Sudbury roadmap to ending homelessness by 2030
“The poor you will always have with you” (Mark 14:7)
The unsheltered sleeping on Elm Street
City of Greater Sudbury’s elected officials unanimously supported a motion at the 26 September 2023 city council meeting for staff to draft a strategy to end homelessness by 2030. A councillor said: “We need a timeline; we need an aggressive timeline.”
The motion cites a Housing First strategy as an effective solution. Housing First is the foundational policy of the federal and provincial government strategies, and has been used by the city since 2008. The Housing First doctrine has been further confirmed by city council in 2018 and in 2019.
Road map to End Homelessness by 2030
On Tuesday, 28 May 2028, city council passed this proposal. You can download the complete report here.
To end Greater Sudbury’s homelessness in six years, it is estimated that it will cost approximately $350 million. The city would pay about a third of the cost with the province and federal governments paying two-thirds.
This chart shows that so far, Housing First has failed Greater Sudbury’s homeless. The number housed each month in our city has mostly been in the single digits while the homeless population has doubled in each of the last two years.
Revelation 21:3-4 — Our suffering will end in joy.
The hope is that Sudbury’s homeless will suffer living on the streets, or in tents, for no more than a few more years after which they will live a proper home.
A well-trodden path
Many North American governments have made proclamations to eliminate homelessness and all have failed. I have included a list of a few of these well-meaning attempts.
Tents in Vancouver
Housing First
Housing First has been a failure almost everywhere it has been tried. Why? There is not enough 24/7 full-support Single Room Occupied (SRO) units, transitional units or full-support housing to accommodate all of the homeless, especially those with multiple issues.
Housing an addict or a person with serious mental illness in a rooming house and checking on them once or twice a week—or not checking on them at all—doesn’t
cut it.
San Francisco’s 10-year plan (20 years later)
When Gavin Newsom won the 2003 San Francisco mayoral election, he developed a ten-year strategy to end chronic homelessness with "tens of millions" of federal dollars in funding to create 550 "supportive housing" units for the troubled homeless.
Now that he is in his third year as California's governor, 67% of of the state’s homeless population is unsheltered despite California spending $20 billion fighting homelessness over the last five years.
San Francisco’s homeless problem has gone state-wide.
Edmonton’s 2009 ten-year plan
The City of Edmonton is updating its plan to end homelessness, 15 years after it launched the original 10-year plan in 2009.
In 2016, Homeward Trust, which coordinates funding and housing programs in Edmonton, counted 1,752 homeless people. In April this year, 3,262 people identified as homeless.
The goal is to reach what Homeward Trust calls "Functional Zero,"' making homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. The 2024 strategy will have no timeline.
Team Obama’s 10-year plan
It may be hard to believe looking at the current state of major American cities, but 2023 was supposed to be the year that in America, all types of homelessness would be eradicated. That’s what the Obama administration promised in 2013.
Team Obama ignored a harsh reality of homelessness: It is overwhelmingly a problem of untreated mental illness and substance-use disorder.
Tents outside Hamilton city hall
2014 Ottawa’s 10-year plan
Nearly halfway through the city's 10-year mission to end chronic homelessness, it appears no closer to its goal. (2018 CBC News report). Ottawa has seen a dramatic increase in the number of homeless families, while only managing to remove 23 chronically homeless people from the shelter system.
The city spent $9.1 million each year on its Housing First initiative, which was first adopted by the city in 2008 and overhauled in 2014.
Mid-term checkup
In March 2018, councillors sat through a marathon meeting discussing the homeless problem. As city spends $18M per year combating homelessness, councillors ask whether problem will ever be solved. A particularly hot topic was the Housing First initiative, a cornerstone of the plan to end chronic homelessness.
City staff were accused of misrepresenting the success rate of the program.
"How are we doing? We don't know," said Alannah McBride, a research assistant from University of Ottawa.
Ontario’s 10-year plan
Ontario was moving ahead with an ambitious target to end chronic homelessness in ten years by implementing recommendations from an Expert Advisory Panel on Homelessness.
In January 2015, the Advisory Panel was to provide advice on how to achieve the goal of ending homelessness under the province's Poverty Reduction Strategy.
The ten years is up in 2025.
Federal government’s Reaching Home 2018
The Federal government launched a new program called Reaching Home in 2018 with the goal to reduce chronic homelessness, which is defined as someone who has been without a home for at least six months, by 50 per cent.
Despite $443 million in new annual spending—a 374 per cent increase compared to prior spending—the number of people without a roof over their head has grown. The number of homeless increased by 20 per cent compared to 2018 reaching 34,270, and the number of chronically homeless increased by 38 per cent.
“We estimate that achieving a 50 per cent reduction in chronic homelessness would require an additional $3.5 billion per year, approximately a seven-fold increase in funding,” the PBO reports.
Timmins — end homelessness by 2025
Living Space, Timmins’s homeless shelter
Releasing a three-year path to end homelessness by 2025, puts the end date beyond the original target, which has been touted for years.
The initiatives add up to a total of more than $11 million over the three years, not including ongoing annual funding or recommendations beyond the plan's term.
In an interview with TimminsToday, CDSSAB communications manager Cameron Grant said it’s important to note that when they say ending homelessness, they mean to make homelessness extremely rare. “And should it occur, that it happens at a very short period of time,” he said.
Homelessness in Timmins has never been as bad as it is now.
Is Sudbury’s goal achievable?
No.
How can Sudbury succeed when so many others failed?
I think that the city council didn’t factor in:
a.) The timeline is far too short to build the planned 1,036 units.
b.) $350 million is not enough money to build the new units and pay for all the operating costs and the required support and health workers.
c.) The muncipal taxpayers will resist the resulting increase in property taxes.
d.) Not all homeless will be willing to leave the streets and their tents.
e.) Replacements. As the homeless leave the streets, new people will take their place both from our city and from other communities throughout Ontario.
Still, the housing is needed and whatever gets built will be welcomed.
The other thing is that 10 years is longer than the average political lifetime. So, if you’re the politician who comes up with the 10-year plan, you can claim to have laid a solid foundation and blame your successor for failing to make a success of it. On the other hand, if you inherit the 10-year plan, you can claim that your predecessor did nothing while they were in office, leaving you with all the work and not enough time.
If all else fails in the political world, have the staff develop a “10-year plan”. Ten years sounds like it’s long enough for things to get done, while being short enough that it doesn’t look like you’re saying it will never happen. It also allows for “slippage”, in the sense that you’ve got a bit of wiggle room to say you are still in the “planning” stages, when people notice, a couple of years in, that you haven’t done anything concrete.
If not a 10-year plan, then go for something like a 50% reduction by a year ending in 0 or 5. It all has to do with the seeming magic of the base-10 number system that we use. While the best or most realistic outcome might actually be a 37% reduction in something by June, 2028, nobody ever sets a goal like that. It’s always round numbers (multiples of 10). Of course, nobody hits their target anyway, but the round numbers give more wiggle room.
Another trick is to put up 1/3 of the money and say that you expect the other two levels of government to come up with the other 2/3. That way, you look like you are serious AND you have someone to blame when nothing happens.
Leaving all that aside, you are correct. Nobody in the world has solved homelessness. Sudbury will be a world leader if they solve it. I’ve heard of one country in Europe where Housing First allegedly works, but I’m not sure that’s even true.
It is a problem of untreated mental illness and addictions, although these days it’s often framed up as the result of unaffordable housing and low vacancy rates. However, people with low incomes do not inevitably end up on the street when they have social capital (friends and family, jobs, etc.). Lots of people on social assistance have stable housing.
However, if your addictions and/or mental illness are uncontrolled, you will be unhousable, and you’ll not be welcomed by your former friends and family.