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Januario and Ana had nowhere for their family to go. Sitting inside a 24-hour McDonald’s in Toronto, the couple urged their three kids — age seven, 10 and 13 — to lay their heads down and try to get some rest as the sky darkened.
The family’s last short-term housing arrangement had fallen through, and they had no backup. After arriving in Canada in 2023, they initially found a place to rent, but quickly suffered a series of setbacks including conflict with a landlord.
So this month, in a state of crisis, the family turned to a midtown refugee house, explained Angola-born Januario, speaking in Portuguese as a refugee worker translated. In the days that followed, the family of five was bounced from a short-term rental unit to a single hotel room, where they’re now waiting for a shelter space.
Across Toronto, child and family homelessness has been rising quickly, with more kids showing up on the doorstep of the shelter system than it was designed to handle. That growing pressure has meant a rising number of families shuffled between stopgaps and shelter overflow solutions to keep their children off the streets.
As of September, nearly 1,500 kids were staying in the city’s shelter system, two thirds of whom were 10 or younger, as well as more than 1,400 children waiting for space in scattered hotel rooms paid for by city hall.
The last decade has seen demand for Toronto’s family shelter spaces rise dramatically, with the number of kids in shelter today nearly triple counts in 2016. City hall says more than 10 times as many families are also waiting in temporary hotel rooms for vacancies compared to a past surge in 2018-19.
When Januario, Ana and their three children — 13-year-old Priscilla, 10-year-old Jonathan and seven-year-old Mellyssa — approached the FCJ Refugee Centre, workers quickly called Toronto’s shelter intake team. But every facility suited for kids was packed.
So, the refugee workers arranged a one-night Airbnb stay. From there, Toronto’s shelter intake workers informed the family there was a single hotel room available in the city’s north end, where they now share two beds.
“There’s not much space,” observed Jonathan, speaking to the Star at the bustling refugee centre roughly one week into their new living arrangement. “There’s a lot of families on the same floor, so we always see other kids.”
Beside him, Mellyssa doodled on a colouring sheet of an ice cream cone, later presenting her artwork to Ana and nuzzling into her shoulder. The Star is withholding the family’s surname to protect the children’s privacy.
As of Sept. 1, 1,486 kids were staying in Toronto shelters, including around 130 under one year old. Another 1,438 kids were living in stopgap hotels.
These “bridging hotel” rooms are different from hotels leased as temporary shelters during the pandemic, which are now considered part of the regular shelter system and offer more services like meals. The federal government also operates its own network of hotels specifically for refugees.
As child homelessness has surged across Toronto, the Star has spoken to families about their time in the city’s regular family shelters — at times squeezed into single rooms packed with beds and cribs, and having to soothe their kids to sleep amid the sounds of hundreds of others. But these kinds of shelters were designed more specifically for kids. At one downtown, for example, there is a private inner courtyard with a playground.
Overflow solutions such as temporary hotel rooms can be more bare bones, without facilities to prepare meals or areas for children to play.
At their hotel, Ana and Januario split one bed, while Priscilla, Jonathan and Mellyssa squeeze into the other. Ana says she’s seen some of her kids in tears over the upheaval. At one point as Januario spoke about what they’d been through, she dabbed away tears welling in her own eyes.
In their room, the family says they don’t have so much as a microwave. While trying to limit spending, it’s meant a lot of McDonald’s and Tim Hortons — a sore point for Ana, who aches to cook her children a warm, filling meal.
“It’s kind of sickening having the same food each time, and not having a hot meal like we did before,” said Priscilla, 13. That’s one of her two main wishes — along with enough beds that the kids don’t have to elbow for space.
The three kids, who are more comfortable speaking in English, have stayed at their school, but it’s now two hours’ transit away.
Tsering Lhamo, co-director of the FCJ Refugee Centre, says she’s seen families in their situation wait around four months for shelter spaces to open up.
She worries about the long-term impact on kids jostled between these temporary living arrangements — which, on the most desperate days, has included their team setting up cots in their office space overnight. She often sees kids sinking into a quieter state as their time battling homelessness stretches on.
“We have youth that have grown up in a homeless shelter or looking for shelter,” she said. “Seeing the family in person, I always see changes.”
Across Toronto, families fall into homelessness for a litany of reasons, from fleeing volatile relationships to economic hardships. Many then struggle to find long-term housing in the face of the city’s affordability squeeze. This reality takes a clear toll, as city-run surveys of Toronto’s homeless population have shown that a third of homeless adults were first unsheltered as children.
One force behind the post-pandemic surge in homeless children and families has been an influx of newcomers. More than 70 per cent of kids staying in Toronto’s regular family shelters on Sept. 1 are part of refugee families, city data indicates. Januario and Ana plan to submit a refugee claim, but haven’t yet filed the required documents. Their case for asylum is complicated by an intervening stay in the U.K. after leaving Angola. Until those documents are filed, Lhamo noted they can’t access refugee-specific supports.
For seven years, Lhamo has been navigating these kinds of complex situations with the refugee centre. In some ways, she believes the landscape has gotten better, especially when it came to their team’s communication with officials at city hall. “That has improved, a lot,” she said. But the struggle to find shelter — and longer term, affordable housing — is still an uphill battle.
As cities across the GTA and beyond have struggled to shelter newcomers, higher governments promised support for a reception centre near Pearson Airport to triage their cases. But that facility hasn’t yet opened. Toronto city staff have yet to outline their winter shelter plans, but Mayor Olivia Chow recently said city hall plans to lease houses on the private market as extra refugee shelters to be operated by non-profit organizations.
Lhamo wants to see more investment into affordable housing, to free up shelter spaces for families facing short-term emergencies. Each time a family like Januario and Ana’s arrives at their door, she feels an ache in her chest.
“I’m a mother. I have a small child, so especially when you see families, it just hits you,” she said softly. “There is a shelter crisis — especially for families.”
Ana and Januario are grateful for the kindness they’ve received already, and know a move to a regular family shelter space could happen any day.
Januario, through the staff translation, maintained his hope for the family’s future in Toronto. Trained in civil construction, he prides himself on working hard. To ask for help was a challenge, and he and Ana hope they can land on their feet again soon — finding a place to gather as a family for a meal.