The City of Toronto, accompanied by police and security guards, cleared an encampment outside the Church of Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields near College and Augusta streets on Thursday, after a fire hazard order from the fire department.
The church and the city received the order from Toronto Fire Services on Tuesday to remove “combustible materials” from “public and private” property at 103 Bellevue Ave. by 1 p.m. Thursday.
Toronto Fire told the Star in an email the site had increasingly accumulated “combustible materials and ignition sources, resulting in elevated fire and life safety risk that require immediate action to mitigate the fire safety risk.”
As of Wednesday, 12 people remained at the Kensington neighbourhood encampment. On Thursday, city outreach workers offered shelter spaces and “homelessness supports” to residents, a spokesperson for the city told the Star.
No encampment residents resisted.
While some agreed to move to a shelter, Rev. Maggie Helwig — who received the order from the provincial Fire Marshal’s Office — said the residents were “coerced” into doing so and had “no choice” because they were threatened with having their homes torn down.
“People are just being scattered and dispersed and torn away from community and torn away from supports, and that makes people more traumatized and makes everything more difficult,” she said.
City spokesperson Elise von Scheel told the Star there had been three fires at the encampment this year, and that the “accumulation of debris” was such that if a fire broke out, people wouldn’t be able to get out fast enough.
“People’s health and safety really is at risk,” von Scheel said. “That’s the call that Toronto Fire has made, and so at that point, we have an obligation,” she said, adding the order meant the city had to speed up the process.
The city used heavy machinery to clear the site and then on Thursday evening began placing concrete blocks where the encampment had been. An encampment at Dufferin Grove Park was also cleared with construction equipment last month and arrests were made when people returned earlier this month. The Dufferin Grove encampment was taken down after months of city staff offering shelter spaces to those residents and, for some, housing.
At the Kensington site, residents and church members had been organizing and removing belongings since at least 8:30 a.m., and by 2 p.m. church members confirmed to city staff that there no residents left on site.
The church stored items residents asked them to hold onto — suitcases, bags of clothes, and miscellaneous items like a lacrosse stick and a tool box — but most of their things remained outside.
About 50 observers watched from the sidewalk of the church on the north end of Kensington Market, including encampment supporters, church workers and volunteers, passersby and media.
Earlier in the day, Cidalia Da Silva, who said she works in the area, expressed some relief at city staff and residents clearing the encampment, calling it an “eyesore” that had been there for years.
Other passersby heckled police and city staff, while some shouted, “Shame on you!” and “These are my neighbours you’re evicting!”
The site had been home to the encampment for years, although the city partially cleared it in 2023.
Helwig said the church would have faced hefty fines from the fire marshal if they hadn’t complied with the order, but added the church won’t turn away anyone who returns.
“If people come to us for help, we do not send them away,” she said. “That is a basic position of the church.”
On Wednesday night, the city awarded Helwig with the 2025 Toronto Book Award and a $20,000 prize for her for book, “Encampment: Resistance, Grace and an Unhoused Community.”
Don Oravec, a juror for the award who observed the encampment Thursday, said Helwig’s book has a powerful message for Toronto and how it deals — or fails to deal — with homelessness.
“They bulldoze these places, but they don’t have a plan for how to house them, how to take care of them,” Oravec said. “These are people, in some cases, that are mentally unwell and I think it’s cruel not to come up with a solution to this problem.
“I mean, we’re one of the richest countries on the planet, and we can’t solve this problem. Something doesn’t feel right to me.”