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Old 03-24-2022, 11:07 PM
 
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I have done research and also seen homeless teenagers in Toronto. I am from New York, and obviously there homeless people in major cities. I wanted to ask why there seems to be a lot of homeless teenagers in Toronto? Did their parents kick them out? Did they leave on their own?

What is Toronto’s attitude towards homelessness? Do they promote shelters?
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Old 03-25-2022, 10:46 AM
 
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
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They are not really " homeless " they are usually couch surfing with friends, and hanging out at the downtown shopping centers , mooching for money to support their meth habit. Of course Toronto supports shelters, but the hard core street people don't like shelters because there are rules that they don't want to follow. Toronto has a miss-guided program that gives addicts free needles and "safe injections sites " where they can shoot up . Its a million dollar a year sink hole of tax payer's money. Some people have made a life long career out of "helping the poor " while being paid by the city .
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Old 03-25-2022, 02:16 PM
 
Location: Canada
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Quote:
Originally Posted by globetrekker96 View Post
I have done research and also seen homeless teenagers in Toronto. I am from New York, and obviously there homeless people in major cities. I wanted to ask why there seems to be a lot of homeless teenagers in Toronto? Did their parents kick them out? Did they leave on their own?

What is Toronto’s attitude towards homelessness? Do they promote shelters?
Where have you been doing your research, and how have you been doing your research? There are homeless people of all ages, including teenagers, in every town from the smallest towns up to the largest of cities throughout all of North America. No town/city on the continent is exempt anywhere but larger cities will get more teenagers because there are more people and more resources for them to access in the bigger cities. Toronto/GTA happens to be the largest city and to have the largest population out of all other cities in Canada so it stands to reason that's the city that will have the most homeless teenagers. They go there for the resources.

And just so you know, Toronto/Ontario doesn't have the most homeless people in Canada, that honour goes to the Greater Vancouver Regional districts/British Columbia. Homeless people travel from all over across the country to get to the west coast because the milder climate there increases their chances of surviving the rigours of homelessness.

There are a multitude of reasons for teenagers to leave the homes they grew up in and end up homeless - you could let your imagination run wild with all sorts of reasons for it and chances are your imagination would be right on all counts. Each homeless person has an individual story of their own, each story is usually very sordid.

If you really want to know why there are homeless teens anywhere then you are asking the wrong people in the wrong place for the teens' reasons for being homeless. Homeless teenagers won't be found hanging around on internet forums waiting to answer questions or join in conversations.

I know you said elsewhere (and your user name indicates) that you've done a lot of travelling so I think the best way for you to properly research what their reasons are for being homeless is during your globe trotting for you to actually interview them in person, face to face on the streets and get their stories straight from the horses' mouthes.

.
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Old 03-25-2022, 04:40 PM
 
Location: Toronto
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In the 90’s, Toronto had thousands of street kids living downtown, making money from the squeegee game, selling drugs at Yonge & Gerard and the downtown club scene. I was friends with a crew of street kids back then after hanging with them at Comfort Zone. Back then, most of the homeless girls I knew had fled sexual abuse in their families. A lot of the boys, too. Not many just living on the streets because they didn’t like curfews. It was a hard life. One of my closest street kid friends accepted the “kindness” of a stranger who then kidnapped her and held her prisoner in his suburban townhouse, where he raped her daily and forced her to take care of his kid. She called me and I went and got her out of there with some friends. This was all normal for both genders.

Street kids had been part of the Toronto landscape as long as I could remember. In the 80’s and early-90’s they were more into the skinhead/grunge scenes, but then went hard into the rave and club scenes in the mid-to-late 90’s because it was huge in Toronto, and a great environment to sell/use drugs. Alcohol, acid, and weed were replaced by crystal and E. There were different crews - some of them were cool, kind people while others were thugs who ripped off and robbed naive clobbers. It all came to an end in the early-2000’s when Toronto took a hard line in squeegee kids and gentrification in the downtown made it hard for them to find safe places to hang and sleep. The waning of the rave/club scene also meant they didn’t have venues to sell and get drugs whenever they wanted. The ones I know died of overdoses, got sick with HIV/AIDS, or just disappeared.

There may still be homeless youths in Toronto, but the street kid scene of prior decades is gone. It’s too hard to survive on the streets these days. The adult homeless population has also gone way down or is just much less visible than it used to be. Most of the shelters, group homes, flop houses, low-rent buildings, and housing projects in the east downtown that made it possible for the large homeless population to survive on the streets were bought up by developers and turned into condos.
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Old 03-25-2022, 10:43 PM
 
389 posts, read 389,583 times
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My research was conducted driving throughout the city and doing research online. Obviously anyone can write anything online, so not everything on the web is always valid and true.
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Old 03-26-2022, 05:00 PM
 
Location: Toronto
2,802 posts, read 3,834,911 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by globetrekker96 View Post
My research was conducted driving throughout the city and doing research online. Obviously anyone can write anything online, so not everything on the web is always valid and true.
Driving through the city and “research” online is probably not nearly enough to make any meaningful observations about a complicated issue like homelessness in an urban center like Toronto.

No wonder your perceptions of Toronto are just that - perceptions. Without staying here and spending at least a week in the downtown and east downtown, walking around and talking to homeless youth, it would be difficult for someone to make empirical observations of the homeless problem in Toronto, as you do in your original post. I suppose you could engage in real research and access the large body of academic and government studies on homelessness in Toronto, but a Google search or two isn’t going to give you much insight into an issue that has existed in urban areas since urban areas came into existence.

The thing is that your observations don’t reflect the true situation of homeless youth in Toronto or homelessness in general. Zoisite wrote a few of the key concerns about what you wrote that I share. Homelessness is an extremely complicated social condition that has affected certain marginalized populations for all of recorded history. There are also many kinds of homelessness, and one can look at it on a spectrum, from those who are staying with friends and relatives temporarily, to those who couch serve and live in their vehicles, to those who have mental health issues and largely sleep rough or occasionally in shelters.

Toronto’s homeless situation is in constant flux, as it has been for decades, and the number of visible homeless in the city is largely shaped by government attitudes towards homelessness. As cities like Toronto gentrify, neighborhoods become more expensive to live in and public services that helped the homeless receive basic services can’t afford the rent or are pushed out by new residents who prefer these services when they are in other peoples’ neighborhoods. While Toronto’s homeless population was largely confined to the immediate downtown, east of Yonge Street, those neighborhoods have changed so much in 20 years. Visible homelessness isn’t tolerated by locals any more, and police seem to police homelessness much more aggressively.

While I don’t live within spitting distance of downtown anymore, and have barely visited since COVID came and brought normal life to a screeching halt, I can’t be authoritative in my observations. However, I can tell you that driving through a city (I don’t quite know what you mean by this either. Did you not walk in the city? How long were you in Toronto? Was it for business or pleasure? How much time did you spend driving around the city and what did you see that made you think homelessness was somehow uniquely bad in Toronto?)

By no means am I trying to say that homelessness doesn’t exist in Toronto or that it isn’t a problem. It is always a problem when a wealthy liberal democracy cannot provide housing for its most vulnerable citizens and residents. Homelessness here, like homelessness in pretty much any North American metropolis, is directly connected to a wide variety of societal factors that can lead people to homelessness. Zoisite addressed this in their post and I agree with him that if you really want to know more about the issue, you take the time to get out of the car and talk to people. It may give you better understanding and empathy.
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