as people wandered in and out. We tried to collectively navigate a variety of challenges, from meal delivery to providing survival supplies to addressing NIMBYism. These tenuous solidarities were a profound shift in the power imbalances between housed and unhoused members of the network.
A fter a year of tolerating or ignoring the camps or attempting to clear them by moving people into shelters, the then mayor of Toronto initiated massive police action to clear encampments over several weeks in the summer of 2021. The city posted notices about its intention to clear the parks. When the looming threat of police action necessitated early-morning scouting shifts, some of the remaining barriers between housed activists and unhoused park residents were dismantled.
Activists showed up at the encampment daily at 6 a.m., watching out for signs of an impending eviction. Park residents camping in tents beside the St. Felix respite centre would often be up already, as they were required to check into the shelter four times a day to maintain access to meals and washrooms. One of those times was four in the morning, so people would be awake and hanging out as dawn came.
A member of the scout team reflected: “We’d show up before dawn, and they’d be like, ‘They’re the Gatorade people, and why are they here this early?’ So they’d come over and talk to us. And some of them would be, ‘Yeah, that’s badass, come and chill with us. Why are you sitting across the street? Come and hang out with us.’ This was what broke the ice.”
Eventually, encampment residents themselves would join us on scouting shifts, and this led to us meeting in encampments to plan our resistance tactics directly with residents.
Approximately two months into our scouting efforts, the City of Toronto brutally and violently evicted encampment residents in a series of escalating shows of force. The first attempt, at Lamport Stadium, was successfully resisted. In one dramatic instance, on June 22, 2021, 150 police and private security personnel arrived in Trinity Bellwoods Park to fence in encampment residents’ belongings and push people out. They were met by a counterforce of many activists, witnesses, and encampment residents who stood their ground and made clear their demands. It took an entire day for the police to clear the park. Displaced residents scattered to various places, some to shelter hotels, others to remaining encampments.
After the public outcry following the evictions, city officials quietly offered affordable housing to some people living in another city park, Dufferin Grove, where many people from other parks had regrouped after being forced from encampments police had evicted, while at the same time pressuring people to accept shelter spaces and actively preventing more people from setting up camp.
Encampments continue in some parks and in other spaces along highways, on church land, and in boulevard medians, despite Toronto continuing to enforce bylaws and evicting encampments, moving people most often to congregate shelter space. The police, along with private security hired by the city, continue to surveil urban spaces and move people along. Small numbers of supportive and affordable housing units are built as a concession to the public good within major private for-profit developments but not nearly enough to match the rapid loss of existing affordable rents through evictions and financialization.
The rental market is increasingly competitive, and inflation has made food costlier, so people are horribly squeezed and feel like there is nowhere else to go and cannot fathom a way to change it. The city still has no plans to offer necessary infrastructure such as water, toilets, and places for the unhoused to camp in the city.
The system has broken open, and the public has seen inside the violence and oppression hammered down on unhoused and underhoused people. This visibility itself is not enough to create movements; in fact, as we see in the continued policing and banishment of the unhoused, homelessness is more intensively criminalized and scapegoated for urban problems in tandem with its visibility.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Dispatches from the Threshold: Tenant Power in Times of Crisis, edited by Rae Baker and Alexander Ferrer, published by Fernwood Publishing, 2025.
