City workers dismantled a homeless encampment in the Rosedale Valley on Tuesday morning despite calls from some anti-poverty advocates to abandon the plan.

The city notified those living underneath the Sherbourne Street bridge of their intention to dismantle the encampment last month, providing them with 15-days’ notice to remove their belongings.

According to city spokesperson Brad Ross, street outreach workers then visited the encampment in advance of its dismantling and were able to get everyone there, with the exception of one person who refused help, into city shelters.

He said that when crews arrived at the scene this morning, there was nobody left in the encampment.

Homeless encampment

It should be noted that on Monday CP24 did speak with some people living in the encampment, who said that they planned to leave in advance of city crews arriving but would return later.

“The city cleared out homeless encampments under the Gardiner last year. What happened? Well they are back there. People were in fact back there a few weeks after the encampments were cleared and people are likely going to be back here as well,” Yogi Acharya, of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, told reporters on Tuesday. “That is the reality that the city is facing when you have the demand for shelter far exceeding supply. People have no options and you have to go back on the streets.”

Acharya said that the dismantlement of the encampment and others like it amounts to a “ritual of humiliation and displacement” that only exasperates the growing poverty crisis in the city.

Mayor John Tory, however, has defended the move. On Monday he told reporters that it comes down to a safety issue.

“The bottom line is we can’t have people living in encampments. It is not safe and it is not appropriate to have people living in encampments, so we go out about dismantling those in a very orderly fashion,” he said. “The decisions are made by professional public servants, there is lot of notice given and I can tell you right now that there is space specifically set aside in shelters adequate to house all the people that will be dislocated by the dismantling of the encampment.”