What Canada’s homelessness crisis actually demands, and why the tools already exist.
“When people see encampments in their parks or feel unsafe walking through their own neighbourhood, they conclude that the solutions must not be working. I understand that. But the truth is the opposite. Housing First works. Supportive housing works. The research is not ambiguous. But they are being outpaced — and an outpaced solution looks identical to a failed one.”
— Taylor Sproka, Jasper Place Wellness Centre, Edmonton, Alberta
There is a story Canadians tell themselves about homelessness: that governments have tried everything, that the solutions are not working, and that some people simply cannot be helped. Taylor Sproka’s words, delivered from the front lines at Jasper Place Wellness Centre in Edmonton, cut through that story with precision. The tools exist. The evidence is in. What is happening is not failure; it is underfunding at a scale that makes success structurally impossible.
In June 2026, the Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) submitted a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (HUMA) as it undertakes a study of homelessness in Canada. That submission, grounded in current research, makes one overarching argument: homelessness in Canada is solvable, but only if governments invest at the scale the crisis demands, and only if they build the right kind of housing.
As Kaite Burkholder Harris, CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, has argued: homelessness is not inevitable. It is a policy choice. And it can be undone by policy choices, too — specifically by scaling the approaches that work, building non-market housing at the volume required, and refusing to accept the gap between what is possible and what is being funded.
1. Return to Housing First: Immediate Access, Lasting Stability
The most important shift in how Canada understands homelessness over the past two decades has been Housing First: the principle that people experiencing homelessness need a real, permanent home, before anything else can work. Not a shelter bed. Not transitional housing. Not a conditional placement tied to sobriety or program compliance. A home, first, with supports available as needed.
The evidence base for Housing First is not ambiguous, as Taylor Sproka put it. Multiple randomized controlled trials, including Canada’s At Home/Chez Soi project, one of the largest Housing First trials in the world, have demonstrated that placing people in stable housing first, dramatically improves outcomes across health, mental health, and quality of life, while reducing emergency service use and costs to the system.
But Housing First is not housing only. The model explicitly includes voluntary, flexible supports (mental health services, addiction supports, peer support, and connections to community) wrapped around stable housing and available to people at the intensity they choose. What makes Housing First work is the security of a permanent home, and the availability of supports that follow the person rather than gatekeeping access to housing.
Canada’s Reaching Home strategy, launched in 2019, was built on these principles. It has provided meaningful coordination at the community level, enabling communities to design locally responsive approaches to homelessness. But Reaching Home’s own data tells the story of a strategy being outpaced. When the National Housing Strategy committed in 2018 to reducing homelessness by 50%, homelessness subsequently rose by 20% by 2024, and by 79% compared to 2020–22 counts. The tools are working wherever they are being applied. The problem is that they are not being applied at anywhere near the required scale, because the supply of permanently affordable housing to sustain Housing First placements does not exist at the volume needed. at voluntary approaches have not closed the gap. More robust, mandatory standards are needed.
2. Emergency Shelter Transformation: Crisis Response Organized Around Exit
Shelters save lives. They provide immediate safety for people with nowhere else to go, and they will always have a necessary role in Canada’s response to homelessness. But the shelter system as currently constituted in most Canadian cities is not organized around its most important purpose: getting people out of homelessness and into permanent housing as quickly as possible.
The environment of an emergency shelter is, by design, a crisis environment. Long-term residence in shelter, which has become the norm in cities where shelter waitlists stretch months and affordable housing is unavailable, compounds trauma, disrupts sleep, and makes recovery and stability harder to achieve. Shelters are not meant to be homes, and treating them as a de facto housing solution for people who have nowhere else to go is a failure of the system, not of the people in it.
What emergency shelter transformation means in practice is reorienting shelters around a single organizing goal: finding each person a permanent home, as quickly as possible, with the supports they need to stay there. This requires investing in diversion, preventing people from entering the shelter system in the first place by rapidly connecting them with housing options, financial supports, and mediation with landlords or family. The evidence for diversion is striking: Rapid Access to Family Therapy (RAFT), a diversion program focused on young people, has achieved a 90 per cent reduction in first-time youth homelessness in communities where it has been implemented.
It also requires that shelters operate as active participants in the coordinated system, connecting people to case management, to housing lists, to income supports, and to bridge housing options for people who need a more supported transition. Organizations like Shepherds of Good Hope in Ottawa demonstrate what it looks like to embed housing-focused programming into shelter operations: not just providing a bed, but actively working with each person on a pathway to permanent housing.
But here too, the limiting factor is supply. Diversion works when there is somewhere to divert people to. Shelter exit works when there is housing to exit to. Every program that connects people to permanent housing is only as effective as the stock of affordable housing available, and right now, that stock is critically inadequate. tirely.
3. Coordinated Systems Planning: The Architecture That Makes It All Work
Housing First and shelter transformation are not independent programs. They are components of a coordinated system, one that requires a shared data infrastructure, common assessment tools, clear referral pathways, and a shared goal of functional zero: a state in which homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.
Canada has made real progress on system coordination through Reaching Home, and that progress matters. Medicine Hat, Alberta became the first Canadian community to reach functional zero in 2021, a genuine achievement that demonstrated what coordinated, outcomes-focused homelessness response can accomplish. But Medicine Hat’s experience also illustrates the central lesson of this brief: coordination has limits. By 2025, Medicine Hat reported 34 people experiencing chronic homelessness again, not because their systems failed, but because people were, in their own words, “caught in the cycle of homelessness due to a shortage of affordable housing.” A coordinated system can move people through the pipeline efficiently. It cannot manufacture housing that does not exist.
Closing that gap requires action at both ends of the timeline.
In the short term, the Canada Housing Benefit (CHB) needs to be significantly increased and made portable. 27% of Canadian renters currently live in unaffordable housing, spending more than 30% of their before-tax income on rent – a figure that rises to 34% for persons with disabilities. The CHB provides direct income support to help renters afford market housing, but in its current form it too often falls short of lifting households out of core housing need. A more generous, portable benefit, one that travels with the person rather than being tied to a specific unit or address, would immediately help people at risk of homelessness maintain stability and give people exiting homelessness more options in the private rental market.
In the long term, Canada needs a fundamentally different housing system. Experts have estimated that Canada needs 4.3 million additional homes for very-low and low-income households and have called for investment in 200,000 non-market units per year over the next decade to meet current need. Non-market housing, including community land trusts, co-operative housing, non-profit rental, is the only model that guarantees affordability in perpetuity, because it removes housing from the speculative market. Acquisition funds that allow non-profits to purchase existing affordable rental buildings before they are sold to speculative investors, public land made available through long-term low-cost leases, and permanently affordable housing models that lock in affordability across generations rather than through time-limited covenants: these are the building blocks of a housing system that works across the income spectrum.
The right to adequate housing is not a rhetorical commitment in Canada. It is enshrined in the National Housing Strategy Act and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a state party. The ICESCR’s definition of adequate housing – encompassing security of tenure, affordability, habitability, accessibility, and cultural adequacy – sets a clear benchmark against which current performance falls short. Courts are increasingly recognizing this gap, finding that bylaws that displace people living in encampments when no adequate alternative exists infringe rights under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter. Legal recognition is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What is needed is the political will to build.
The Solutions Are Not the Problem
Housing First works. Diversion works. Coordinated systems work. The evidence for each is robust, peer-reviewed, and replicated across jurisdictions. When Canadians look at encampments growing in their cities and conclude that something must not be working, they are not wrong to be alarmed. They are wrong only about the diagnosis.
What is not working is the political commitment to fund these solutions at the scale required. For every affordable unit added under the National Housing Strategy, two affordable units have been lost. That math does not work, no matter how well communities coordinate their response. The federal government has the fiscal and contractual tools to change this, through binding intergovernmental obligations, sustained investment in non-market housing, renter protections that prevent eviction into homelessness, and a homelessness strategy that is explicitly connected to the supply of deeply affordable units.
Homelessness is solvable. That is not optimism; it is what the data says. But solving it requires governments to step up: to invest not just in coordination, but in homes. Permanently affordable, non-market homes, built and protected at the volume the crisis demands.
The Balanced Supply of Housing (BSH) is a SSHRC-CMHC funded partnership grant led by Dr. Alexandra Flynn at UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, focused on land use, housing financialization, and sustainable housing futures across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
