Governing Homelessness Through Land-use: A Sociolegal Study of the Toronto Shelter Zoning By-law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we focus on one particular effort undertaken by the city of Toronto, in the late-1990s, to address the problem of homelessness, namely, the attempt to build more homeless shelters and equitably spread them across the city. We argue that any attempts made by municipal governments to address issues of homelessness — and more broadly, matters of social justice — are bound to run into serious roadblocks, so much so that even the most compassionate and well-intended efforts to provide a temporary roof over the heads of those who find themselves without shelter, are likely to be thwarted, significantly delayed or deviate drastically from their original intentions on the one hand, or at the other extreme, fail miserably. When municipalities attempt to address issues such as homelessness, and matters of social justice more generally, these issues are often funnelled into the awkward machinery of zoning law, one of the few legal fields within municipal jurisdiction. Zoning law governs uses and spaces, not persons. This basic legal fact is shown to have an important effect on the outcome of political conflicts, and this problem is exacerbated when a hot-button issue such as where to locate shelters is opened up for public input and consultation. This case study thus suggests the importance of closely studying the specifics of the legal architecture within which municipal politics are waged. Résumé: Dans cet article, nous nous concentrons sur l'un des efforts entrepris par la ville de Toronto à la fin des années 90 afin de faire face au problème de l'itinérance, soit la tentative de construire davantage de refuges et de les distribuer équitablement à travers la ville. Nous avançons que toutes les tentatives des gouvernements municipaux de résoudre le problème des sans-abris — ou, plus généralement, toute question de justice sociale — se heurtent nécessairement à des obstacles. Même les efforts les plus compatissants visant à fournir un toit provisoire au-dessus de la tête des sans-abris courent le risque de s'enrayer, d'être retardés, ou sensiblement déviés de leurs objectifs originels, voire d'échouer lamentablement. Lorsque les municipalités abordent le problèmes de l'itinérance, ou toutes autres questions liées à la justice sociale, elles doivent souvent faire face à l'encombrante machinerie que sont les règlements de zonage, l'une des rares prérogatives juridiques municipales. La loi de zonage gère les usages et les espaces, mais non les personnes. Ce détail fondamental a un effet considérable sur les résultats des conflits politiques, un problème qui s'aggrave encore davantage lors qu'il y a consultations publiques concernant des sujets chauds, par exemple l'emplacement exact des refuges. Cette étude de cas suggère ainsi l'importance d'étudier étroitement les détails de l'architecture légale, au milieu desquels se joue la politique municipale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".