A blueprint for ending homelessness in Toronto
Experts advocate turning hotels, rental buildings into permanent housing
City officials and housing advocates are vowing not to return to the status quo when it comes to managing homelessness postcoronavirus.
Easy remedies such as simply adding more beds to the burgeoning shelter system in Toronto just won’t cut it anymore, officials say.
“What we are focusing on in (post-COVID economic) recovery is to try to pivot away from the call to expand the shelter system,” says Mary-Anne Bedard, general manager of Toronto’s shelter support and housing administration.
“All we’re doing there is creating a bigger net but with no pathway out of that net.”
Crafting a pathway out of that net starts with permanent housing, city officials say.
“We’ve put homeless people in hotels or community centres and when (the pandemic) is over we could just say, ‘Let’s take everybody back into the shelters.’ What we’re saying is, ‘No, there is a better way to do this,’ ” says Coun. Ana Bailao, council’s housing advocate. “Because if you do some investments now, you end up saving money in operations costs and you get permanent solutions.”
Turning hotels and private rental buildings used to shelter the homeless during the pandemic into permanent affordable and supportive housing is one tool that is being seriously pursued.
The Star asked experts what will end, not manage, homelessness in the city when the virus wanes.
First came a warning that Toronto will always need an emergency shelter system because there will always be people, who for reasons such as job loss or family breakup, fall into homelessness for a short time. They make up the vast bulk of shelter users: 80 per cent, according to the city, who need a bed for about four months before they are back on their feet. They typically need the shelter system only once in their lifetimes.
Rather, experts argue, the objective should be to end chronic homelessness — situations where people are trapped in a cycle of homelessness, living for extended periods, sometimes years, in shelters or on the streets. It’s about $60,000 a year cheaper to house someone with proper supports than to keep them in a shelter, the city says. “How do we end chronic homelessness? We do that through the provision of new affordable housing and through the provision of supportive housing,” says Coun. Joe Cressy, chairperson of Toronto’s board of health, and a member of the city’s economic and community development committee.
In the midst of this pandemic, the city has taken extensive steps to curb the spread of the coronavirus among the homeless, including leasing hotels to accommodate social distancing and taking down outdoor encampments where homeless people sleep and congregate, thus increasing chances for the virus to spread.
As of last Friday, there were 146 active COVID-19 cases among shelter users (382 cumulative cases) and four deaths. (Of the 146 active cases, three were from the hotel program and those people have since been moved to the city’s COVID-19 recovery site.)
Meanwhile, a group of local experts including the anti-poverty organization Maytree, the Alliance to End Homelessness, the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations, landlords and others have been meeting to give the city input on how to solve chronic homelessness in a smart way, particularly postCOVID.
About 26,000 people used Toronto’s shelter system last year, a system that provides about 7,000 beds, each costing up to $45,000 a year to operate.
To ease the crowding in shelters and accommodate social distancing, the city leased 15 hotels to temporarily house 1,300 people. The city is keen to turn many of these properties into permanent housing.
“As we are leasing hotel properties, in the lease there is a first right of refusal. If the owner is interested in selling they would have those discussions with us first. Our real estate division would look at the lease payments we’ve been making and negotiate having that recognized in the purchase price,” Bedard explained.
There is precedent for buying properties in this way, although no purchases have been made since the pandemic began. When Toronto opened a winter respite shelter in 2017, it initially leased the building and the lease payments were deducted from the purchase price.
The city continues to have talks with the owners of the hotels currently used to house the homeless. Among them are hotel chains realizing that it will take some time, perhaps years, for the tourism industry to fully recover.
“So what are the opportunities for them to perhaps look at their portfolio of properties and identify ones that even in good times weren’t necessarily performing well?” Bedard says.
The city has also reached out to the provincial and federal governments to form economic “recovery-oriented partnerships” in which the city is hoping for stimulus money to use toward the purchase, renovation and conversion of properties including hotels and private apartment buildings.
David Reycraft is housing services director with Dixon Hall, a non-profit, multi-service agency that operates shelters and helps the homeless, seniors and other needy people in Toronto. He’s a big proponent of turning hotels into permanent housing for the homeless, noting it has been done in other jurisdictions, including Vancouver and New York City.
“The hotel option can be successful,” Reycraft says adding that Dixon Hall has moved more than 100 clients from its shelter into Toronto hotels.
Non-profit groups can provide the supportive network — mental health supports, employment counselling, peer support etc. — to residents living in the hotels when they become permanent dwellings for the homeless, he says.
“This is also an opportunity for community agencies like Dixon Hall, Fred Victor and the Salvation Army to flex their muscle and demonstrate that we know how to solve and end homelessness,” Reycraft adds. “It’s not my desire as director of (Dixon Hall) to be opening up other shelters.”
Emily Paradis, a Maytree fellow, believes that in the same way our governments have established a health-care system that provides for the needs of everyone in Canada, we need our housing system to do the same. The pandemic will result in rental housing units coming on the market, she says.
“We need to ensure that the city, federal government and non-profits are in a position to acquire those assets when they become available. Otherwise if international investment firms acquire them we’ll see an entrenchment of the terrible dynamics we’ve seen in Toronto’s rental market in the last 10, 15 years where rents continue to increase and the market is driven by profit-driven investors, instead of being driven to meet the needs of tenants,” Paradis says.
“As part of our National Housing Strategy, there should be something that enables cities and non-profits to come to the table quickly and nimbly as those assets become available.”
An example of this occurred last week when the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre, a nonprofit that supports the homeless and those with mental health and addiction challenges, acquired a 39-unit building on Queen Street West for $7 million, a purchase made possible with financial support from the city’s affordable housing office and organizations in the city.
The organization now operates 110 units across South Parkdale, a neighbourhood where almost 90 per cent of residents are renters and more than 30 per cent live in poverty, PARC says.
“Landlords are increasingly deciding to sell either to developers, who want to upgrade to higher rents or condos, or to international investors who take revenues out of our economy. When this happens, there is nowhere else for our neighbours to go and we lose local community benefits,” PARC says.
When PARC buys existing lowincome housing from private sector landlords, residents’ “homes are safe and secure, and they are welcomed into our meal, employment and healthrelated programs.”
Meanwhile, the city’s HousingTO 2020 to 2030 action plan is targeting moving 18,000 people out of the shelter system and into supportive housing in that 10year period, 1,800 people a year.
The action plan calls for increased funding from the city, province and federal government, and for Ottawa to “enhance and extend efforts under the National Housing Strategy, and the provincial government to commit to increasing income supports and supportive housing options to vulnerable people.”
The overall plan is expected to cost the three levels of government about $23.4 billion over 10 years. The city plans to increase its investments by $3 billion, mostly to support the creation of 20,000 new affordable rental and supportive housing units.
Supportive housing units are for people with serious health, mental health and addiction issues. There’s also a big population in shelters of people with intellectual disabilities who can’t live independently and would benefit from supportive housing, the city says.
“It’s far cheaper and more dignified to provide housing to a person with an intellectual disability in supportive housing rather than in a shelter where, quite frankly, they are quite vulnerable,” Bedard says.