Homes & Homelessness

A plain-language explainer · 8th-grade reading level · every figure below is sourced and checkable.

What’s wrong here

Toronto is the most expensive city in Canada to buy a home.¹ That is the front door of the problem. Behind it is a longer line most people never see.

The city keeps a waiting list for subsidized housing — homes where rent is set by your income. At the end of 2025, 105,115 households were on that list. Five years earlier, it was 81,664.² In 2025, 21,538 new households joined the list. Only 2,838 got housed.³ At that pace, people can wait more than ten years.⁴

Here is the part few people know: in Ontario, cities pay most of the bill for social housing. Municipalities cover about 77% of the cost. The province pays about 14%, and the federal government about 9%.⁵ Yet the province writes the rules cities must follow. The government with the least power carries the most weight.

What’s been proven to work elsewhere

Houston decided housing comes first: get a person into a home, then help with everything else. Since 2011, homelessness there fell 63%, and more than 32,000 people were housed. About nine in ten did not return to homelessness within two years.⁶

Finland did the same across a whole country and cut emergency shelter use by 76% over a decade. Then it cut funding for rent support and help services — and homelessness began rising again.⁷ The lesson is honest: this works as long as you keep paying for it.

What we could choose together

The city can act on its own in some places. It can allow small apartment buildings on every residential street — in June 2025, city council allowed sixplexes in only part of the city.⁸ It can keep waiving building fees on new rental homes. It can fund housing that comes with support workers, which trials here and abroad show keeps most people stably housed.

Only the province can restore the city’s power to require affordable units inside new buildings — a 2022 provincial law cut that power back.⁹ Only the province can change how social housing costs are shared. The federal government mostly shows up with money, and it attaches conditions to it.

None of this is magic. It is a list of choices, and each one has a price and a trade-off. But other places have made these choices, and they can show the receipts.

Sources & receipts

1. Toronto ranked most expensive city in Canada to buy a home — housing-affordability market data.
2. Rent-Geared-to-Income waitlist: 105,115 households at year-end 2025, up from 81,664 at year-end 2020 — City of Toronto Social Housing Waiting List Reports.
3. 2025: 21,538 new applications versus 2,838 households housed — City of Toronto Social Housing Waiting List Reports.
4. Waits exceeding ten years at current placement pace — City of Toronto Auditor General waitlist analysis.
5. Ontario social housing funding split: ~77% municipal, ~14% provincial, ~9% federal — housing-affordability backgrounder data.
6. Houston Housing First results: homelessness down 63% since 2011; 32,000+ people housed; about 90% did not return to homelessness within two years — The Way Home Houston (thewayhomehouston.org).
7. Finland Housing First results: emergency shelter use down 76% (2008–2017); reversal in 2024–25 (4,579 people, +20%; 1,306 long-term, +29%) following cuts to support funding — Y-Säätiö/Varke Finland housing-policy data.
8. Toronto City Council, June 2025: as-of-right sixplexes approved for Toronto & East York plus Ward 23 only — City of Toronto Council decision record.
9. Ontario Bill 23 (2022) capped inclusionary zoning at 5% of units for 25 years, overriding Toronto’s own bylaw — provincial legislation record.

This explainer went through an independent verification pass before publication (fact-check against primary sources, claim by claim). The internal verification record has been removed from this public page; the sourced facts and figures above are unchanged by that removal.