'Yes In My Backyard...But Not Like That': Discursive Rebranding of Opposition to New Emergency Shelter Locations in Toronto

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Description of Research Project

Background

Homelessness in Toronto remains a growing social and structural issue. In 2023, Toronto City Council formally declared a homelessness emergency, acknowledging both the devastating impacts of homelessness and the long-standing nature of unhoused experiences in the city. By 2025, the number of people experiencing homelessness (as recorded on the City’s by-name list) reached an all-time high of 11,780. Later that year, the release of the official point-in-time count reported that homelessness in Toronto had doubled over a three-year period, framing the situation as a “crisis” and calling on all orders of government, as well as public, private, and community actors, to contribute to solutions for what is described as a “wicked” policy problem.

At the same time, local governments have been increasingly tasked with addressing community safety and well-being. Provincial policy now requires municipalities to work with community stakeholders to develop comprehensive community safety and well-being plans. These plans adopt a broad definition of safety, emphasizing not only freedom from violence but also access to education, health care, food, housing, income, and social and cultural participation. Toronto has taken initial steps to interpret safety through a structural and public health lens, focusing on the root causes of harm and violence. Against this backdrop of increasing need for emergency homeless shelters and increased calls for improved community safety, in 2023 the City of Toronto committed to a 10-year capital infrastructure plan to develop new purpose-built emergency shelters. While this plan has received formal approval from City Council and aligns with the City’s Housing Charter and its stated commitment to the progressive realization of housing as a human right, public support has proven fragile. As site locations are announced and community consultations unfold, opposition has re-emerged in increasingly coded forms that invoke community safety.

The convergence of rising homelessness and an intensified policy focus on community safety and well-being has created new discursive conditions. These conditions have enabled a shift in public discourse away from overt NIMBYism toward more subtle and difficult-to-confront forms of opposition. Rather than relying on explicitly stigmatizing or exclusionary language, contemporary resistance increasingly mobilizes the rhetoric of community safety, wellness, and resource scarcity to challenge homelessness services, including emergency shelters. In particular, the use of this coded form of resistance allows for elected officials and local residents to simultaneously acknowledge the need for emergency shelter services, while resisting the placement of these services in their local neighbourhoods. This shift in discourse effectively weaponizes progressive-sounding concepts to influence policy and program decisions while obscuring outright exclusionary intent. As new shelter sites have been publicly announced across Toronto, opposition rhetoric has intensified, often facilitated through digital platforms and neighbourhood-based organizing.

Research Description

This research examines the evolving nature of NIMBYism in Toronto by analyzing government, nonprofit, and public discourse related to the siting of new emergency shelter locations. Moving beyond analyses of overt prejudice, the study focuses on how resistance has been reframed through narratives of community safety, well-being, and local neighbourhood resource insufficiency. By empirically tracing these discursive shifts through a critical discourse analysis, the research contributes to contemporary understandings of homelessness-related NIMBYism and its transformation at the local level through the examination of public discourse related to newly sited shelter sites. It also aims to generate knowledge that can assist policymakers in addressing covert forms of resistance.

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Undergraduate Student Responsibilities

Part-time Research Assistant support is needed to aid the PI in writing a literature review, preparing data collection materials and assisting with data collection and organization.
Major deliverables include:

• Researching and drafting a literature review on discourses on opposition to homelessness services and intersections between community safety and well-being
• Data collection and organization
• Participation in data analysis

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Qualifications Required

Skills Required:

• Critical thinking, curiousity and openness to learning
• Ability to both work on tasks independently with direction and support from the Principal Investigator (PI)
• Good writing skills including ability to conduct literature reviews
• Attention to detail
• Ability to collect and organize data including use of shared folders, spreadsheets or reference management software
• Interest in working on issues related to homelessness and an ability to engage with content in a critical and reflexive way that is committed to principles of equity, anti-oppression and social justice