She’s a Priest. Her Churchyard Became an Encampment

O ne day, I was leaving the church where I work when an angry woman stopped me. She threw a bag of garbage into the encampment in our yard and told me that a person had started sleeping in hers—and that I needed to tell her how she could find out who it was and make him go away. I suggested that she ask the person himself.

She stared at me and exclaimed, “But he takes drugs!”

“You can still ask him who he is,” I said.

And she stormed away up the street.

I tell this story not primarily to illustrate how I have come to be seen as responsible for all homeless people within about an eight-block radius of the church, although that is, for some reason, true. I tell it because there is a great gulf fixed, and very few people are willing to cross it. People who have not lived in the world of which encampments are part are afraid, and they are angry. And they cannot imagine that there is a way to cross that line, to speak to a homeless person as a fellow human being, without somehow themselves being harmed, being damaged, being touched by a world they would rather deny.

A kinder, more well-intentioned, neighbour once told me he didn’t want to introduce himself to encampment residents, because if they knew he lived nearby, they might knock on his door all the time asking for help. It seems like a reasonable fear, and it is hard to explain that unhoused people have such deep and well-founded apprehensions about the housed world that, even when they are living against the wall of the church, and even when they know we are an institution that is here to support them, it is almost always my job to go out the door and identify need.

I am writing this because I want you to understand my world, the world I live in, and the world I live alongside. I have been an Anglican priest since 2012; I have been the priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, in Kensington Market in Toronto, since 2013. We have had, I guess somewhat famously, an encampment in our churchyard since about the spring of 2022, although there was no single clear point when it began, and it is tied up with events and choices going back years, and it is perhaps ultimately the responsibility of the poet and theologian Rowan Williams, who was once the archbishop of Canterbury.

I am writing this because I want you to understand that this is a world of real people, who struggle and are kind, who are often special and beautiful in ways that most of our society cannot and does not try to understand. I want you to understand that I have felt safer here than in most other places, hard as it has sometimes been.

And I am writing this because I do not have much optimism about what is coming in our society, in our world. We are standing at the edge of catastrophic climate breakdown and the fall of a long empire—and all the collateral damage which the fall of an empire brings. Nothing stable is going to last; and the only way that we, the small and the ordinary, might survive in any decent way is if we learn to take care of each other, to do it deeply and consistently and in ways that will change how we think and how we live. And I am writing this because if you want to know who someone is, you can ask them.

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W e think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering it, most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement.

You couch-surf sometimes. You may have lived for a while in one of the increasingly few cheap rooming houses, but more and more they are being torn down, or renovated into expensive large homes. Maybe you used to live at the Waverley Hotel, before it became a condo development, or one of the other vanishing long-stay hotels. Maybe you’ve been renovicted from a basement in the market (in Toronto, a landlord can kick you out if they say they’re going to renovate your unit). Or maybe your parents just threw you out, for any of the reasons that might happen. Maybe a relationship has broken down. Maybe you suddenly lost a job, or spent a month in such a deep depression that you didn’t, or couldn’t, meet a rent payment.

Remember that if you rely on government support—here in Toronto, Ontario Works (OW) or the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP)—your income is so low that even doubling it instantly would leave you far below the poverty line. Remember that we have chosen, as a society, to set social assistance rates at a fraction of what we acknowledge is necessary to survive; that, essentially, to be on social assistance—to be disabled, to be old, to be laid off and looking for work—is to be told that you don’t really deserve to live. Certainly not to live indoors.

Current calculations suggest that you need a gross income of at least $64,000 a year to afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto—which currently averages around $2,400 per month. The maximum OW payment for a single person is $8,796 per year. ODSP is slightly better: a single person might get as much as $16,416 per year, though not everyone on ODSP gets that much. A single minimum-wage earner, working forty hours every week, could theoretically earn as much as $35,776 per year, before deductions. None of these people would be even close to achieving a bachelor—much less a one-bedroom—apartment, at market rent, unless they are among the handful of lucky people who moved into rent-controlled units long ago.

Most people imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable.

Even much “affordable” housing is far out of reach. As of March 2024, Habitat for Humanity, which builds affordable housing, was advertising for families with yearly incomes between $90,000 and $130,000. That same month, I, as the parent of a disabled adult who lives with me, received a listing for new “affordable” units, and it was, in fact, the case that my full-time professional salary put us in the qualifying range for this act of charity.

You are probably trying to get onto the list for the small amount of genuine rent-geared-to-income housing that exists in Toronto, much of it operated by the notorious city-run Toronto Community Housing, but you can’t be classified as “housing ready” and able to go on that list until you have an income source—probably ODSP—as well as valid ID and several years of completed income tax returns. If all your ID has been stolen, which it almost certainly has been at some point, you need to start from scratch. You may not have done your income tax for years—why would you when you have little or no income? And you may have no idea how to start. By now, you probably have high enough levels of anxiety and depression that even getting to an ID clinic becomes an insurmountable challenge.

Not only that, but in order to be officially “chronically homeless” and therefore given a degree of priority for rent-geared-to-income housing, you are also required to have spent some amount of time (usually six months in the past year) in a shelter, either one which is city run or which submits data to the city’s central database. If not—if you have been sleeping on the street, or in a tent, or in the stairwell of a shop, for instance, or even on your cousin’s floor in an overcrowded apartment—you are not officially homeless for the purposes of housing access.

Under certain circumstances, if you have spent a shorter amount of time in a shelter, or regularly visited one of the drop-ins that send statistics to the central database (many drop-ins do not), and if you have regular contact with Streets to Homes, you might be able to get a caseworker to write a letter stating that you have indeed been homeless for six months or more, but if you have not appeared in the database at all, as some haven’t, even a caseworker’s letter isn’t enough to allow you to be prioritized.

Most homeless people don’t understand this arcane system, which seems to have been created to protect against a very notional and improbable kind of fraud—I barely understand it myself. But it is yet another barrier against even beginning to access housing.

Very possibly, you are already on the waiting list, but whether you are officially homeless, or homeless without official recognition, or just living in some kind of precarious and unsafe indoor accommodation, the wait will be long. One of my colleagues recently reported that someone she works with had just qualified for a rent-geared-to-income unit (or, rather, for an opportunity to view photographs of a unit and accept or decline it based on that) for the first time. He had been on the waiting list for eighteen years.

You may spend time in shelters or shelter hotels—if you can even get into one, which is a whole other problem—but you may not feel safe there: there is widespread infectious disease, there is likely violence, there is certainly theft. And these institutions have stringent “service restriction” policies, which means you can be evicted at a moment’s notice for reasons you may not know or understand, reasons that can sometimes be as trivial as smoking in a stairwell or missing the nightly bed check. You can be restricted for breaking rules you didn’t even know existed. Or you haven’t broken the rules, but maybe you can’t be with your partner, or your pet; maybe there is a stairway you can technically climb but only in pain. You are evicted, or you leave.

Service restrictions may prevent you from going into any other shelter for some time, or, if your records are not updated at the central database, as they frequently are not, you may be considered still “in shelter” and so not eligible to go anywhere else.

Maybe you go into hospital with an infection, because bad infections are hard to avoid when you don’t have a place to wash cuts and wounds, or for basic first-aid supplies like antibiotic ointments, and your space is gone when you come out. Or perhaps one of your workers—because by now you probably have several workers and you may not even know them very well—decides that you should be “formed”: held in the hospital briefly under the Mental Health Act.

This might last twenty-four or forty-eight or even seventy-two hours, but it won’t last longer than that, because there is almost no public provision for longer-term mental health care. But in the meantime, you may have lost a space you were holding, indoors or outdoors, and you have probably lost possessions, maybe your phone, maybe your ID.

Someone had just qualified for a rent-geared-to-income unit for the first time. He had been on the waiting list for eighteen years.

Sometimes you miss a court appearance—because you’re in the hospital perhaps, or you can’t figure out how to get to the court, or you’re afraid of the courts and have no one to support you—and then perhaps there is a bench warrant issued and you spend some time in jail. Maybe not long but again long enough to lose a place, your things, maybe your dog, anything stable that you might rely on. What was the original charge? It can be hard to remember, when the “failure to appear” cycle becomes almost self-sustaining, but it may have been as small as failing to pay a fine for panhandling, or riding your bicycle through a red light, or drinking alcohol in public. Maybe you were required to pay the cost of your own eviction process and defaulted on that payment, and that began a saga of court dates that became self-propelling.

Maybe you have a child, maybe the child is in the custody of your family or of foster parents, maybe you are allowed to see them or not, maybe you struggle to meet the conditions that will allow you to see your child, and then you fail, and then your heart is shattered one more time. Maybe you try to work, but if anyone will hire you without a fixed address, it will be grey economy and unpredictable, and you can be easily replaced for any reason or no reason at all.

Maybe you set up a tent, alone or with others—it’s important to know that people were living in tents in Toronto long before the pandemic, though less visibly, mostly in the ravines or under the highway bridges—and then the tent is cleared away one day when you’re not there, and again you have lost everything.

And people think “mental illness,” and they think “drugs,” and these things are true as well, but they are true in part because the constant background noise of life is displacement and fear and loss after loss after endless loss.

A bout getting into a shelter. On any given night, close to 10,000 people will be sleeping in emergency shelters of some kind in Toronto. This is not even close to a full census of the number of people who are homeless: the real number, including couch surfers and people sleeping rough, could be as much as double that figure. But it serves as some indication of how huge and overloaded the shelter system has become.

In Toronto, the only access to a shelter bed (with the exception of a very few private shelters, mostly run by evangelical Christians) is through a phone number called Central Intake, run by the city. The “easy listening” hold music for Central Intake is now the best-known piece of music for anyone who works in the field. One of my colleagues was doing a shift in the emergency room one night and was there when a tiny elderly nun was admitted, over her own protests that she was perfectly fine. As he passed her cubicle later, he heard the Central Intake hold music and recognized immediately that the little nun was working from her hospital bed to find a bed for someone else. If you call Central Intake, you are likely to sit on hold, listening to the music, for an hour or so. If you do get through, it is not likely to go well.

One of the hidden facts of the system is that many, many shelter beds are permanently unavailable. The “emergency” shelter system became a long-term home for many people, especially working-age and senior men, a decade or more ago. People have lived in these dormitories for years and have no prospect of ever moving out. So quite a significant number of beds are ruled out before anyone even starts looking.

Central Intake does track the number of people it turns away every night. The number varies—from as few as thirty people a night in the winter of 2022 to a staggering 291 people a night, every night, in October 2023, the month during which the church was trying to get a legal injunction to protect the encampment. The numbers are usually lowest in January and February, when a few low-barrier warming centres open up. In January 2024, the average was nearly 150 callers per night turned away without shelter. Through the summer of 2024, the number hovered just above 230.

By the time someone arrives in an encampment, they have been living like this for months or, often enough, for years. Some people come just for the time it takes them to get a shelter bed or a shelter-hotel room, which may be just a few days or weeks but they have to live somewhere in the meantime. Some find friends or family who will let them crash for a while, but that’s not a long-term solution either. Some people are still trying to get onto the housing list; some people are already on the list but are caught in the interminable wait time. Some people have given up or have been so damaged they cannot trust again that anyone will have their best interests at heart.

The relentless machine of late capitalism devours and discards anyone who is not an efficient economic actor (meaning, sooner or later, all of us).

One person who slept for a long time in our encampment had been evicted from Toronto Community Housing after a psychotic break but was still, a year later, listed in the central database as “housed,” so no one would or could offer them a shelter bed. Another person had fled a Toronto Community Housing apartment when it was taken over by a gang—and was in the official rehousing process but could not go into a shelter without losing the housing portion of their ODSP payment, which they needed for the rehousing to happen. Another person was renovicted from a basement apartment in the Annex and arrested when they tried to go back for their belongings.

Some people who have stayed in the encampment have been employed, usually in precarious shift work in the food industry, but unable to afford even the most basic housing within commuting distance of their jobs. One person was in the encampment for nearly a full year simply because they had lost the keys to their Toronto Community Housing apartment and didn’t know how to get new keys and couldn’t find anyone at the city who could help them with that one simple thing. And another had slept in doorways and parks around the neighbourhood for a decade, was restricted from every shelter and respite, bounced in and out of hospital and jail, moved into a tent in the Grange Park encampment, and came to us after someone tried to set that tent on fire and nearly killed them.

And if you live in this world, everyone understands all of these things: they aren’t secret; they are basic knowledge. But if you live outside, in the world of people who are housed and relatively comfortable, people whose anguish and confusion can be concealed behind socially acceptable facades, it is arcane, mysterious. It doesn’t seem to make sense, because it doesn’t make sense, because the system is a Lewis Carroll fantasia, but if you live on the outside, that can be a hard thing to believe. What I am telling you, I have learned over years of day-to-day experience, and only because people have shared their lives with me in a way that I have had no right to expect.

Finally, although this is the story of a small number of people and their relationships to a tiny piece of land outside a tiny church, it is driven by greater powers and principalities—by the relentless machine of late capitalism, which devours and discards anyone who is not an efficient economic actor (meaning, sooner or later, all of us), which sets individual self-interest and competition for resources above all else, and which structures the economy so that debt and poverty are not only widespread but actually necessary for economic “health.”

This is the storm in which we live right now; this is the flood that each one of us is trying to survive.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig, published by Coach House Books, 2025. All rights reserved.