Reaching Home: Canada's Homelessness Strategy
Why are we hearing next to nothing about this very ambitious plan?
Reaching Home: Canada's Homelessness Strategy is a community-based program aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness across Canada. This program provides funding to urban, Indigenous, rural and remote communities to help them address their local homelessness needs.
Reaching Home supports the goals of the National Housing Strategy, in particular,
to support the most vulnerable Canadians in maintaining safe, stable and affordable housing and to reduce chronic homelessness nationally by 50% by fiscal year
2027 to 2028.
Are there any signs anywhere in Canada that shows that our present federal government, under the Liberal–NDP alliance, has made any progress on meeting any of their homelessness reduction goals?
The feds have the money and the power to make a big dent in the homeless problem so why is their willpower so weak?
They have just 3 1/2 more years until the due date.
Reaching Home: City of Greater Sudbury 2019 – 2024
Community-Wide Outcomes
The City of Greater Sudbury will be reporting on the four federally mandated outcomes, including:
• Chronic homelessness in the community is reduced by 50% by 2027-28;
• Homelessness in the community is reduced overall, and for priority populations
(i.e. individuals who identify as Indigenous);
• New inflows into homelessness are reduced; and,
• Returns to homelessness from housing are reduced.
Will Sudbury come close to meeting these objectives?
The number of homeless in Sudbury has more than trebled in the last 2.5 years while the number of shelter beds had a slight decrease.
The number of homeless in Sudbury has more than trebled in the last 2.5 years while, on a monthly basis, the number of homeless that were housed dropped into the zero to negative range.
It used to be that governments would build public housing, in effect bare bones apartment buildings or townhouses, with subsidized rents, for those who couldn’t otherwise afford to rent or buy. It has come to light recently in Nova Scotia that many of these units are vacant, because it takes forever to do the repairs when long term tenants move out. Other units were built for families and are now occupied by single senior citizens, because nobody wants to evict them from their home, so the capacity is greater than the occupancy. Other units have been occupied for years by people who needed a leg up way back in the day, but now have a good income and are simply happy to enjoy the low rent. The bottom line seems to be that the public housing stock has been mismanaged. Lots of people on the waiting list while there are lots of empty units and under occupied units. Nothing new gets built, even though the demand is there.
More recently, the buzzword is “affordable housing”. The idea seems to be that government will bribe landlords to provide a certain number of units at a reduced rent. Considering how long this latter strategy has been operational, I would love to see a report telling me how many units have been created and what effect it has had in meeting the need. My sense is that landlords pay lip service to the concept, other tenants aren’t happy that some folks are getting subsidized rents, and nobody is overseeing the entire mess. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the affordable units never actually “happen”.
If some level of government wants to make something happen in a hurry, they should build a bunch of public housing and then manage it properly. It’s visible, manageable, affordable, and can be quite standard in terms of design, etc., so there are probably economies of scale.