Tiny shelters for the homeless

Every winter, homelessness kills.   This carpenter is building tiny shelters to help people survive Canada's harsh winters.

Transcript

00:00There's all these eviction cases going through courts right now in Toronto and many people are

00:05losing their homes. It's not clear exactly what's going to happen and how many homeless people there

00:12are actually going to be this winter. So it's a little, yeah, it seems a little overwhelming.

00:18I was staying in a community in BC for three years and it's an intentional community and

00:32I figured before I left it'd be nice to build my own sort of living situation. And yeah,

00:39I just made this little shelter out of two by four and it had a bunch of windows and a skylight.

00:45And yeah, I stayed in it in negative 15 and I was comfortable. And then I came back

00:53to Toronto and sort of saw all of these people staying in parks and yeah, it blew my mind,

01:00I guess, to see so many people in parks tenting out. And yeah, I guess I figured this is something

01:06that I could do and sort of took that design and improved it, made it a lot more thermally robust.

01:15I

01:31think everyone's really happy about how warm they are and also how quiet they are.

01:38And just having a sense of security, being able to leave your things and lock them,

01:44know that you're going to be able to come back to them and not be stressed about these things

01:49getting stolen. And also just safety, knowing that there's not going to be someone getting

01:56at you while you're sleeping. We've had one person checking the temperature inside of the shelter

02:12with a thermometer and they have another thermometer outside and it's been consistently

02:1718 to 20 degrees inside, like regardless of the outside temperature.

02:23So

02:38we've been securing different private properties to place the shelters on.

02:43So if they start sending out eviction notices, we'll be going around

02:47and helping people move to areas where they can stay safe.