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Lessons in how to fix Toronto’s homelessness problem


As Toronto’s homeless population swells, other jurisdictions are pioneering solutions.

In Wales, a “duty to assist” law passed in 2015 requires local governments to provide rental debt relief and access to housing for everyone who seeks assistance. 

Peter Mackie, a leading expert in the field of housing and homelessness at Cardiff University, says that the law “has massively reduced” the numbers of people in temporary accommodation and living on the streets. According to his research, some 67 per cent of individuals at risk of going homeless have been helped by the law. Another 47 per cent of individuals on the street have been able to find accommodation.

Some homelessness persists despite the law, Mackie says, because of funding issues and because no central department has been set up to ensure that regional governments comply. (The law only requires that governments make “reasonable efforts” to help those in distress, leaving some local authorities to make do with the resources they have.) 

That’s what happened in England, which copied Wales’s duty to assist law but failed to put the necessary resources behind it. As a result, the most vulnerable people are slipping through the cracks.

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Samuel Engelking


MEANWHILE, IN WALES

I spoke to Daniel and Shawn after a meeting of a Wales homeless charity where they both volunteer.

Daniel first became homeless at age 17. After years on the street and in crowded accommodations, he is finally housed, but it hasn’t been easy.

He says that mental health support wasn’t offered when he entered the system. It took two years in temporary accommodation to secure a flat. He credits his volunteer work with making the biggest difference in his life. “It keeps my mind occupied and out of trouble.”

Shawn, meanwhile, continues to experience homelessness. As a single, drug-free male, he’s a lower priority in a system that emphasizes more vulnerable people.

The bureaucracy can be complicated. “It’s only when you can go through their red-tape system of being written down in enough people’s books that some member of an authority says ‘no’ or ‘yes, we need to help this guy.’”

Mackie suggests that besides reforming duty to assist, a robust duty to house could make the biggest difference for most people. “An absolute duty to house shifts the responsibility back to the state. If it can’t house people, then it must build more housing.”

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Samuel Engelking


HOUSING FIRST IN FINLAND

Finland has earned plaudits for its duty to house policy, or Housing First, which unconditionally offers rental homes to anyone experiencing homelessness or at risk.

Juha Kaakinen, CEO of the Y-Foundation, an affordable housing developer and fourth-largest landlord in Finland, says the policy “is based on a simple idea [that] housing is a basic human right and a foundation for life.” 

Under the policy, the number of street homeless is down two-thirds since 2008. Most shelters have been renovated into supportive housing with individual flats and on-site support staff. There are only 52 emergency shelter beds for all of Helsinki.

While Finland’s homelessness numbers pale next to Toronto’s, Kaakinen stresses that scale only matters when it comes to the ratio of permanent housing to temporary accommodation. “Temporary accommodation in shelters tends to tempt homeless people to move to bigger cities and then you think that more shelters are needed. That’s not the way to end homelessness,” he says.

Even in Finland, some homelessness persists because there isn’t enough affordable housing. But steady progress is being made on that front through two related policies: guaranteed social housing for low-income people (backed by 40-year state loans), and a requirement that at least 25 per cent of new urban housing developments be affordable.

“It is a question of systemic change from temporary to permanent housing solutions,” Kaakinen says. “Of course it helps with financing that Housing First is a national policy, not just individual small projects,” he adds. “So maybe the most important requirement, after all, is political will.”

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Samuel Engelking


AUSTERITY TRAP

If there is one through-line in the Welsh and Finnish examples that can be applied here, it’s that no tweak of policy or law alone can succeed under conditions of austerity.

Where the duty to assist works in Wales, it’s often because local governments find private rentals that they did not previously know existed. That would be hard to imagine in Toronto, where the vacancy rate is hovering around one per cent. More than 102,000 households were on the active wait list for subsidized housing in early 2019.

Existing prevention programs are also restrictive. The city’s Housing Stabilization Fund (HSF) is only available to those who receive social assistance. HSF does not provide funds for those at risk of homelessness.

Toronto Rent Bank’s interest-free repayable loans are meant to temporarily help people facing eviction who have a sustainable income source. 

But Gladys Wong, who helps run the program, says there has been a noticeable decline in landlord referrals in recent months. That trend is concurrent with reports of double-digit rent increases a year after the Ford government lifted rent controls on new units. Meanwhile, those waiting for supportive housing remain in shelters, hospitals, rooming houses or other forms of housing that don’t meet their needs for an average of five to seven years.

Melanie Redman, head of national youth homelessness coalition A Way Home, and Stephen Gaetz, head of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, have co-authored a report calling for a duty to assist law for youth experiencing homelessness in Canada. Half of all people experiencing homelessness in Canada have their first experience before the age of 25.

Their proposal calls for a duty to offer support much sooner than in Wales, and an ombudsperson to ensure municipalities meet their obligations. Preventing youth homelessness would shrink the overall homeless population, and, in the long run, that could make chronic homelessness solutions like duty to house an easier sell.

In addition to offering policy prescriptions, Redman and Gaetz are currently piloting a duty-to- assist project in Hamilton that helps educators identify young people who may be in distress.

“We have to retool the entire social system, not just the homelessness system, to be able to ensure that whatever duties or rights we put in place can be actualized,” Redman says.

Their joint housing first initiative is being tested at 12 sites in 10 communities across Ontario and Alberta, and expanding to additional sites in Ontario and British Columbia this spring. These projects focus on youth exiting care, youth exiting corrections and Indigenous youth, led by Indigenous service providers. 

“We have found that one of the most useful things we can do is to develop tangible examples that we can point government to,” Redman says

They also give credit to their counterparts doing meaningful on-the-ground work, like Raising the Roof, which has a program that partners with municipalities to renovate derelict housing units and lease them to organizations working with vulnerable young people to provide more housing.

Redman and Gaetz say the current system focuses on emergency responses at the expense of prevention and long-term relief. But they both see signs that Canada is moving in the right direction, pointing out that housing as a human right is now enshrined in Canadian law. 

Redman describes the federal government’s National Housing Strategy – which plans to create up to 125,000 new housing units and cut chronic homelessness by half – as “a step in the right direction” that could spur action by other orders of government. A $1.4-billion Canada-Ontario rental housing benefit was also announced last month, and the feds announced over $600 million for Indigenous housing in 2019.

The new Toronto housing plan promises that the three orders of government will spend billions on, among other things, 40,000 new affordable housing options, including 18,000 supportive housing units.

A staff report tabled this week presents a road map to create 600 supportive housing units in 2020. But that’s short of its goal of 1,800 units, which is one-tenth of the 18,000 promised by 2030. The explanation offered is a lack of funding.

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