FROM DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

1. Make housing a human right in every neighbourhood

“The realization of housing as a human right is the groundwork of social change and a platform to end homelessness in Toronto. It is the structural shift that can revitalize neighbourhoods and improve housing stability for over 341,000 households across the housing spectrum. Let’s advance the dialogue, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, building by building, by asking the questions: How do we make supportive housing happen here? How do we do our part in ending homelessness? How do we assure that all our family members are appropriately supported in the face of their unique challenges? How do we hold every level of government accountable?

The right to housing cannot be isolated to corners of our city, but must be extended to every neighbourhood, every street, and every multiunit building. It is not a question of whether supportive housing [where on-site social services support the transition to stable housing] will come to your street; it is a question of when and how. You will want to make sure your ideas are heard and that you influence how these projects roll out in the neighbourhood where you live.

If housing is the primary social determinant of health for individuals, it is also a social determinant of health in our city, and we have some work to do.

Access to housing is the rudiment of a healthy life, and by extension, a healthy city. We need to stop the emerging narrative of homeless encampments popping up in a green space near you and get appropriate housing built.” — David Reycraft, Director of Housing Services, Dixon Hall

2. Increase supportive housing, which costs less than a stay in the shelter system

“Treating housing as a human right doesn’t mean putting housing first. It means putting the human condition first. And we’ve seen this approach work elsewhere – here in Winnipeg, and most notably in Finland, which manages a prioritized list of approximately 5,000 people who are chronically homeless. Along with housing, Finland provides community health workers, primary care, mental health support access and much more. In addition to demonstrably benefitting them as individuals and the economy as a whole, this approach has also been proven to centre human dignity.

In Ontario, we’re currently paying between $6,500 and $7,000 a month per homeless person occupying a shelter. A human- and housing-first supportive housing model that truly puts people first would cost less than half that.” — Andrew Baback Boozary, Executive Director, Health and Social Policy, University Health Network

3. Think of homelessness as your problem

“In terms of homelessness, the one single thing that would get us closer to transformational change is a broad attitudinal shift among Torontonians. Many in our community may feel untouched by homelessness, but everyone has a role to play in making sure this is a priority issue to be solved. Neighbourhoods need to embrace new supportive housing developments and services in their communities. Support for densification and openness to multi-tenant rooming houses would also help to create much-needed housing.” — Gord Tanner, General Manager, Shelter, Support and Housing Administration, City of Toronto

4. Treat homelessness like a natural disaster

“If you really think about it, there’s no practical difference between those who lose their homes due to a natural disaster and those who lose their homes due to poverty and policy. And yet, the societal response is completely different. In 2013, a massive flood in Alberta led to the displacement of individuals from 75,000 households. Nobody who was made homeless by that disaster is still homeless today, aside from those who were in shelters or who have since been made homeless by poverty and policy factors.

In a natural disaster, there are clear agreements between municipal, provincial and federal governments on their specific roles and game plans. Treating homelessness with the urgency of a disaster is exactly how Medicine Hat, a small city in southeast Alberta, virtually ended its homelessness problem over the past decade. In addition, Medicine Hat possessed strong local leadership who deployed a clear and decisive homelessness response plan through a coordinated command centre to tackle it.

If someone is made homeless by a disaster, they are often evacuated to a shelter. But the shelter isn’t the final solution, as is often the case with chronic homelessness. Shelters are a temporary stopgap until those individuals can be housed again. In Medicine Hat, the focus became getting people off the streets into [long-term] housing, not just into temporary shelters.

Disaster response plans are also followed by mitigation measures to prevent further devastation caused by a future potential disaster. After the 2013 Alberta flood, stormwater diversions were built along the Bow River to avoid major floods in downtown Calgary. Homelessness through poverty and policy can be similarly avoided. There’s plenty of evidence that providing people with sufficient income and affordable housing will prevent homelessness.

With its coordinated system focused on those mitigation measures, Medicine Hat has been able to drastically reduce its homeless population. While Toronto is a major city with a larger homeless population, the roadmap to creating a fully housed city is the same: Treat homelessness like a disaster and create a proper municipal response plan with support from the provincial and federal governments to end it.” — Tim Richter, Founder, President and CEO, Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH)

5. Take Toronto’s shelter tracker national

“Building a Canada-wide data system to track our homeless population in real time will enable us to prevent homelessness in the most efficient and effective way possible. Tracking this data will help us monitor the inflow and outflow of homeless individuals so we can then figure out what resources are needed where.

Our federal and provincial governments should invest in this database, but ideally, each municipality should also be heavily involved, because homelessness looks different from one place to the next. Therefore, the needs of the homeless individuals will vary depending on the municipality. Toronto requires different housing investments compared to Halifax, for example, because average incomes, rents and housing prices differ.

On a municipal level, Toronto actually already has a template that it can build on to inspire other cities. The information Toronto collects with its Shelter System Flow Data to track shelter inflow and outflow can be expanded into a more comprehensive and coordinated system to support the homeless with housing.” — Alban Joxhe, Director of Transitional Housing, Friends of Ruby

6. Pilot “possibility houses,” like the Austrians have

“In Vienna, our current strategy involves Chancenhäuser – the closest translation is Possibility Houses. They play a big part in our ambition to prevent homelessness from becoming chronic. They offer 24/7 access to emergency accommodation and social assistance by experienced staff members.

There are currently seven Chancenhäuser in Vienna, which accommodate up to 566 men, women and couples and 52 families with underage children. From day one it is more than just a warm place to stay – the staff works with people on plans to change their situation and find a fresh perspective to better their lives.” — Iraides Franz, Spokesperson, Fonds Soziales Wien (Vienna Social Fund)

7. Get to know Toronto’s homeless residents by name

“In Medicine Hat, the city knows every single person experiencing homelessness by name. Their needs are documented so the city can then work on an individual response for each person. After all, homelessness ends one person at a time.” — Tim Richter, Founder, President and CEO, Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH)

8. Revive the national housing program and use it to build a ton of social housing for everyone

“Call me nostalgic, but as a longtime street nurse, I really miss our country’s national housing program. Bring it back. Creating homes is the foundation of health.

From its founding after the Second World War to 1993, when it was eliminated, Canada’s national housing program created 20,000 new units of affordable housing annually. Nearly 30 years later, the 580,000-unit shortfall – 29 years times 20,000 units – is an open wound in the country’s social fabric. In Toronto alone, 3,900 social housing units were built every year but then the funding ended when the program was killed.

During those years, governments spent on average only one per cent of their budgets on housing programs that created co-ops, seniors’ housing, accessible and supportive housing, public housing. Only one per cent.

In the early 2000s, due to growing homelessness, Canadian governments chose to import an American program called Housing First. This program was primarily utilized to house people with serious mental health issues or addictions. Housing First was never ‘Housing for All’ – as in students, seniors, families with children, people with disabilities. It wasn’t even close to a national housing program. Instead, it was more like a smoke-and-mirrors policy that gave the appearance that governments were doing something.

The federal Liberal government’s National Housing Strategy has also been a colossal failure because, like Housing First, it’s not creating housing for all. Just look at the cranes in the sky around Toronto. They’re not building public housing or co-ops.

So I want a fully funded national housing program back. A program that will build all types of social housing: public housing, supportive housing, co-ops, accessible housing, seniors’ housing including long-term care and retirement homes. A program that will create rent supplements so unhoused people today can be fast-tracked into safe housing. A program that will provide funding for rehabilitation and repairs for our existing stock of housing. A program that will create green housing and green jobs.” — Cathy Crowe, Street Nurse and Visiting Practitioner, Toronto Metropolitan University

9. Do more to stem illegal evictions

“Affordable units are lost in droves through evictions, many of which are made in bad faith. A bylaw to prevent renovictions is an expedient way to curb the loss of housing.” — Genrys Goodchild, Communications and Public Affairs Specialist, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO)

10. Allow people deprived of housing to encamp in a park

“If we do not have housing available, and if the shelter system is at capacity and is an unsafe option for many, the city has to recognize that camping in a park may be a last resort, but it is a viable option. After all, at the municipal level, the city must adhere to the Municipal Housing Charter, which includes a commitment to minimizing policies and bylaws that can lead to homelessness. To me, this means repealing those bylaws that make it illegal to encamp in a public park. A municipal bylaw is superseded by international law, the National Housing Strategy Act, the Charter and also the Ontario Human Rights Code, so it is the city that is failing to uphold the law by enforcing lesser bylaws.” — Diana Chan McNally, community and crisis worker (lived expertise with homelessness)

11. Experiment with “managed encampments” – co-run by local government and people who’ve experienced homelessness

“At the moment, Waterloo Region is at a similar crossroads to Toronto. Regional council got in hot water for violently evicting an encampment last winter. As a result, there’s been more of a grace period this fall since council has struggled to find justification for further evictions. Because of this delay in criminalization, unsheltered communities have had more time to build networks of care than in previous years. Because of this, Waterloo Region is in the process of piloting Managed Encampments, which are formally supervised and supported by the local government and those with lived expertise in homelessness.

Examples [of what managed encampments look like] are where residents take turns watching each other’s stuff and cleaning common spaces, or have a conflict management process they follow.

Managed encampments should also be implemented in Toronto. The city needs to work with unsheltered communities, not against them. It also needs to provide funding and support to expand the networks of care that already exist. This requires the city to stop criminalizing unsheltered communities. Instead, unsheltered communities should be seen as sources of knowledge, wisdom and solutions.

The city needs to get comfortable funding these communities so they have the resources to lift each other out of danger. The thousands that are currently wasted on policing, security, lawyers and strategists would go so much further in the hands of the people actually experiencing homelessness.” — David Alton, Facilitator, Lived Expertise Working Group, Kitchener Housing Strategy, Waterloo Region

12. Stop using public funding to build unaffordable rental buildings; move the money into housing for low-income residents

“It’s great that we have the National Housing Strategy Act, but the strategy itself is an abject failure. Two of the strategy’s largest programs, the National Housing Co-Investment Fund [which provides capital for the building of new affordable units] and the Rental Construction Financing (RCF) Initiative [which provides funding to rental-property developers], have produced almost no housing accessible to those in core housing need, let alone those who are middle-income. Money should be reallocated from these programs – in particular, the RCF – and we must restructure our housing strategy to ensure that housing for those who are homeless and extremely low-income is prioritized. This means social housing that is rent-geared-to-income, understanding that the income of Canadians simply isn’t keeping up with the cost of living.” — Diana Chan McNally, Community and Crisis Worker (lived expertise with homelessness)

13. Use city land for public housing, not private development

“At Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC), we see two stories. One is Canada’s lack of commitment to house every person. The other is the challenge of finding affordable housing solutions for the most vulnerable in our city: people who are homeless and struggling with mental health, addiction and trauma.

Creative solutions and partnerships are essential to try to meet demand. Over the years of the homelessness and housing crisis, PARC made decisions to acquire buildings that came on the market to keep housing affordable in the community. This often means we acquire buildings in need of significant repair and upgrading to code – but the risk of losing them to private development or waiting for new development is far greater.

In 2006, the city called for proposals to develop housing on a number of sites it owned. One of those addresses was a vacant rooming house called Edmond Place, after Edmond Yu, who died in a fatal interaction with Toronto police on February 20, 1997. Residents were welcomed into the 29-unit Edmond Place, which is operated by PARC, in 2011. We’ve been able to add three more buildings in the last five years that would have otherwise been lost to private development. Our current portfolio consists of six properties in total.

PARC is just one of over 30 organizations that provide affordable and supportive housing across the city. Cumulatively, we represent about 6,000 units of supportive housing. However, the city has called for 18,000 units over the next 10 years. That’s why we need to devote far more public land to public housing.” — Victor Willis, Executive Director, PARC

14. Make rooming houses safer by regulating them properly

“Rooming houses – that is, multi-tenant homes (MTHs) – are one of the last remaining types of affordable housing in the city. Toronto has dealt with an uneven patchwork of regulations for MTHs for decades. As a result, some tenants end up living in unsafe and hazardous illegal homes, stuck in a dire situation because it’s all they can afford. Bringing everything above board and unifying regulations for MTHs will actually allow them to operate more safely while providing an affordable option for housing.” — Genrys Goodchild, Communications and Public Affairs Specialist, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO)

15. Plug up the private market so affordable units can flourish

“Toronto has to prioritize the preservation of affordable rental housing by ‘plugging the bathtub,’ so to speak. All too often, decision-makers focus on generating new supply through the private market. But it’s worked as well as attempting to fill a bathtub with the drain unplugged.

Even a cursory glance at rental market prices, wages, rates of homelessness and rising evictions demonstrates how spectacularly the private market has failed to provide adequate and affordable housing for everyone. We are losing affordable housing far faster than we provide it. Each year in Canada, 64,000 existing affordable housing units are lost, and 20,000 of those are lost just in Ontario. Housing advocates acknowledge that only relying on the private market to provide affordable rentals does not work. Why won’t our leaders do the same?

One way is to focus on preservation of current rental stock [which means upgrading old buildings instead of selling them for redevelopment]. The great thing about preservation is it’s often a faster and cheaper way to ensure affordable rental housing. One promising example is Toronto’s new Multi-Unit Residential Acquisitions program [which gives funding and incentives to non-profit housing groups to purchase, renovate and operate market rental properties for low- to moderate-income residents, secured as affordable housing for at least 99 years]. This is an encouraging step in the right direction, and Toronto’s new council should do what it can to make acquisition of at-risk rental units a pillar of Toronto’s approach to housing.” — Genrys Goodchild, Communications and Public Affairs Specialist, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO)

This story is part of a year-long multimedia partnership with Maytree, an organization devoted to finding systemic solutions to poverty through a human rights-based approach. WEP is grateful to Maytree for its financial support.

All stories, video series and artwork created through the partnership are being independently produced by West End Phoenix.