What to know
- Dunn House is expanding with the help of federal and provincial funding in collaboration with Toronto and its public health network.
- The expansion is a result of the tangible success from the project’s first phase that saw reductions in emergency visits and hospital bed days among its tenants – saving the health-care system millions of dollars.
- The project, driven by UHN’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine was received with open arms by the Parkdale community.
Federal, provincial, and city partners have come together to expand the Dunn House project – the country’s first hospital-led social housing initiative.
Under the expansion, 54 additional rent-geared-to-income studio units will be created for the city’s most vulnerable population. It comes shortly after the first phase – launched in October 2024 – marked one successful year of operation.
We announced support for the next phase of Dunn House in Toronto. Using modular construction, it will deliver 54 rent-geared-to-income supportive homes with on-site health supports for people at risk of homelessness.
— Build Canada Homes (@BuildCanHomes) January 22, 2026
Info: https://t.co/rs4kXR9o9T pic.twitter.com/QwRIoJQt0k
Read More
Dunn House Phase 2 is made possible by the $21.6 million federal investment through Build Canada Homes and $2.6 million in annual operation funding from the Ontario government.
Although the operators of Phase 2 have not yet been announced, Fred Victor – the operator of Phase 1 – says it’s “thrilled” about the expansion.
“This initiative reflects the kind of coordinated leadership Canada needs at this moment,” Keith Hambly, CEO of Fred Victor, tells Now Toronto.
“By aligning federal capital investment, provincial operating funding, municipal delivery, health-care partners, and non-profit housing expertise, this partnership shows how governments and community organizations can work together effectively to address homelessness at scale.”
Dunn House is a product of collaboration between many organizations and governments, with its driving force being the University Health Network’s (UHN) Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine.
“Through our social medicine program, we looked at the high-frequency users in our emergency rooms (ER),” CEO of UHN Kevin Smith tells Now Toronto.
To their surprise, they discovered that 215 patients visited the emergency room a total of 15,000 times. That’s on average 70 visits for each of those patients.
“It became clear to us that these folks were not here because they had urgent medical needs. They were here because they were often falling through the cracks of the system for having mental health or addiction issues or for being underhoused or unhoused.”
Dunn House Phase 2 is a result of Phase 1’s success
Preliminary data of the 51 tenants of Dunn House Phase 1 shows a 52 per cent reduction in emergency departmvent visits and a 79 per cent decrease in hospital bed days, equivalent to $2.1 million in predicted savings for the health-care network.
Gattuso Center’s Founding Executive Director Dr. Andrew Boozary tells Now Toronto that Dunn House was initially considered a “radical idea” – one that was “outside of [their] lane of health care.” He believes medical education and practice generally lack holistic evaluation of patients.
“The air people breathe, the jobs they have, their housing conditions and poverty are some of the most powerful drivers of health outcomes,” he says.
“Dunn House is one of the most concrete ways to show that we can interrupt these vicious cycles differently with outcomes that are more human and effective than the way we’ve been doing things conventionally.”
Boozary hopes the data from projects such as Dunn House along with the lived experiences of the city’s most vulnerable will help inform public policy.
“From the food prescribing, peer support work, interventions to housing, and other various ways, … I think this is where we’re able to build this niche of bridging the intersection of hospital and community,” he says.
For UHN, the first Dunn House provided an opportunity for research – to see what role the “conventional” health-care network can play in addressing the social determinants of health, or lack thereof.
“As a leading research hospital, [we are tasked with demonstrating] does this work or not,” Smith says. “And if it doesn’t work, that’s OK. … That, too, would have been our responsibility – to disseminate learned knowledge about our successes and our failures. That’s what research hospitals do.”
Boozary says projects like Dunn House also add to the momentum for the public health sector to employ more holistic approaches.
“We need to be articulating these solutions, these approaches that I believe are being lost in the vitriol and polarization that we’re seeing in the public,” he says.
“We have to keep trying to galvanize this progress and the movement – to build coalitions across various sectors and unconventional partners.”
Parkdale welcomes Dunn House with open arms
When the project was in the works, Smith worried he would face pushback in the form of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard).
“‘I live here,’ ‘What’s their background?’, ‘Will they accept my community?’, ‘Will this affect my property value?’ and all sorts of scary things; they are real issues and [the uncertainty] can be scary,” Smith says.
To his surprise, the community of Parkdale welcomed the project wholeheartedly.
“They became volunteers, they became friends, they welcomed people into the community.”
Although the Parkdale community overall received the project with open arms, it was not to say there wasn’t a little hesitation from some of its residents.
““There are going to be different perspectives on issues and developments, and that’s OK,” Karim Bardeesy, Parkdale MP, tells Now Toronto.
“The question is, how do you work through those issues, and find ways to live together?”
For Bardeesy, that means “a lot of preparation” and “a lot of conversations.”
He attributes the success of the first Dunn House to the fact that its residents worked with the local community. As for Phase 2, the success of the first phase meant the majority of the community did not need much convincing.
“So far we haven’t heard many issues. People are working well together, living well together. I think it’s part of the Parkdale spirit as well,” he says.
The future of social medicine in Toronto and beyond
Beyond Dunn House Phase 2, UHN does not yet have plans to expand its social housing initiative in the near future. However, in the meantime, it is focused on sharing the model so that other cities can use, build on, and benefit from the work they have accomplished.
“Canada is at the leading edge of thinking about civil society, productive society, economically effective society,” Smith says, adding that he hopes conversations leading to projects such as Dunn House continue to be had across the country.
“The level of joint commitment across political lines has been truly remarkable,” Smith says.
“When politicians put their shoulder to the wheel regardless of their political ideology, when everyone agrees that this is about building a better city, a more economically-durable city, it really demonstrates what being Canadian is about, especially at this moment in time.”
