Hotels Turned Homeless Shelters
City of Toronto partners with Hotels to provide respite to the homeless. But do short-term hotels miss the need for more comprehensive housing policies? At the beginning of the pandemic (March 2020) Regent Park TV interviewed David Reycraft, Director of Housing, Homelessness Services at Dixon Hall, who then described the housing and shelter situation faced the Toronto’s homeless population as dire - eight months later a great deal has changed. In Toronto’s downtown east side, in the areas of known as Moss Park, Regent Park, Cabbage Town, Church and Wellesley, and St Jamestown where there is the greatest concentration of people considered to be low income, living in poverty, and homeless, the matter of responding to the urgency posed by the pandemic has never been more obvious. While homelessness in the public eye may no longer be seen as a phenomenon limited only to certain areas of the city, it is however, in the more concentrated areas of the downtown core. With the exist