Toronto Design Challenge encourages creative ideas

Met Radio – The Final Hour host Mariana Schuetze spoke to Elizabeth McIsaac, President of Maytree, about the un/SHELTERED: Toronto Design Challenge, encouraging participants to come up with creative solutions to address the city’s housing crisis.

Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mariana Schuetze, Host of The Final Work – Met Radio: You’re listening to The Final Word on Met Radio 1280 AM in Toronto. It’s Friday, August 23rd, and I’m your host, Mariana Schuetze. In today’s episode, The Final Word spoke to Elizabeth McIsaac, president of Maytree, about the un/SHELTERED: Toronto Design Challenge, which encourages participants to come up with creative solutions to address the city’s housing crisis.

Elizabeth McIsaac, Maytree: Maytree is an organization here in Toronto that is focused on human rights and poverty. We’re a foundation, so we do some grant making, but most importantly, we really work on trying to advance social and economic rights in Canada. And to a large part, we’re deeply focused right now on housing and the right to housing, and ensuring that people have a place to call home.

Mariana: In that, along with the West End Phoenix, you have launched the un/SHELTERED: Toronto Design Challenge, encouraging applicants to create innovative designs and try to come up with housing solutions for people who are homeless and unsheltered. Could you talk a little bit about that initiative and how it got started?

Elizabeth: Sure. So un/SHELTERED is an effort to look at what are some of the ideas that we haven’t considered in finding home for people who are, as we call it, unsheltered.

Every night in Toronto, we have about 10,000 people who are staying in shelters or temporary accommodations that the city provides. That’s what we know from the city stats. But what we also know is that there are roughly a thousand people every night that are unsheltered, that are perhaps in a tent, in a park, and an encampment, they might be in a doorway, they might be just in a park under a tree. They are without a home, a place to close the door, lock the door, be warm, be safe, and have their basic needs met.

These are rough estimates. I think most recently the city of Toronto, that their last count was somewhere around 500 or 560 encampments per se. But we also know that each night there’s about 200, 250 people who knock at the door of the shelter and don’t get in.

So the numbers are estimates, but we know that people are not getting accommodated, and we need a better answer.

We can say, “Let’s get more shelters.” But even the shelters are not a good answer for a lot of people, because a lot of people are not even going to the door. And there’s a number of reasons for that. And so I think what we need to do as a society, as a community is say, “What else can we try? What have we not tried to make sure that people have a place to call home?”

And so this challenge, we had a conversation with the West End Phoenix, Dave Bidini, who puts that out, and scratched our heads and said, “So how do we get new ideas out into the landscape? How do we get people talking and thinking and being creative?”

And I think this is a creative city. I think we’ve got a lot of smart, capable, innovative people out there. And I think putting their minds to a complex problem like this, and in some ways it’s complex and in some ways it’s ways it’s straightforward: what can we build, what’s the design that would accommodate people that would be quick to put up?

It’s not going to take five years. What we know is that we need real housing solutions. Canada, Ontario, Toronto, we need to be building affordable and deeply affordable housing for people, proper housing. That’s what the right to housing is about.

But in the meantime, that may take three years, five years, 10 years before it happens. We know that building takes a long time. Just look around the city, it doesn’t happen quickly.

In the meantime, and as we move into September and every year we see this, and then the snow flies and then we panic, because we know that there’s going to be a cold night where someone may lose their life. And they may lose their life for other reasons as well in between, it’s not just the cold night. So we need to look at what are the ideas that can provide people with the basic essentials: a door they can lock, a washroom facility, water, electricity, and a bed where they can put their head down and feel safe. And that’s the minimum, that’s the bare minimum.

And so what can that look like? There’s all kinds of ideas sprouting up around, and so let’s put our heads to it, let’s put pen to paper, draw out what it might look like, and see what could be possible.

Mariana: And in terms of applications and applicants and their ideas, what are you expecting from the applicants in this sense?

Elizabeth: I hope that I don’t know what to expect. I hope that there’s going to be stuff that you go, “Whoa, I would never would’ve thought of that.”

I was at an event last night that was talking about the challenge a bit, and somebody came up to me and he’s designing a one-person container on a bike. So that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that before.

We’re hearing about tiny homes in different places. That’s an idea.

And that there might be stuff we don’t even think about. So I don’t know what’s going to come in. It might be something that’s multi-person. I don’t know.

What’s important is that people take license, be creative, but that they are mindful of important elements that ensure that the person’s dignity is taken care of. And so that’s making sure that you can close the door and lock it, that you’ve got the basic hygiene pieces, and that it’s culturally appropriate, that it’s close.

Where are you going to put this? Are you going to put it out in an airfield 50 kilometers from the nearest service? Or are there places in our city that we can put stuff that’s close to services, close to transit, close to where people need to go to get their needs met?

Those are some of the elements that we’re hoping to see, and those are elements of the right to housing, that it’s clean, that it’s secure, it’s safe, it’s habitable, all of those elements are there, and that even in a temporary solution that that can be part of what we can expect.

Mariana: That’s a great point, just to open up and have ideas, it’s the main goal, I guess. And what should people interested in applying know about the challenge?

Elizabeth: So what they should know first and foremost is that the deadline is September 30th [editorial note: deadline was extended], so they got to get to work.

There is a full brief on the West End Phoenix website and on the Maytree website as well that lays out what the application should contain. We want to see visual renderings. We’re not looking for a policy document. We’re looking for what does this look like.

It should be costed. They should be able to do the math and say, “It’s going to cost $100, it’s going to cost $1,000, it’s going to cost a million dollars.” It doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate, but it’s got to be reasonable, and it has to be properly costed in some way.

They should have an idea of where it’s going to go, what are the ideas of where. It doesn’t have to be permitted, it doesn’t have to be confirmed, but the notion of where this would be situated is important.

It’s important to be able to see how it links up to social infrastructure, so some of what I talked about, does it connect to services or does it connect to transit or that type of thing.

There should be a floor plan. There should be this is going to be X feet by Y feet, I’m not good at these things, so I can’t give you what the dimensions should be, but that should be there. And does it have electrical power? Does it have those elements? What does this thing actually function like? And so I think the better picture someone can draw and help people understand what the concept is, the better, and describing it and why it’s important.

But we’re not looking for a thousand-page, two-year planning document. We’re looking for something that is concise, gets to the point, and can be understood fairly easily. And because what we want to do is where we get finalists, where we think that these are ideas that are really worth talking about, we want to be able to tell the story. So the West End Phoenix wants to tell the story in its publication, we want to be able to take that story out to a wider audience, because the purpose of this is to build a conversation in the city about what else is possible, so we don’t just do the same old thing that really isn’t meeting the needs of people.

Mariana: Absolutely. And you mentioned a website, how can listeners learn more about the un/SHELTERED: Toronto Design Challenge and your guys’ work?

Elizabeth: So you can come to www.maytree.com and you can also go to the West End Phoenix. I don’t have the URL on the top of my head, but I know that if you Google West End Phoenix un/SHELTERED, you will get to the page and the design brief, and you can download it from there.

And if you’re just turning your attention to this, spend some time thinking about it. If you have questions, there’s a number that you can call. I think it’s pretty straightforward and clear.

I think what’s exciting about this, it’s really tapping into the creative energy in the city and the ideas that people can put toward issues and challenges that are about us as a city and how much better we can be as a city, and not feeling frustrated and angry by the situation that we’re seeing around us, but instead feeling that they can be part of figuring out a solution.

Mariana: That sounds like a great idea. Thanks so much for your time. I was wondering if there’s anything that I missed that you’d like to add?

Elizabeth: I would just reiterate that we continue to have a really challenging housing crisis on our hands. And this is a project that’s looking at the very sharpest end of it, those people who are unsheltered. And we use the term unsheltered because in some ways it has happened, the systems in some ways have created this, and so we need to fix those systems. That’s the biggest challenge is fixing the systems. This is clearly just fixing the symptom.

But we need to also get up and fix the systems, and that’s some of the work that Maytree does, how do we get up and fix the systems in our city, in our province, in our country so that people don’t find themselves unsheltered, that they are able to find a home, maintain a home, and that it is affordable, that it is secure, that they’re not at risk of being evicted, that it is safe, that it is habitable, that it is appropriate to their culture, where they are not discriminated against.

That’s the right to housing and everyone has that right. They have it because they’re a human being, and so we need to figure out ways to make it work for everyone.

So this is the sharp end of the crisis, but there’s also a lot of people who are close to it, and so we need to pay attention to the systems that are pushing people to that edge. So many people in this city are feeling the incredible stress of maintaining their housing, finding housing, and so there’s many more, many more efforts and fixes that need to be found, but this is one that’s so critical because we know that lives are at stake. People do die on the street, and so we need to fix this now.

Mariana: That was Elizabeth McIsaac, president of Maytree, talking about their un/SHELTERED: Toronto Design Challenge. If you want to learn more about the challenge, you can visit westendphoenix.com/unsheltered.