Results tagged “homelessness”

The recession may be officially over for the moment, but it is still unclear what the residual effects will be on the everyday life of Canadians. That’s why for Dr. Mike Wood Daly, executive director of Ground Level Youth Ventures, there was much to celebrate as the Ground Level Café opened its doors to the public this Monday, after delays due in part to the recently ended strike.

For a Torontonian, walking through downtown Detroit on an ordinary Saturday afternoon is an eerie, Rod Serling–esque experience: where're all the people? Nobody’s around. From time to time a rolling vehicle will pass by, on the lookout for a safe lot. It is a desolate, almost post-nuclear dystopia, where every storefront and sidewalk is as deserted as a Chrysler dealership. Even ten or fifteen minutes out from the downtown core, there aren't many locals in sight. Perhaps the odd drifter hustling tourists in a near-empty McDonald’s or Burger King. The savvy eat in their parked cars, while roving police cruisers outnumber pedestrians and pleasant chatter by a wide margin. Portraits of yesteryear glories hang wherever you go, and you’d like to think this famous city has more heart than a Michaëlle Jean snack, but downtown NoMo-town is undeniably a lifeless, soulless scene.

             

At the Royal Ontario Museum, the portraits of homeless or formerly-homeless people holding signs with self-scrawled messages on them start outside the main entrance on Bloor Street, one large-scale man and large-scale woman standing back-to-back, dwarfed by the Crystal. They continue life-sized just inside, one young woman hiding above the main entrance, an older man further inside off to the right. In total, there are eighteen portraits wheatpasted at spots on the Crystal's bare walls, part of a series called "The Unaddressed" created by Dan Bergeron—fauxreel. Like his spectacular Regent Park portraits from last year, Bergeron's focus in "The Unaddressed" is on uprooted subjects, which is why it makes sense that the portraits themselves refuse to rest in only one location: all eighteen portraits, in addition to being safely contained on the ROM's property and walls, are also mirrored on walls across Toronto.

Vandalist recently sat down with OTHER, one of the artists participating in "Housepaint, Phase 2", now showing at the ROM. OTHER, a.k.a. Troy Lovegates, a.k.a. Derek Shamus Mehaffey, is an acclaimed street artist who has made his mark the world over. We caught up with him at his temporary studio space, just off Dufferin, while he prepared a piece bound for the ROM last month, and chatted about the show, being on the road, homelessness, and his Toronto roots.

In step with the crisp winter air that swept into Toronto earlier this week, TAXI Canada has re-launched the 15 Below Project. In case you don't have time for the full background, TAXI's Creative Director Steve Mykolyn teamed up with Toronto-based designer Lida Baday last winter to develop a water-and-windproof jacket for the homeless. This unique coat was specially designed to have pockets that can be stuffed with old newspaper, which act as a make-shift lining in frigid temperatures. And to commemorate its 15th anniversary, TAXI paid for the costs of production and distribution of 3,000 jackets.

Nearing the tail end of a year marked by mounting homelessness, an alarming spike in related deaths, and the continuing closure of an unacceptably high number of emergency hostels and shelters, a report published Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is a timely reminder that, yes, untold numbers of people in Toronto are being desperately, royally, systemically screwed.

Photo by bigdaddyhame from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Photo by Michael Chrisman from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

zig Executive Creative Director Martin Beauvais, to The National Post about his company's totally repulsive bumvertising campaign for CFRB: "We didn’t pay [the homeless people] thousands or hundreds. We paid them the kind of money they would make on the street because it would have been wrong to do more than that. We paid them something decent." And: "I don’t think it’s exploitive at all because we’ve asked people if they wanted to do it and they agreed to do it. We presented them with the whole idea of what it was about. I don’t think it’s exploitive at all. It’s not more exploitive than putting a billboard on a building." Uhhhh...

Remember during last year's TIFF, when Colin Farrell took a homeless man known as "Stress" on a $2,100 shopping spree and gave him $830 in cash to find a place to stay? The Sun reports today that Stress is now "clean and sober, has a comfy bachelor pad, goes to church and the Y and darts around town on a mountain bike," has "taken up yoga," and credits Farrell for giving him the help he needed to turn his life around. There is nothing about this story that is not amazing.

Photo of NinjaX, by NinjaX, courtesy of NinjaX.

A protest outside the Toronto office of Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty Thursday drew attention to the housing crisis in Canada, demanding that resources spent on military action in Afghanistan be diverted to provide an additional 1% of the federal budget for social housing.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

Last week, Toronto-based advertising agency TAXI announced 15 Below, a new project to coincide with TAXI's fifteenth anniversary that would see the company create, manufacture, and distribute 3,000 coats for homeless people across North America. Designed by TAXI's executive creative director Steve Mykolyn and designer Lida Baday (pictured), the waterproof, windproof, and plentily-pocketed coat serves as a lightweight jacket during not-too-cold weather, can fold into a backpack during decent weather, and—when you fill the pockets up with newspaper—converts into a super-warm jacket that was tested (in a meat locker, no less!) to be effective up to -29° celsius.