During a recent visit to my hometown of Hamilton, I had the chance to meet someone named Amanda.
Amanda is 35 years old. (TVO Today has agreed to use only her first name to protect her privacy.) She started working at age 15 and doesn’t have a lot of formal education. However, she earned a living waitressing, then as a receptionist. Her company promoted her to sales, and life started to improve. She got married and had three kids. Her eldest is now 13, and the twins are 11. But Amanda doesn’t see much of her kids anymore.
I met Amanda while my 90-year-old father and I were taking a stroll through downtown Hamilton. We walked through the square in front of city hall, and that’s when we saw her. Amanda is one of a few dozen people who live there in an ad hoc tent city.
We walked over to ask whether we could speak with her because we wanted to understand why so many people were living in such conditions — and she couldn’t have been friendlier. So we struck up a conversation.
Amanda lives in a tent in the homeless encampment outside Hamilton city hall. (Steve Paikin)
Turns out, the tent city is merely the latest place Amanda has called home. She once lived in what she describes as a “beautiful apartment, even though it had cockroaches.” She paid $1,500 a month for rent, until one day, she says, the owner, accompanied by another man, walked in wearing a camera and excoriated her for what he claimed was damage she’d caused. She says he was determined to renovate the place and offered her two options: she could take $500 and leave willingly in three months or he’d take her to court and have her out in six months. Amanda left.
Agenda segment, April 11, 2024: Why Hamilton needed a renoviction bylaw
What came next was a descent into homelessness: two months at one friend’s house, two weeks at another friend’s home, then a motel. But at $120 a week, that option dried up pretty quickly, too. Suddenly, Amanda found herself living in Woodlands Park in the city’s north end, smack in the middle of what she describes as a war between competing groups trying to control the drug trade in the area.
“In one month there, I saw one shooting, four stabbings, four tent fires, and I was doused with hand sanitizer,” she recalls. “Someone else took a hatchet to the face.”
Two views of Hamilton city hall. (Steve Paikin)
Understandably, Amanda was on the move again. She tried sleeping on the outdoor steps of a building until the proprietors fenced that off. So she came to city hall. While, to date, authorities have not moved in and forcibly removed the tents, Amanda says they have asked her and her other unhoused neighbours there to move to Cootes Paradise, a suburban, picturesque area near the Dundas Marsh, about a 20-minute drive west. But Amanda insists that’s not a viable option.
“All the services [I need] are down here,” she says. “We rely on handouts of food, shelter, and health outreach. If I go down to Cootes Paradise, how am I going to travel here?”
Amanda’s marriage has broken up. She’s got a boyfriend who lives with her in the tent, but getting a job is next to impossible because one of them always has to remain in the square.
“I have to watch all of these people who will try to steal my stuff,” she says.
(Steve Paikin)
I ask Amanda to estimate what percentage of people there may have addiction issues.
“One hundred per cent,” she says. “I’m an opiate addict. And I’m not getting help. I tried a few times to quit, but the only options they give you here are methadone or the safer-supply program. People get Dilaudid [an extremely powerful pain-relieving narcotic] and sell it.”
Amanda does take comfort in knowing that her kids are doing well. “They go to a private Christian school,” she says. “I don’t know how [my ex-husband] affords it, but he does. And it’s a little more difficult to see them. Even the oldest can’t come down here. They can’t be dropped off.”
My father has lived in Hamilton his entire life. I was born and raised there and return most weekends to visit. Both of us expressed shock at the sight of the city’s most iconic square. Living there simply can’t be the best option for people — and it certainly doesn’t help the city’s image.
Agenda segment, June 25, 2021: Clearing homeless encampments
What’s Hamilton doing about this? Well, Mayor Andrea Horwath captured significant attention last week when she used her so-called strong-mayor powers to overrule her deadlocked council and convert part of a municipally owned suburban parking lot into land for 67 units of affordable housing. (Council declined to approve the plan, because it would result in a loss of one-third of the area’s parking spots, which it says could potentially harm local businesses.)
Someday, those units will be home to people who need a more affordable place to live. But for Amanda, today, they are not yet an answer to her predicament.
“I’d like to be in a house and be clean and be in my kids’ lives,” she says. “My kids message me and say they love me. I used to be a much different person. I want to be the person they think I am.”
Good luck, Amanda. We’re pulling for you. But if the people living in those tents are ever going to have a real roof over their heads, decision-makers are going to have to exhibit a hell of a lot more imagination than they’ve shown to date.