At its peak, more than 500 people were living in tents across Toronto’s network of parks.
Data maintained by the City of Toronto, and presented as part of its annual budget process, showed the number of encampments, which rose significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, crept up throughout 2024.
By November of that year, a total of 539 people were recorded living in tents put up in one of Toronto’s 1,500-plus parks.
Officials with the city now say the figure is beginning to fall. Ever since November 2024, the number of tents in Toronto’s parks has steadily declined.
As of December 2025, the city said 196 people were living in tents across Toronto. Staff said encampments were reported in 48 separate parks — down from 107 last year.
“Our shelter system and our work on encampments is (something) I want to focus on because we are better today, Jan. 8, than we were on Jan. 8, 2025, when it comes to encampments,” Stephen Conforti, Toronto’s chief financial officer, told councillors last week.
“Sometimes you wouldn’t think that’s the case … but you can do the math on the reduction.”
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Diana Chan McNally, a community worker in Toronto, said the city appeared to be making progress in its approach to visible homelessness, although changes to how it measures data and approaches the issue have made it more complicated.
“I do appreciate that they’re doing better, especially compared to previous administrations where they were using police, for example, to evict encampments,” she said.
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“But at the same time, without all the resources and without all the data available, it is hard for me to even understand entirely what the situation looks like.”
A concern both the City of Toronto and Chan McNally worry about is the upcoming changes to the Canada-Ontario Housing benefit, which both say could force more into homelessness.
“If I look at how and why people are becoming homeless, I think of the province as a tap,” Chan McNally said. “We have these policy levers that essentially are allowing more and more people to slip into homelessness. And unless we turn that off, every municipality is going to continue to deal with this.”
The City of Toronto’s budget said staff were trying to solve the issue in the face of matters they don’t control.
“The City’s shelter system continues to be required to respond to inadequacies in other sectors that drive homelessness and create barriers to exiting from it,” part of the financial blueprint read.
“External pressures include insufficient affordable housing supply, rising cost of living, inadequate income supports, limited access to health and mental health supports, limited access to substance use treatment and the ways in which the health, justice, and child welfare systems contribute to inflow into homelessness.”
The decrease in Toronto’s encampments — and warning of future pressure — comes as a new report from Ontario’s municipalities reveals some 85,000 people experienced homelessness in the province last year.
More than half of those people are experiencing prolonged periods of homelessness of six months or longer, the report led by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario found.
About 20,000 children and youth are homeless in the province. The data shows northern and rural regions are driving the growth in homelessness.
Should the economy take a nosedive, there could be nearly 300,000 homeless people by then.
When asked if there was more his government could do to tackle the growing problem, Premier Doug Ford said the solution is simple.
“Best way to help a homeless person is getting them trained and getting them a good-paying job,” he said Tuesday.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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