He slept on night buses and in a storage locker to avoid homeless shelters
John Grant Yusak spent 6 months seeking out spots to pass the night in Ottawa
Three days before Christmas, John Grant Yusak was evicted from the closest thing he'd had to a home in months.
It was a storage locker.
At six feet tall, he could barely squeeze into the space. He piled up his bins, laid an air mattress on top and wrapped himself up in a sleeping bag. He called it "reasonably comfortable."
"I was at the storage locker for about a month before I got discovered," he said. "Somewhere I slipped up, but I tried very hard to be inconspicuous … it was just get in there, crash, get up."
It was the end of a six-month journey that took Yusak from his truck to an airport waiting room to an all-night bus circuit, as he tried every option he could find to avoid ending up at a homeless shelter after a previous bad experience.
City staff estimate about 218 people are living unsheltered in Ottawa.
That number includes people staying in informal arrangements like cars when staff come across them, but the city doesn't keep a specific count of how many fall into that category.
"We almost have no way of getting data on those folks," said Kaite Burkholder Harris of the Alliance to End Homelessness. "We have no data that would help us to understand."
Yusak's own anecdotal impression is that the number is high — much higher than the city's estimate. As security guards pushed him from one resting place to the next, he spotted others living just like him, sleeping at bus stations or parked at Walmart.
Mikyla Tacilauskas, manager of outreach and housing services at the Salvation Army in Ottawa, said it's usually been hard to come across people in that situation: they often don't want to be found.
This year, the sheer numbers are making them harder to miss.
"We're seeing more and more people who hold full-time jobs sleeping in their vehicles in parking lots," Tacilauskas said. Her outreach team sees them on a daily basis.
"I'm very confident that my programs are missing quite a few of these individuals," she said.
'They weren't waiting for flights'
Yusak's journey started after a dispute with his landlord, who gave him an eviction notice in April. Since the landlord lived in the same dwelling, Yusak had no legal recourse. He was out in June.
"I didn't have anywhere to go," he said.
Yusak had stayed at the Ottawa Mission once before, years ago. He found it dangerous. This time, he thought it would be safer and cleaner to stay in his truck — so he pulled it into a Walmart parking lot.
He noticed he had neighbours.
"There was easily, at least, consistently seven to eight people that were living out of their vehicles," he said.
"And I'm not talking RVs. There was a beat-up little Corolla with its right back window punched out, where two guys were in the car with two dogs."
Yusak's vehicle was later impounded, so he had to find another option. It was early November and the nighttime temperature was dropping below zero.
His first stop was the Ottawa International Airport. He estimates about a half dozen people were living there too.
"They weren't waiting for flights," he said. "They were looking for a warm place to stay."
After about eight nights, Yusak was escorted out of the airport. He still didn't want to go to a shelter, so he turned OC Transpo's night bus routes into his moving home.
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He rode from the airport to Hurdman to Rideau to Barrhaven Centre stations. There, he'd stop at Tim Hortons for a coffee and get back on a bus to Orléans. He'd spend hours on that circuit, nodding off for a few minutes here and there.
"There's a way … of pretty much staying on buses all night," he said. "If you have a bus pass, you can ride as much as you want. Just keep tapping."
Yusak also stayed at hospitals, in a quiet corner with a blanket. A run-in with security guards put him back on the road.
He rode the buses again for a few more days. All that time, Yusak's belongings were in a storage locker. He knew it was warm, so that's where he headed next.
"I'd heard rumours that you weren't supposed to stay in it, but I'd also found a number of articles online where people were doing it anyway because they just didn't have anywhere to live," he said.
"It was a last resort."
'I want to get out of this'
Tacilauskas said there are all sorts of motivations for choosing a bus or a Walmart parking lot instead of a shelter. Like Yusak, some have safety concerns. Others have too many belongings or pets.
"We often see couples who will make the decision to sleep in these more hidden homeless locations, just because there's no shelter that can take couples," she added.
Burkholder Harris of the homelessness alliance added that emergency shelters are overcapacity. While the city has a policy of ensuring no one has to sleep outside and runs its own makeshift shelters in recreation centres, the system doesn't catch everyone who needs it.
"There are still cases of people falling through the cracks," she said.
In November, the most recent month available, an average of more than 2,300 people a night stayed in "temporary emergency accommodations" such as shelters, overflow hotels and physical distancing centres.
The 3,259 people who spent at least one night in these places is more than the population of nearby Merrickville-Wolford and nearing that of Bancroft, Casselman or Prescott.
After leaving the storage locker last month, Yusak finally decided to book into one of those makeshift shelters.
"For a shelter, I would say that I'm reasonably pleased," he said. "Nobody steals your stuff. There's nobody attacking. Everybody's in the same boat there."
In 2023, 317 people moved out of the physical distancing centres for housing, according to the city. Yusak is hoping he will soon join them.
He's working part-time these days and said he's making enough to afford a room.
He just hasn't found anyone willing to take a 64-year-old man as a roommate. Most of the ads he sees are looking for women,young professionals, or international students.
"I don't fit the mould of what people want," he said.
"I want to get out of this," Yusak said. "I want to find a place that I can rent, which is clean. I can have a nice bath. I can cook some food, and then hopefully still live the Canadian dream."
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