It's Saturday afternoon at the Lido Motel and Charmaine's six-year-old son is riding circles in the parking lot on the small bicycle Tracy McDowell brought. "It's raining but he will ride it all day," Charmaine says. The Scarborough woman and her four children have been at the Lido since they were evicted from their apartment Dec. 1. They are part of the overflow of the City of Toronto shelter system. For 24 years, the city has put homeless families in motels, and in the late 1990s, 1,100 people a night were housed in this way, some in motels as far away as Hamilton. The practice was worrying residents of communities along motel strips of Kingston Road, where, said a 1999 city report, "up to one-third" of school populations were temporary and those children were likely to leave after some weeks or months.
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