Thirty-three years ago, a scrappy Christian R&B band decided Jesus probably had better things to do than linger at a church coffee house. They dreamed of carrying the good news into Toronto’s shelters, jails and streets. From that vision, Sanctuary Ministries was born. It was a place where the city’s poor and excluded could find a meal, a prayer and someone to remember their name.
Then rose the glass towers, Casa Condos among them, settling beside Sanctuary some 15 years ago. Today, those neighbours — or at least their board — have turned to the courts, seeking more than $2 million in damages.
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The board claims Sanctuary has permitted “illegal, illicit, disruptive, interfering and egregious conduct.” They describe the adjacent park as “overflow” for Sanctuary’s community — as if people without housing are somehow out of place in their own neighbourhood. The board president has even gone so far as to call Sanctuary a “cult.”
I know some of the people who have found home at Sanctuary. They also show up at my congregation’s Out of the Cold program. Many have shared their life stories with me, detailing abuse and neglect that makes my throat ache. Somehow, they’re still standing, still cracking jokes, still showing up. They’re not abstractions. They’re neighbours with names and histories. And without the care and consistency Sanctuary offers, some of them would be dead. Full stop.
I don’t know if the condo board understands this. If they do, I fear it might not matter. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s comfort was weighed against another person’s survival and found heavier. A neighbour without a roof is tolerated about as much as dandelions in a manicured lawn.
The condo’s president insists Sanctuary is “in the business of helping enable homeless drug addicts,” and that residents are now too scared to walk their own street. They say this isn’t just about property, but about safety.
It’s an important question: who deserves safety? The residents who can lock a door at night, or the ones who curl up on a bench outside with the cold seeping in through their shoes?
Both, of course.
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But it’s dishonest to pretend the risks are equal. It’s the most obvious math in the world. When you have a home, you are far less likely to be beaten, robbed, raped or killed than the person trying to sleep on the sidewalk beneath your window.
Condo residents aren’t wrong to want safety. But neither is Sanctuary’s community. It’s a failure of the government if safety hasn’t been secured for both.
And yet, in the condo’s version of responsibility, the problem isn’t the decades of neglect, the poisoned drug supply or the housing crisis that has left thousands without a place to land. The problem, somehow, is the community and staff at Sanctuary. It’s like blaming the first-aid tent for the war.
But the people who make up Sanctuary are not invaders. Many have been part of the neighbourhood for decades. They belong as surely as the professionals who now make their homes high above Charles Street.
If Sanctuary were pushed out, the people it cares for wouldn’t simply vanish. The lawsuit might shuffle bodies from one block to the next, but it will not cure hunger or the cold.
This is the story of gentrification; each new build pushes property values higher while making it harder for the poor to endure. Toronto desperately needs more housing — and more density too. But when those units are built, bought and sold (often simply as investments) without regard for those least able to benefit, “progress” for some becomes exile for others.
Scripture has seen this pattern before. The prophet Isaiah warns, “Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field until there is no room left for the poor in the land.” Despite what the Casa Condos board claims, the sin here is a city that keeps building higher and higher while leaving its most vulnerable to sleep in the shadows below.
To sue Sanctuary is deeply misguided. And cruel. The real scandal isn’t what happens on Sanctuary’s steps or in the park; it’s that Toronto still needs Sanctuary at all.
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Rev. Bri-anne Swan is the minister at East End United Regional Ministry in Toronto.
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