Toronto to rent motel rooms for the homeless

Mayor John Tory plans on turning motel rooms into shelter spaces, with at least 90 spaces to open as early as next week.

The city will be renting blocks of rooms in two Toronto motels in an effort to make extra space available during the cold weather.

It will cost roughly $100,000 from now until March, but Tory said it’s a short-term solution.

“It’s going to be used on a sort of supply-and-demand basis; if the need is there, then these rooms are going to be available to us.”

“We have an overall challenge with respect to the homeless, [the] shelter system, because it is of course concentrated downtown where most of the need is but not all of it.”

A report on the city’s homeless shelter system is expected in a few weeks.

Four homeless men died in just over a week, three of them due to the frigid weather.

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