He slept on night buses and in a storage locker to avoid homeless shelters

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.

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.