Fighting for health and housing in a pandemic

Homelessness is a major social and healthcare disaster that has been plaguing Canada for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this issue.

Are provincial and municipal governments doing enough to combat homelessness in our communities? Or are the solutions that they're coming up with making the problem worse?

In Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic, outreach worker Greg Cook and rabble columnist and retired street nurse Cathy Crowe collect stories which shed a light on infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography.

Contributors to the book include those who have lived experience of homelessness in Toronto. Each chapter reports on different areas of the realities of this crisis and how community members responded. Whether that be by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, or by rising up against encampment evictions.

The book also provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic.

You can order your own copy of Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic here.

You can catch up on Cathy Crowe's column, where she regularly reports on issues surrounding homelessness, housing, advocacy and activism here.

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