Work together to get it built
A shelter bed is the worst and most expensive way to house someone who doesn’t have a home.
Yet the City of Toronto has more than 6,000 of them already and faces a seemingly never-ending push to open more to cope with a crisis in homelessness.
It’s particularly infuriating since there are far better and less costly ways to help those in need. And they’re well known.
It’s affordable housing for those who just don’t have enough income to find a place to live, and supportive housing for people with mental challenges and addictions who need additional support to maintain a home of their own.
Politicians and bureaucrats at the city, provincial and federal levels have countless reports detailing all this. And yet all governments can’t seem to come together to produce enough of the better housing. As a consequence, people in need are left with nothing but the shelter system that warehouses them at night and sends them back on the streets every morning, clutching their belongings.
For want of $2,000 to do the right thing for people in need of supportive housing, we spend $3,300 in normal times and a whopping $6,600 in pandemic times on a shelter bed for them. It makes no sense.
The latest example of this collective failure is Toronto’s unfunded plan to build more than 1,200 new units of supportive housing.
The plan is a mix of existing city-owned social housing units, acquiring and renovating new spaces such as offices or hotels and building new modular homes that can be put up quickly. The city has the right idea. And it has secured more than $200 million in federal funding to build and convert spaces.
But Toronto needs provincial funding to provide ongoing supports such as mental health and addiction services, which should properly come from the health budget. And, so far, that’s missing in action.
Where the need for something is so obviously pressing, Toronto council has in the past budgeted the money upfront and then launched what amounts to a begging campaign to get the province to keep it going.
This time the city hasn’t done that. Toronto’s 2021 budget goes to council for final debate and approval starting Thursday without the funding for the wraparound health services these homes need.
If the province doesn’t come forward with the $15.4 million needed immediately (and $26 million on an annual basis after that) the city’s plans for this supportive housing will grind to a halt next month. The city has funding to put support services into only about 10 per cent of the planned units.
The city’s budget move basically amounts to playing a game of chicken with the province to get the supportive housing that’s so clearly needed. It’s ridiculous.
For years governments have known that emergency shelters were, in fact, providing permanent housing for far too many people. The pandemic has made that impossible to ignore.
There’s nothing quite like telling people to distance themselves from one another to drive home the plight of those who don’t have a room of their own, let alone a home.
In record-breaking time Toronto contracted 1,200 hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness in the pandemic and senior governments came through with money. There was virtually no sniping about who’s responsible for what and who should pay.
It was a welcome change from politics as usual that seeks to deflect responsibility, thereby delaying funding and action. It would be tragic if that change was so fleeting.
Toronto is trying to do the right thing by building new supportive housing. But it won’t succeed if Doug Ford’s government doesn’t step up.