Khaleel Seivwright

Last updated

Khaleel Seivwright is a Canadian carpenter and homelessness activist known for his construction of homeless shelters.

Contents

Early life

Sievwright grew up in suburban Toronto; his parents are Jamaican immigrants. [1] After high school, he took a job as an apprentice carpenter, and learned how to frame houses. [1] In his early 20s, he lived on a British Columbia commune where he built his own tiny home shelter. [1]

Toronto homeless shelters

In September 2020, [2] Sievwright began building homeless shelters and placing them in parks and ravines in Toronto. [3] [4] The small shelters cost about $1,000 CAD to build. [5] [6] The shelters included insulation, a Vapor barrier, a carbon monoxide detector and a lock. [7]

In November 2020, the City of Toronto wrote to Sievwright, demanding that he "immediately cease the production, distribution, supply and installation" of the shelters. [5] [8] A petition started by Sievwright in response to the City's letter garnered over 80,000 signatures. [7]

In January 2021, Sievwright launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $200,000 CAD to construct more of the shelters. [9] [10]

In February 2021, the City filed an injunction to stop the construction of the shelters, which take the form of very small tiny homes. [5] [10] Critics of Seivwright's shelters, including the City of Toronto, have said that the homes do not represent a long-term solution to homelessness. [11]

As of April 2021, Sievwright had built over 100 of the shelters, with a crew of 40 volunteers. [1]

Sievwright was the subject of the 2023 documentary Someone Lives Here . [12] The film won Best Canadian Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival. [13]

Related Research Articles

Toronto Life is a monthly magazine about entertainment, politics and life in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Toronto Life also publishes a number of annual special interest guides about the city, including Real Estate, Stylebook, Eating & Drinking, City Home and Neighbourhoods. Established in 1966, it has been owned by St. Joseph Communications since 2002. Toronto Life has a circulation of 87,929 and readership of 890,000. The magazine is a major winner of the Canadian National Magazine Awards, leading current publications with 110 gold awards including 3 awards for Magazine of the Year in 1985, 1989, and 2007. Toronto Life also won the Magazine Grand Prix award at the 2021 National Magazine Awards, with the jury writing that it is "alert to the cultural moment, bold in its journalistic exposés, up-to-the-minute in its services reportage and smart about the platforms it uses to deliver content to readers. The issues its editorial team assembled during the pandemic showed just how relevant and useful a first-class city magazine can be." It is also known for publishing an annual 50 most influential people in Toronto list.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baby Point</span> Neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Baby Point is a residential neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is bounded on the west by the Humber River from south of Baby Point Crescent to St. Marks Road, east to Jane Street and Jane Street south to Raymond Avenue and Raymond Avenue west to the Humber. It is within the city-defined neighbourhood of 'Lambton-Baby Point'. Baby Point is within the proximity of Jane station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tory</span> Mayor of Toronto from 2014 to 2023

John Howard Tory is a Canadian broadcaster, businessman, and former politician who served as the 65th mayor of Toronto from 2014 to 2023. He served as leader of the Official Opposition in Ontario from 2005 to 2007 while he was leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario from 2004 to 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tent city</span> Temporary housing facility

A tent city is a temporary housing facility made using tents or other temporary structures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dignity Village</span> Encampment in Portland, Oregon, United States

Dignity Village is a city-recognized legal encampment of an estimated 60 homeless people in Portland, Oregon, United States. In the days before Christmas of 2000, a group of individuals living outdoors in Portland established a tent city. It evolved from a group of self-described "outsiders" squatting a city owned land to a self-regulating, city-recognized campground as defined by Portland city code. The encampment is located on land near Portland International Airport, and has elected community officials and constructed crude but functional cooking, social, electric, and sanitary facilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregor Robertson (politician)</span> Canadian politician

Gregor Angus Bethune Robertson is a Canadian businessman and a progressive politician, who served as the 39th mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia, from 2008 to 2018. As the longest consecutive serving Mayor in Vancouver's history, Robertson and his team led the creation and implementation of the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan and spearheaded the city's first comprehensive Economic Action Strategy.

Mad Housers, Inc. is a non-profit corporation based in Atlanta and engaged in charitable work, research and education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shad (rapper)</span> Canadian rapper and broadcaster (born 1982)

Shadrach Kabango, better known as Shad or Shad K, is a Canadian recording artist and broadcaster. He has released 7 full-length albums and 3 EP's since his debut in 2005. He won a Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year in 2011 and 5 of his albums have been shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, the most short-list nominations of any artist in the prize's history. In 2013, CBC Music named Shad the second-greatest Canadian rapper of all time. Shad hosted Q on CBC Radio One from 2015 to 2016 and hosts the International Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary series Hip-Hop Evolution on HBO Canada and Netflix.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lloyd Kahn</span>

Lloyd Kahn is an American publisher, editor, author, photographer, carpenter, and self-taught architect. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is a pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements. His book Shelter (1973) about DIY architecture, has sold more than 250,000 copies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tiny-house movement</span> Architectural movement advocating smaller living spaces

The tiny-house movement is an architectural and social movement promoting the reduction and simplification of living spaces. According to the International Residential Code, a tiny house’s floorspace is no larger than 400 square feet (37 m2). Proponents suggest that tiny homes could offer low-cost, eco-friendly alternatives within the housing market and serve as a transitional housing option for homeless individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in Seattle</span>

In the Seattle King County area, there were estimated to be 11,751 homeless people living on the streets or in shelters. On January 24, 2020, the count of unsheltered homeless individuals was 5,578. The number of individuals without homes in emergency shelters was 4,085 and the number of homeless individuals in transitional housing was 2,088, for a total count of 11,751 unsheltered people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Layton</span> Canadian municipal politician (born 1980)

Michael Layton is a Canadian politician who served on Toronto City Council from 2010 until 2022. Layton most recently represented Ward 11 University—Rosedale. He was first elected in the 2010 municipal election in Ward 19 Trinity—Spadina. Layton did not run for re-election in 2022. In March 2023, Layton became Chief Sustainability Officer at York University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ana Bailão</span> Canadian politician, Toronto city councillor (born 1976)

Ana Bailão is a Canadian politician who represented Davenport on Toronto City Council from 2010 until 2022. She was the deputy mayor of Toronto representing Toronto and East York from 2017 to 2022. Bailão placed second in the 2023 Toronto mayoral by-election, losing to former NDP MP Olivia Chow.

<i>Homeless Jesus</i> Sculpture depicting Jesus as a homeless person

Homeless Jesus, also known as Jesus the Homeless, is a bronze sculpture by Timothy Schmalz depicting Jesus as a homeless person, sleeping on a park bench. The original sculpture was installed in 2013 at Regis College, a theological college federated with the University of Toronto. Other copies of the statue were installed in several other locations beginning in 2014. As of 2017, over 50 copies were created and placed around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area</span>

The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.

<i>Santa Quest</i> 2014 Canadian film

Santa Quest is a 2014 pseudo-documentary film that follows Canadian actor John Dunsworth as he rekindles his faith in Santa Claus and represents Canada at the Santa Winter Games in Sweden in an attempt to become the world's best Santa Claus. The film was produced by Tell Tale Productions Inc had its world premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival in September 2014.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto is a viral pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), localized in Toronto. Toronto is the most populous city in Canada, and the fourth most populous city in North America.

Naheed Dosani is a palliative care physician based in Ontario, Canada, who founded and leads the Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless (PEACH) program. For his efforts in providing mobile healthcare to individuals with vulnerable housing or are homeless, Dosani has received a Meritorious Service Cross from the Governor General of Canada (2017), and a Canadian Medical Association Award for Young Leaders (2020).

The COVID-19 pandemic made homelessness in Toronto more visible, due to the rise of encampments in public parks. However, homelessness in Canada had been an issue of widespread concern long before the pandemic's arrival. A 2016 report found that at least 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness in a year, and 35,000 Canadians experience it on a given night. A Nanos survey found in 2020 that 72% of Canadians believed it was urgent to work toward ending homelessness in Canada. A 2020 report from the Wellesley Institute argues that there were disproportionately higher rates of evictions in Black neighborhoods, and that Black residents were among the worst hit by COVID-19. As part of its stay at home order in March 2020, the Ontario government instated a ban on evictions, however this was lifted with the emergency order in June 2020. The Ontario government however made evictions easier, according to some critics, due to its passage of Bill 184 which allowed landlords to bypass the Landlord and Tenant Board. One advocacy group deemed the cascading effects of Bill 184 'a bloodbath of evictions'. By December 2020, Toronto tenants were calling for a reinstatement of the moratorium on evictions. The crisis conditions of the pandemic lead to an increase in organizing against what many homelessness advocates deemed to be social murder of the city's unhoused. This ranged from legal lawsuits against the city's shelter system to calls for a city plan that would address the large numbers of unhoused people camping outside, to suits against encampment evictions, to large scale protests against the clearings of public parks. The Covid-19 encampments are best understood as emerging out of a longer history of urban informality in Toronto.

<i>Someone Lives Here</i> 2023 Canadian documentary film

Someone Lives Here is a 2023 Canadian documentary film, directed by Zack Russell. The film profiles Khaleel Seivwright, a carpenter who has launched a project of building small private shelters for homeless people in Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic, against the bureaucratic resistance of the city government.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Porter, Catherine (16 April 2021). "The Carpenter Who Built Tiny Homes for Toronto's Homeless". The New York Times.
  2. "Toronto carpenter builds $1,300 tiny shelters for homeless". youtube.com. Good Morning America.
  3. "Toronto carpenter builds tiny wooden shelters for those experiencing homelessness". CTVNews. 29 October 2020.
  4. "Carpenter urges Toronto to drop injunction over his tiny shelters, arguing legal costs would be better spent on housing the homeless". thestar.com. 22 February 2021.
  5. 1 2 3 Gibson, Victoria (19 February 2021). "City of Toronto files injunction to stop carpenter from erecting wooden shelters for homeless". thestar.com.
  6. "Project to build tiny homes for Toronto's homeless under threat". Broadview Magazine. 20 November 2020.
  7. 1 2 Cecco, Leyland (28 February 2021). "Why Toronto is taking action against a carpenter amid its homelessness crisis". the Guardian.
  8. King, Angelina; Draaisma, Muriel. "City issues warning letter to Toronto carpenter building shelters for unhoused people | CBC News". CBC.
  9. Longwell, Karen. "Toronto's tiny shelter fundraiser hits $200K goal but city still doesn't want them". www.blogto.com.
  10. 1 2 Casey, Liam. "Toronto seeks injunction to stop man from putting tiny shelters for the homeless in city parks | CBC News". cbc.ca.
  11. Urback, Robyn. "Opinion: Toronto's crackdown on tiny shelters is not as callous as it seems". theglobeandmail.com.
  12. Vega, Manuela (2023-07-19). "Tiny shelter carpenter Khaleel Seivwright at centre of Hot Docs' 'Someone Lives Here'". Toronto Star. Retrieved 2024-05-25.
  13. "VIFF announces award winners". The Georgia Straight. 2023-10-05. Retrieved 2024-05-25.