‘The world is meant for all of us’: The people living Toronto’s homelessness crisis

TORONTO — Steam slowly spiraled up from the trays of freshly cooked meals laid on a table at the corner of the sprawling basement room. Dozens of people sat around other tables, some of them eating while others took sips of hot tea and coffee as they laughed and smiled.

A small group of servers delivered plates and guided visitors to their seats. Among them was Tanja Futter, who was on the move like an attentive waitress, zigzagging around the tables, offering food and asking about everyone’s day.

“Why don’t you take a seat there,” she told a man who wanted to eat, pointing towards a chair. Then came the plate filled with fried fish, cooked vegetables, mushrooms and fries. “Here we go.”

This scene unfolded on a recent Thursday at the Sanctuary Ministries Toronto, a church in the downtown core that has provided a safe haven for the most marginalized and vulnerable for more than three decades.

Here at the church on Charles Street East, just around the corner from Yonge Street people struggling with homelessness, addiction, mental heath and poverty are welcomed in to dine, take a hot shower, seek medical care, collect sleeping bags and winter clothing and, more importantly, hang out with people who remember their names.

It is a community that has been “built on trust,” where everyone feels safe, said Futter, who is the pastoral director at the Sanctuary.

“There is a beauty of Sanctuary where I’ve said to many people that this is the most transformative community I’ve ever been part of,” said Futter. “And it is also, you know, the most grief that I have ever experienced in my life.”

She said she got to know people who died of overdoses, and has driven people to the hospital after suicide attempts. “It’s the relational part that hurts more, because you actually care for people,” she said.

The proximity to such struggles is not something that Sanctuary’s neighbours have always tolerated.

The board of CASA condos at 33 Charles Street East has filed a $2.3-million lawsuit against Sanctuary, saying its clients have created safety risks for condo residents.

In its statement of claim, the board alleges the church is allowing “illicit, disruptive, interfering and egregious conduct” including drug use and trafficking, overdoses and serious physical altercations to happen on its property, according to court documents provided by the Sanctuary.

Greg Cook, an outreach team lead at the church, said he cannot comment on the lawsuit because the matter is before the court.

But he said the work they do is more important than ever, given the depth of the homelessness crisis.

Homelessness isn’t a new problem in Ontario and in Toronto, but Cook, who has been working with the homeless population for nearly two decades, said it exploded in recent years as the cost of housing doubled while income and government assistance remained almost the same.

When he started the outreach work, there was a shortage of housing, but “it felt like a possibility” for people to find it, he said. Services weren’t available as widely as they are now, but not too many people needed them. That isn’t the case anymore.

“If your situation is you maybe have a criminal record or you have bad credit or you’re living outside, the chances of getting housing is almost impossible,” he said.

Citing the city’s data, Cook said the number of homeless people jumped from fewer than 8,000 in 2021 to more than 15,000 in late 2024. The Ontario Municipalities Association says 80,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024.

Earlier this month, Ontario’s Big City Mayors called on the Ontario government to declare a state of emergency to address the issue, which they said has created a “community safety and humanitarian crisis” across the province.

Cook said what he does at the church makes his life more meaningful.

“I’d say it’s also an honour to hold people’s trust,” he said, adding that between 300 and 350 community participants visit the church each week.

The Canadian Press spent several Thursday evenings in November and December visiting Sanctuary and spoke with a handful of people who visit frequently to hear their histories and understand what their day-to-day lives are like.

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SABRINA

A white Christian family took Sabrina Wanee-Katari Sutherland and her sister into their home when she was 11 or 12 years old.

Sutherland, who mainly grew up in Attawapiskat First Nation, said she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend. Both of them were implicated in a legal case over the alleged child abuse, and the two girls entered the provincial foster care system, eventually landing in Kingston, Ont.

“Within a few months, they decided that I was more damaged than they initially thought, the foster family,” she said. The family kept her sister — with whom she had not been allowed to speak Cree — and she was sent to a group home.

At 16, her access to the group home ended. The province had not yet raised the age of protection to 18, a change that would only take effect in 2018. She left for Toronto.

After a one-night stand, Sutherland had an unplanned pregnancy.

Four months in, she had no idea what was happening to her body. When a nurse congratulated her after seeing test results, she said she was so shocked that she “almost fell off the chair.”

It brought things into perspective, and she set out to seek a better life. She went back to Kingston, gave birth to her daughter Kayla and enrolled to finish high school, where a daycare was available.

Sutherland found a part-time job at a law firm. She worked there for several years and got her own apartment. Thanks to her fast typing and strong spelling skills, she became a court reporter in Kingston.

She and Kayla moved back to Toronto when Kayla was in Grade 6 or 7. Sutherland found another job as a court reporter at the Federal Court, and started studying in a radio television arts university program.

But then things turned upside down. Sutherland’s childhood trauma began to haunt her, she said.

“I would see him in cars, or if I was on the streetcar, I would see him outside, you know, on a sidewalk,” she said of her abuser. “Or I would see him hiding behind bushes and shrubs.”

She quit school and left her job. She tried cocaine for the first time when out camping with a cousin. It quickly became a habit.

A few years after they moved to Toronto, Sutherland sent Kayla to live with a lawyer she used to work with. She decided to embark on a cross-country journey in the hopes of finding healing and detoxing from her addiction.

The last time she was housed was in 2018, Sutherland said. She had been living with a man for several years. She said he beat her, and their relationship ended badly.

After the COVID-19 pandemic began, encampments began to pop up in Toronto. Sutherland said she had been living at a cottage, but she returned to the city and began splitting her time between tents and shelter beds.

Today, Sutherland is 51 years old and has a fentanyl addiction. She only understands a little bit of Cree, the language she knew fluently as a child.

She is HIV positive. She said she is not sure how she caught the virus, but she has faced sexual assaults, she has been beaten unconscious and she could have been exposed to a contaminated syringe.

Sitting by a table in a small room at Sanctuary Toronto, Sutherland shared that she has always felt ashamed of her First Nation heritage. “I would always say I was half white and I was assimilated,” she said while combing her hair.

“They are misunderstood and targeted and abused by the system. They’re unwanted by society,” she said, speaking about both the homeless population and Indigenous people.

“Because in the long run … it’s more expensive to help them. It would be cheaper if they died.”

Her daughter Kayla Sutherland is more hopeful. She is a well-known activist and works as an intergenerational relations program co-ordinator at the east-end Children’s Peace Theatre. She visits her mother regularly at Sanctuary.

“They’re like my older brothers and uncles, the staff that have been taking care of my mom,” she said of the staff.

She said if her mother is able to get off drugs, they are planning to enrol her in a trauma recovery program that uses Indigenous approaches and medicine.

Sutherland said she has detoxed in the past, and she is ready to do it again. She wants to heal, and “self-medicating with fentanyl is not going to work.”

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TONY

Tony Aguiar left his apartment this spring due to what he described as deteriorating living conditions in his supportive housing unit. He has been sleeping on cardboard in the doorway of an empty building in downtown Toronto ever since.

“The owners could have asked me to leave at any time, but because I don’t leave a mess, I’m not making noise, I’m not damaging the place, they allow me to stay there,” he said.

“I do feel lucky. I do feel blessed.”

Aguiar said he is happy he has a space where he can sleep alone, away from the noise of an encampment. Even though many people prefer to stay in a tent, Aguiar said that doesn’t make him feel safe.

“I don’t really like tents, because you’re hidden. You can’t see what’s going on outside around you,” he said.

Aguiar added he hopes to be able to secure a hotel room that the City of Toronto is offering as a temporary shelter. He doesn’t want the children at a nearby school see him every morning.

“In this world, there is not much that matters to me, but the kids matter to me most,” he said, grinding his cannabis into a bowl. While living in a doorway is freezing, he stills prefers it from the shelters.

“I feel a lot safer in my doorway or in a park or behind a garbage bin or somewhere where I just feel that no one has a chance to … (steal) my stuff,” he said.

Aguiar said he doesn’t use any hard drugs, but he drinks a lot of alcohol and smokes cigarettes and cannabis.

He said he started drinking alcohol when he was a teenager, with his friends in downtown Toronto. At that time, his drinking habits were largely under control, he said.

Then his cousin, who was very close to him, died of what he suspects was a drug overdose nearly two decades ago. The loss left him devastated, and that is when his drinking became a serious problem.

The first time he became homeless, Aguiar was 17. Now, at 44, he is struggling again.

“The way you think life is going to go, sometimes it doesn’t go that way,” he said. “So I am kinda used to life not going the way I see it going, or the way it should go.”

Aguiar said he has a 22-year-old daughter. He hasn’t seen her since she was a toddler, but they speak sometimes over the phone and he often checks her Facebook page to see how she is doing.

“I told her … that I was proud of her that she stuck with school,” he said. “Because me, I dropped out, and I just didn’t make nothing of myself.”

He said he hasn’t seen her mother, who lives in Port Dover, Ont., for many years. He has no intention to do so any time soon.

“I don’t want her to see me like this, to be honest with you, ’cause she worries too much already,” he said.

Aguiar said it restores his faith in the world to see that there are people supporting the homeless community.

“This world is meant for all of us to live, not some of us,” he said.

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AUBREE

Aubree Olson’s life began plunging into a downward spiral when she picked up a serious knee injury during a basketball game in high school.

At first, she took painkillers, but then turned to street drugs after the prescription ran out. Olson never finished high school.

She and her father moved to Ontario from Winnipeg when she was 17. He had his own addiction issues. And after getting treatment, she said he was so fed up with his daughter’s drug use that he kicked her out of the house. She was 18.

“When he got out of rehab, they told him to avoid stressful situations in life, and that I was the most stressful situation in his life,” she said.

“That’s when our relationship ended.”

A few years later, her boyfriend died of an overdose in Coburg, Ont.

Olson, now 28, has been struggling with mental health, on-and-off addiction and homelessness for the past decade.

Last winter, she stayed at a warming centre in Toronto, she said, but now she lives at an encampment.

“I find it, like, easier to maintain my drug addiction, like to a lower level, when I am just out here by myself,” she said. She added her drug use can get “really out of control” when she is around other addicts.

There are other reasons why she prefers not to live in a shelter. They feature large, overcrowded rooms where dozens of women and men are crammed in. Each has a space the size of a bed.

Stealing and physical violence are common, she said. The last time Olson was kicked out of a shelter, it was because she had been engaged in a physical altercation with a man.

“Staff only saw me punching him in the face. They didn’t witness me getting dragged across a room by (my) hair.”

As winter sets in, Olson’s priorities are shifting.

While she would prefer to have a space of her own, like a room at a hotel or an apartment, her No. 1 goal now is simply to find a place that has walls and a roof, so she can stay warm.

“It’s really cold. I don’t like it,” she said.

Olson said she has been able to detox several times.

“Every New Year’s, I would just think, OK, this is it. I’m going to quit doing drugs,” she said. “I only managed to stay off drugs for a couple of months. … The last time I did it was probably three years ago.”

Though the experience of withdrawal is rough, she is ready to give it another try. She wants to take the nine credits she still needs to graduate from high school.

Olson uses fentanyl, one of the strongest and most addictive drugs. It has one of the highest relapse rates. She is aware of that.

“Most people that do fentanyl or are addicted to opioids will be addicted to them for the rest of their lives, so the statistics are not really on my side,” she said.

“But I’m positive about it.”

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CRYSTOFUR

Crystofur Taggart became a member of Toronto’s homeless community when he was just 16.

“On my birthday, my foster dad gave me $300 cash, told me he didn’t want to make me leave, but he had no choice,'” he remembers being told.

Under a temporary care agreement, he said, the foster family with whom he had lived for three years couldn’t continue to keep him in the house after he turned 16.

Taggart had been in the system for several years after facing an abusive situation at home and trying to take his own life.

He said he began identifying as bisexual or gay as a kid, and his parents did not approve of that. “They would always fight with me. I would always fight with them,” he said.

Taggart said he got the Children’s Aid Society involved through school after things got physical between him and his stepdad.

“I attempted suicide when I was like 13, and Children’s Aid Society came to the hospital and took me to a foster home from the hospital.”

On the eve of his 16th birthday, Taggart said his foster family called youth shelters to see if they could find him a place to sleep. They had no luck.

He had nowhere else to stay. His mother and stepfather had since moved away from Ontario. He ended up sleeping in the alleyway across the street from a shelter for a few nights before getting a bed.

“I had never slept outside before,” he said. “I was alone. All I could really think about was that I had nobody willing to let me stay with them.”

Taggart, now 28, said he has been mostly homeless and struggled with addiction since then. His partner died of a fentanyl overdose in 2020.

These experiences have left him “heartbroken,” he said.

Recently, Taggart said his tent at a downtown encampment under the Gardiner Expressway — and everything in it, including dog food, sleeping bag and winter clothes — was gone when he returned to it.

That night, he and his dog Coco had to sleep on the concrete stairwell of a parking garage, he said.

There are few options for shelter.

Taggart said he has been trying to get a bed, but there is a shortage of spaces. He prefers to find a place that will allow him to be with Coco, but many places do not accept animals.

“Being outside in the cold is, it’s not manageable. It’s not easy. It’s scary. It makes my mental health worse,” he said. “It makes survival more expensive, and it’s not good for my dog.”

He said he now lives at another encampment after a woman bought him a tent, winter clothing and a dog coat. He said he will send Coco to stay with a friend so she can escape the unbearably freezing temperature.

“I would also miss her. She’s my best friend. But her well-being is what I care about most,” he said, as the white-and-black dog lay snoring under a table by his feet.

Taggart’s biological father lives in poverty in Ontario, and he can’t expect any support from him, he said.

His mother, who now lives in the United States, will not take him in. He said she told him she fears he would fall into “bad habits” and need medical help — “and it’s not free here.”

Taggart gets $700 monthly from the government. He said it is impossible to secure permanent housing with that amount.

Homeless people and those on social assistance are discriminated against when they apply for housing, he said. When he sends messages to rental property managers and owners, he usually does not get a reply.

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If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, support is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988, Canada’s national suicide prevention helpline.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 16, 2025.

Sharif Hassan, The Canadian Press