Sleeping cabins are a considerable success

Three months in, 50 small sleeping cabins that replaced a makeshift tent city in downtown Peterborough are looking like a considerable success.

Both the formerly homeless people living in them and neighbouring homeowners who were initially skeptical see the city-run, provincially funded “cabin city” as a real improvement.

That’s the cautiously optimistic message in an update that goes to city council Monday.

The report also totals the cost of supplying the cabins and related support buildings, providing counselling and support to the residents and maintaining 24-7 security: $2.4 million for up-front construction and $1.9 million annually for operations.

While that’s a lot of money, it’s the going rate. The report notes costs for a similar 50-unit cabin complex in Kitchener are almost identical.

And it’s a bargain compared to supplying more conventional housing. A new apartment building with 50 studio units would cost tens of millions to construct and operating costs would be similar.

Now that the Wolfe Street cabins are up and running, attention is turning to “what’s next.”

When city council agreed to replace the tents instead of clearing homeless people out altogether, it put a two-year time limit on the project. The cabins could stay to the end of 2025, with no guarantees beyond that date.

The sunset clause was probably necessary to win approval for the project.

When the cabins were initially proposed, four councillors voted against them. By the time the plan firmed up it was clear they were a better alternative than the tent city, which was dangerous for both the people living there and the neighbourhood. But the project was framed as a temporary solution, not a permanent addition to downtown.

Without that understanding council might have turned it down. Support would certainly have been weaker.

Monday’s report to council indicates how the project will be monitored and assessed leading up to December. It also notes that two years might not be enough time to “comprehensively assess the success and impact of the program.”

That work needs to be done, but the idea that the cabins might be shut down, or moved elsewhere, should be considered a polite fiction.

The cabins house the most marginalized members of the homeless population. The goal is that counselling and support will allow them to eventually move out, first to transitional housing with less support and perhaps, long term, to a home or apartment where they function completely on their own.

But not all will make that transition in the next two years. And as some do and spaces come up, others in need will fill them.

In short, homelessness is not going away. And even if the province develops more permanent supported housing for this segment of the homeless population — which won’t happen in the next two years — the cabins should stay.

Homelessness is a broad, complex problem with no single solution. But one of the many slogans applied to it over the past decade has stuck: housing first.

Not just housing, though. Housing with support workers, and levels of transition housing designed to move those who are able from one level to the next.

The new golden rule is that once a housing unit for the homeless is created, hold onto it. They are too hard to come by to be abandoned.

The city’s website still refers to a policy of zero homelessness by the end of 2025, another polite fiction.

The way these cabins fit into the long-term network of housing and supporting marginalized people might change, but they will be needed. How that happens, not whether it does, is the understanding everyone should be working toward.