The two-bedroom basement apartment was never going to be the right fit for Steve Blake and his three sons.Low ceilings meant his eldest son, Jacob, 20, would regularly hit his head and by the time you crammed in a well-used couch, kitchen table, a fish tank, two toads, art supplies, video game consoles, a television and a pile of sneakers and shoes, Kaslo, 15, and Gaebrial, 12, also didnât have a lot of room to move.âWe have been a little under-housed for a long time. It is really hard to afford anything more in this city,â says Steve, 50, a contractor. âWe never did have room to set up our racetrackâ and toy cars, he says.Read more:Living in the cityâs real estate bubble: TimsonâSalonâ to tackle Toronto housing crisisThe family also includes a hugely pregnant cat named Moon, though until a few weeks ago she didnât take up much space. It wasnât ideal, but it was home â at least until last week when they entered the shelter system. The Blake family is among the 235,000 people the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness estimates will experience homelessness at some point every year. Lower-income families, or single-parent families, often bounce from space to space. Once inside the shelter system, those families often stay three times longer than single people, according to Raising the Roof, a homelessness advocacy group. Steve rented the basement apartment two years ago, but says he only gave notice he was leaving because a friend said the family could move into a condo she owned if he would do renovations for a cut on the rent. First, he says, he spent months working on the empty place and was paid for some work, but there were delays and it wasnât finished. She changed her mind just weeks before they had to move out of the basement, he says. The landlord, meanwhile, couldnât let them stay because he needed the basement apartment for family.With nowhere to go they ended up in ...
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