"Although a few more respite centres may keep a few hundred homeless people warm and safe for a few days and nights, they do absolutely nothing to guarantee and protect homeless people’s right to an affordable home: a human right. For more than 20 years, Toronto city council and planners have consistently betrayed homeless people, housing advocates and antipoverty activists. How? By colluding with amoral developers and the Ontario Municipal Board to build more highrise condos for the rich. In this process of “disaster capitalism” (writer Naomi Klein’s apt term), many communities have been gentrified, thousands of poor people evicted by amoral, rent-gouging landlords, who refuse to provide low-cost and safe housing for the 181,000 on Toronto’s affordable-housing waiting list. Tragically, more nameless-homeless people, more John Does and Jane Does, will freeze to death on Toronto’s cold streets this winter. At the current rate of three or four street deaths per month, Toronto’s Homeless Memorial List will skyrocket to 900 within the next two years. But who cares? Mayor John Tory, city councillors, Premier Kathleen Wynne, developers, the Ontario Municipal Board, MPPs and MPs all don’t give a damn. Profit over people is their bottom line. Respite-warming centres with mats (not cots) are a poor excuse — a token and pathetic response to homelessness in Canada’s richest city." Don Weitz, Toronto in a letter to the Toronto STAR Photo: Proof that the armoury has space. From a previous opening of armoury.