How many Londoners are sleeping rough tonight? The numbers have doubled in 2 years
Advocate working to keep the Thames River clean says he's never seen so many camps
New estimates from the City of London put the number of people who don't know where they're going to sleep tonight at 1,868 as of October — double the rate from only two years ago when an estimated 966 people were believed to be homeless in 2020.
City officials stress that these are only the people they know about because they're accessing support services. The true number of people sleeping rough in London may never be known.
Tents and makeshift homes, lashed together with nylon rope and tarpaulin are now a common sight along the Thames Valley Parkway as it snakes its way through the heart of the city, offering anyone cycling, jogging or walking along its length a raw glimpse of the extreme poverty.
Rising housing costs, combined with persistent inflation on everything, from food, to fuel and especially rent has compounded the problem, putting homes and apartments out of reach for many and leaving more Londoners with nowhere to go.
The number of people seeking help has surged, from food banks to crisis lines and, with many emergency shelters at or near capacity, people with nowhere to live have turned to camping out, in fields, empty lots and on the river bank in ever increasing numbers.
'I think we're becoming callous'
"I've never noticed so many shanty towns as I have now," said Susan Vande Sompel, who was walking the path to Gibbons Park with her friend Jane Miller on Monday.
"I always thought London takes care of their own, but we don't seem to be doing that anymore. I think we're becoming callous in the sense that we just walk by it," Vande Sompel said.
The City of London recently announced $5 million for homelessness supports this winter — double the sum it normally would in an attempt to address the ever-worsening crisis.
"We are getting an exponential increase in calls for service every day," said Anne Armstrong, the executive director of London Cares homeless response services, which dispatches outreach teams to check on people who are sleeping rough.
London Cares is the agency leading the campaign to help the city's most vulnerable this season. Already, it has reported a 380 per cent increase in calls for assistance and a 215 per cent increase in monthly interactions with homeless encampments this year.
The crisis has grown so acute that Armstrong and leaders at other homelessness outreach agencies will be meeting with city and health-care officials at a summit on Thursday to figure out new ways to tackle a problem that only seems to get worse with each passing year.
"We are very focused on a system shift," Armstrong said. "This is not acceptable for people in our community to have to experience homelessness and live outside."
Until people are housed, Armstrong said, line agencies such as London Cares will continue to serve their needs, including delivering meals, warm blankets or socks to those in need.
It's a complaint heard regularly by Tom Cull, the co-founder Antler River Rally, who leads regular forays by an army of volunteers into the green spaces along the Thames to clean them up.
He said many people tell him they are no longer happy with the state of the river as it becomes increasingly colonized by the economically dislocated, who when their camps are cleared or abandoned, often jettison their possessions on the shore because they have little choice.
Homelessness and pollution linked
"I've had conversations with people who are quite angry about the state of our river and quite frankly, we should be," he said. "If you care about the river in London, then you should also be an affordable housing advocate."
Cull said the problems of homelessness and environmental pollution are interlinked and significantly curbing one will curb the other.
WATCH | Environmental costs of poverty:
"I've been doing this for 11 years and we've never seen these levels of people sleeping rough or camping by the river."
Fixing homelessness is easier said than done and Kevin Dickins, the deputy manager of social health and development for the City of London said Monday that in addition to city hall's winter response plan, it's also working on a long-term plan in the form of 3,000 affordable housing units to be built over the next few years.
Once housing, and the social services that go with it, are in place — relief agencies hope the trend of homelessness in London will finally go down, instead of up.
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