A man using a rolling walker walks on the street past tents setup on the sidewalk at a sprawling homeless encampment on East Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, on Aug. 16.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Tim Richter is the president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.
October 10 marked World Homelessness Day, acknowledged at a time when communities across Canada are experiencing a wave of new homelessness, sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated by a cost-of-living crisis that is disproportionately battering low-income households.
Though inflation slowed to 6.9 per cent in September, the price of groceries soared 11.4 per cent. Meanwhile, over the past year, the median rent across the country increased by 7 per cent between the second quarters of 2021 and 2022, according to Rentals.ca; British Columbia saw a 25-per-cent surge in average rent in that time. A single parent in Vancouver or Toronto receiving social assistance is now spending more than 85 per cent of their income on shelter and food alone. And on top of increasing rents and grocery prices, we’ve had a massive spike in gas prices, too.
If someone is already struggling to make ends meet, it is not hard to see how a single jolt or unexpected bill could force them from their home. In one sampling of 19 communities we work with, we found that 70 per cent saw increases in chronic homelessness averaging a whopping 60 per cent between February, 2020, and March of this year.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Despite these significant headwinds, a handful of communities across the country are having success reducing homelessness. Ontario alone has some excellent examples. Guelph-Wellington county has sustained a 30-per-cent decrease in chronic homelessness since 2019. For the same time frame, Ottawa has reduced rates by 15 per cent; Sault St. Marie by 31 per cent; and St. Thomas-Elgin by 19 per cent. Dufferin County is on track to reach functional-zero chronic homelessness very soon, having already reduced it by as much as 74 per cent since 2019.
These examples show it is possible. But in the face of increasing homelessness, we urgently need to redouble our efforts to relieve cost-of-living pressures on the lowest-income households. Here are five measures governments can take right now, based on models used in Canada and elsewhere.
First, Ottawa should build on the Canada Housing Benefit with a federally administered homelessness prevention and housing benefit to provide rent support to people at greatest risk. We know more than 85 per cent of people experiencing homelessness and three-quarters of people in core-housing need (defined as a household living in inadequate, unsuitable or unaffordable housing) are in this position only because they cannot afford proper housing. This benefit would quickly help low-income households stay in their homes, alleviate food bank use and food insecurity.
Second, governments must provide more support for communities to help people living in encampments, in parks and on the street. Reaching Home, the federal government’s national homelessness program, should be expanded with a dedicated program that moves people rapidly out of parks and into permanent housing with the supports they need. The only way to truly resolve encampments is to end the homelessness for the people living in them. This will give municipal governments an effective and humane alternative to police enforcement, while addressing community concerns about disorder.
Third, provincial governments should tackle skyrocketing rents and the erosion of affordability by implementing caps on rent increases. They should also strictly regulate rent increases during periods of vacancy to address the perverse market incentive to evict or “renovict” existing low-income tenants. Since 2011, Canada has lost more than 552,000 low-cost rental units, yet the federal National Housing Strategy has only promised to produce 160,000. We can’t fix Canada’s housing crisis if the gap just keeps getting bigger.
Fourth, all provincial governments should index social assistance to inflation, ensuring those in the greatest need can weather the cost-of-living crisis.
Finally, the federal government needs to fix the National Housing Strategy by increasing the number of affordable housing units it plans to build to at least 350,000, while ensuring that they go to those in greatest need and that the rents are geared to income. Most of the housing produced by the NHS is not affordable by any reasonable measure. Ottawa also needs to urgently address the specific and unique needs of Indigenous peoples with an urban, rural and Northern Indigenous housing strategy.
This work will be significant and expensive – but the cost of doing nothing is far greater. If we implement these policies quickly, we can protect millions of Canadians from hunger and homelessness.