Let them eat vegan cake, while sitting in a terrarium next to a former homeless encampment

My friend John, who keeps his eyes and ears on the zeitgeist, blogged the other day on a new restaurant in Toronto. The title of his post – More signs of the age of guillotines – gives a bit of his thinking away.

Dinner With A View:

…just wanted a pop-up restaurant that was highly Instagrammable, because why do anything that doesn’t generate some good Instagram? But they didn’t think about the optics of taking a site where a homeless encampment was just swept away and serving $150 dinners in little terrariums.

That’s right.

The City of Toronto, citing public safety, recently swept away the non-homes of the homeless, who were living in their tarp shelters, sheltered from the elements by a highway overpass.

With John, I’m not anti-expensive dinners. I’ve been known to eat out at really nice places. With John, I’m not someone who needs to make every experience Instagrammable. (Au contraire…) With John, if someone wants to eat in a terrarium, have at it. And with John I feel that:

Doing it in a place where until recently the most marginalized people in your community were trying to find a place to sleep without freezing to death is a bit clueless, though.

As it happens, through my volunteer work, I’m acquainted with a number of homeless folks.

They come into St. Francis House for a shower, for breakfast or lunch, for some clean clothing. Some of them come in for more: help finding housing, help getting back on track with their lives, legal assistance, medical care, mental health counseling, a spiritual lift, the chance to be a bit creative in the art room.

We do have some units of permanent housing, and on an emergency basis, we have had folks stay overnight, but St. Francis House is primarily a day shelter for the homeless and for the just plain poor. People sleep overnight somewhere else (including some in their own homes), and hang with us during the day.

Many of our guests who are homeless spend the night in a shelter like the Pine Street Inn. Others opt to sleep rough. Sometimes it’s because shelters make them crazy. Sometimes it’s because you can’t drink or do drugs in a shelter. Sometimes it’s because they want to stay with a mate, and the shelters don’t offer co-ed sleeping arrangements. Sometimes it’s just because. And sometimes it’s because they’ve built up a community in a homeless encampment.

I have no doubt that the Toronto homeless encampment closed do to make way for Instagram terrarium dining was a dangerous and nasty place.

The reasons why people find themselves experiencing homelessness are varied, but the prime ones are mental illness, substance abuse, criminal past, and living on the economic margins where it’s pretty difficult to recover from an unfortunate event like losing your job or getting hit with a rent increase. (The one thing that every homeless person I’ve ever met has in common, by the way, is bad luck.)

Yesterday morning, I had a conversation with a fellow who works as a sausage vendor at Fenway Park, and at Bruins and Celtics games. He spends part of the days he’s not working at St. Francis House, but he sleeps at the Pine Street Inn. Unless he’s working a night game – and most games are. Pine Street closes its gates at 7 p.m. So, on game nights, this fellow sleeps on a couch in the warehouse where the sausage carts are stored. He’s trying to save up enough to get a place of his own, but, as you can imagine, this is pretty hard to do. But he lives like homeless people live: on the edge. For some, the edge is under a highway overpass.

Anyway, I’ve seen encampments from a distance, and I have no fantasies about them being swell places. Still, for some in Toronto, it was home, and the juxtaposition (time- and location-wise) of shutting down an encampment and in short order and nearby, opening up a precious little “concept dining” spot, well…

Dinner with a View had nothing to do with rousting out the homeless. And they were working with a non-profit that does arty multi-culti things in the under the highway space. But they might have thought this through a bit better.

They were, however, thinking loftier thoughts, like wanting to offer:

A completely luxurious dining experience in a highly unexpected setting. The adventure begins as guests are ushered into a unique outdoor space - a wondrous environment perfect for sharing via social.

Our domes are transformed into terrariums with distinct terrains. A terrarium is an elegant encapsulation of an ecosystem; a living biosphere captured in time. Here, we bring that notion to life inside our domes, each corresponding to a different region of the earth’s terroir: tundra, tropical, grasslands, arid and boreal forest. These extraordinary spaces are designed using resplendent materials such as live flora, luxurious textiles and elegant illumination…

Artistic spectaculars will frame the stage which will offer opportunities to capture that perfect photograph against an iconic urban background. Source: Dinner with a View).

Wonder if they removed all traces of the encampment detritus: blue tarp, grocery carts, torn sleeping bags with the stuffing falling out, or let them stay to create some atmosphere. After all, homelessness is another iconic urban background, isn’t it?