Toronto is adding 1,533 shelter, warming centre and housing spaces for the winter, the city announced Monday. In the city’s own survey, 58% of the people it counted as homeless were Black. Black Torontonians are about 10% of the population.
That gap comes from Toronto’s 2024 Street Needs Assessment, which estimated 15,400 people were without housing in the fall of 2024, up from about 7,300 in April 2021. Nine per cent of respondents identified as Indigenous, in a city where Indigenous people are about 3% of residents. Whatever the winter plan does, it lands first on Black and Indigenous Torontonians.
The 2026-27 plan runs Nov. 15 to April 15. It is 18% bigger than last winter’s, which brought 1,275 spaces online. It has four parts: 505 new shelter and 24-hour respite spaces, 254 warming centre spaces at five sites that open when temperatures reach -5 C, 186 surge spaces that open at -15 C, and 588 supportive and subsidized housing units. Drop-in centres will add 252 hours a week. About 500 of the spaces stay open year-round.
The city says it is expanding the plan even though demand has fallen. Toronto now shelters roughly 7,000 people a night, down from 9,000 last year. Encampments dropped from 353 in October 2025 to about 118 last month, and more than 4,100 people moved from shelters into permanent housing in the past year.
Those are real gains, and they should be credited. But the last full count found more than twice as many people unhoused as in 2021, and Black residents were the majority of them. A falling shelter count does not say how many of the people who left the system found a home, and the figures reported Monday do not include that breakdown by race.
Advocates say the plan leaves people exposed. Lorraine Lam of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network said: “People are surviving in the best of their abilities, but there is a huge risk for cold injury and frostbite and even death.” She questioned why only about 500 of the added spaces stay open all winter. Gord Tanner, the city’s general manager of Shelter and Support Services, said broader government support is essential to address the systemic causes.
He is right. If 58% of the people in the shelter system are Black, any plan that counts only beds and units is incomplete. Toronto should report who is getting housed, who is returning to the street and how long each group waits, and publish those numbers by race.
The city’s next Street Needs Assessment is the count that will show whether the drop in shelter use reached Black Toronto at all.
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