Ending Homelessness in Toronto · Chapter 5

Housing Everyone: The One-Year Plan and Its Conditions

A chapter of Ending Homelessness in Toronto — this project’s receipt-backed book on ending homelessness for less than the crisis costs now. Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, the text says so on its face. How the checking works: how we verify · corrections.

The evidence: Housing First works, and Toronto has already proven it

The core method is not in question. Housing First — moving people directly into permanent housing with no preconditions, then wrapping support around them — was tested against the alternative in Canada's own At Home/Chez Soi randomized controlled trial (2009–2013, Mental Health Commission of Canada), across five cities including Toronto. Nationally, participants with the highest needs who received Housing First plus Assertive Community Treatment returned $9.60 in avoided shelter, hospital, and justice costs for every $10 spent, and across the full national sample 62% of Housing First participants were housed all of the time in the trial's last six months, against 31% of the comparison group (Mental Health Commission of Canada, National At Home/Chez Soi Final Report, 2014).

Toronto's own site — high-needs cohort specifically, 2014 report — returned $15.05 for every $10 invested, on an average intervention cost of $21,089 per person per year and average two-year service-cost reductions of $31,747; moderate-needs Toronto participants returned $2.90 per $10 on a $14,731-a-year intervention cost. These are genuine, Toronto-specific figures, confirmed by a direct reading of the trial's own site report, distinct from and additional to the national figures above, not a replacement for them (Gozdzik et al., At Home/Chez Soi Project: Toronto Site Final Report, Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2014, pp. 3, 11, 25). Toronto's own site also reported 80% of participants stably housed at study end, against 54% for the comparison group. A follow-up peer-reviewed cost-effectiveness analysis put the net cost of an additional day of stable housing at just $41.73 (Latimer et al., "Cost-Effectiveness of Housing First With Assertive Community Treatment," Psychiatric Services, October 2020).

This is Toronto's own evidence, from Toronto's own trial — but it is worth naming plainly what it is: one 2014 randomized trial's high-needs cohort, drawn from Toronto's 2009–2013 housing market, that now carries both this chapter's headline return-on-investment claim and the cost arithmetic in Chapter 7. That is real weight for a single, decade-old study to bear, and this book would rather say so than let the figure be read as a settled multiplier that extrapolates without limit. The method is not the missing ingredient; scale and speed are.

The tools already running in Toronto — and how fast each one actually is

Three delivery tools already operate in Toronto, at different speeds and costs, and a one-year plan uses all three in sequence rather than waiting for the slowest.

Portable rent supplements into the existing private market are the fastest tool available, because they use housing that already exists. Toronto's rental vacancy rate of 3.0% (Chapter 3) still represents thousands of vacant units at any moment; a supplement large enough to close the gap between disability-support or welfare income and market rent, paired with landlord recruitment, can move a person from shelter to a lease in weeks, not years. This is the delivery model behind the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit already operating in Toronto — though, as Chapter 6 details, that benefit's funding to Toronto was cut from $38 million in 2024 to a budgeted $7.95 million in 2026, a 79% reduction moving in exactly the wrong direction for this strategy.

Acquisition of existing buildings is the second-fastest tool, and unit for unit, the cheapest capital tool the City has. Toronto's Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program, running since 2021, has distributed $165 million to 21 non-profit and Indigenous housing providers, preserving over 1,000 permanently affordable homes across 34 projects, at funding caps of up to $200,000 per unit — meaningfully below the cost of new construction — with 20% of annual program funding reserved for Indigenous-led organizations (City of Toronto, "Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program"). Wigwamen Incorporated has already used the program to acquire 23 units directly.

Fast-build modular and supportive housing is the tool for people who need on-site, wraparound support and cannot be housed through a scattered-site subsidy alone. Toronto has already demonstrated the build speed required: the first 110-unit phase of the City's modular supportive housing program opened within roughly five months of authorization in 2020, at a program-wide average cost of about $190,000 per unit, with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's Affordable Housing Innovation Fund covering 40% of Phase 1 capital costs (Storeys, "Toronto Spending $47M to Build 250 Modular Housing Units," April 2020; City of Toronto, "Modular Housing Initiative"). The federal Rapid Housing Initiative has already put close to $440 million into Toronto across its first two rounds, creating over 1,000 homes, with a third round continuing to fund projects including Na-Me-Res's 230 Coxwell Avenue building and Gabriel Dumont Non-Profit Homes' 68-unit project on Kingston Road (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, "Canada creates over 1,000 new affordable homes in Toronto," March 2022).

The plan: house everyone within a year, conditional on landlord-recruitment and staffing benchmarks

The City's existing pipeline is already doing this at meaningful scale: it moved 4,107 people experiencing homelessness from the shelter system into permanent housing between January 1 and October 31, 2025 alone (City of Toronto, 2026 Budget Notes, Toronto Shelter and Support Services). Applying the three-tool sequence above to Toronto's current point-in-time population — an estimated 12,196 people as of October 2025 — produces a workable, costed, one-year plan, sequenced by speed. This timeline is explicitly conditional, not a fixed promise regardless of market absorption capacity: it holds only if landlord recruitment and support-staffing keep pace with the schedule below, the same two named benchmarks Chapter 9 prescribes as the honest fix to an unqualified one-year claim. For calibration, Scotland's national Housing First programme — this book's closest real-world analogue at national scale — averages 255 days from referral to tenancy, materially slower than a twelve-month, whole-population target; that gap is exactly why the sequence below front-loads the fastest tool first and treats landlord recruitment and staffing as tracked, named benchmarks rather than an assumption:

1. Months 1–3 — Scale portable rent supplements and landlord recruitment first. Every person whose barrier to housing is primarily financial, not clinical, should be matched to a rent supplement large enough to close the market-rent gap and an active landlord-recruitment effort, drawing on Toronto's 3.0% purpose-built vacancy rate. This is the fastest and cheapest lever available and should absorb the largest single share of the population.
2. Months 2–8 — Accelerate acquisition through the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program, using the City's own $150,000-to-$200,000-per-unit benchmark, prioritized toward buildings that can close quickly, with the existing 20% Indigenous set-aside scaled up in direct proportion to documented Indigenous overrepresentation (Chapters 1 and 3).
3. Months 3–12 — Expand modular and purpose-built supportive housing for the smaller group who need on-site clinical, addictions, or elder and cultural support, using the build-speed and cost benchmarks Toronto has already demonstrated — roughly five months per phase, $190,000 (as claimed by the program) to $310,000 (the ceiling implied by the Auditor General's audited actuals) per unit — continuing the Rapid Housing Initiative and Housing Now pipelines already underway rather than starting new ones.
4. Throughout — Coordinate the whole effort through a real-time, by-name list and functional-zero methodology, the approach Built for Zero Canada, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness's domestic initiative, has already validated: Medicine Hat, Alberta became the first Canadian city to reach functional zero for chronic homelessness under this methodology on June 2, 2021, and London, Ontario became the first Canadian city to functionally end veteran homelessness in 2020 (Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, "Medicine Hat achieves functional zero chronic homelessness," June 2, 2021). Toronto already runs a public Shelter Flow Dashboard the Alliance has described as "the most comprehensive public dashboard in Canada," but has not yet joined Built for Zero Canada as a core, by-name-list community at Medicine Hat's or London's scale — doing so is a near-term, low-cost step that would put Toronto's existing data infrastructure to full use.

Medicine Hat is also an honest caution, not just a model: the city's functional-zero status lapsed within months in late 2021, with roughly 40 people found sleeping rough in a November 2021 count. This was not the city's first such lapse — Medicine Hat had separately declared it had "ended homelessness" in 2015, the target year of its original 2008/2009 ten-year plan, and that declaration also lapsed within roughly 15 months, per CBC News reporting. The lesson is not that Housing First failed — it is that functional zero has to be maintained, through permanent, indexed funding for both housing supply and support services, not declared once and left to erode. Toronto's one-year plan has to be paired with the permanent income-support and prevention fixes in Chapter 3, or a successful one-year push will simply refill.

The Indigenous-led track within the plan

A one-year rehousing plan that is not explicitly Indigenous-led in design will reproduce the overrepresentation documented in Chapter 1. Toronto's Reaching Home community plan already commits to matching a minimum 25% of housing opportunities to Indigenous people experiencing homelessness — a floor that should be treated as binding across all three delivery tools above, not just the acquisition stream — and the City's Indigenous Funding Stream, independently administered by the Aboriginal Labour Force Development Circle, should be the default channel for Indigenous-specific units under all three, consistent with the "For Indigenous, By Indigenous" principle already operating nationally through the National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc., which received $287.1 million in federal funding in June 2023, explicitly grounded in Articles 21 and 23 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Indigenous Services Canada, news release, June 8, 2023). Wigwamen, Na-Me-Res, Gabriel Dumont Non-Profit Homes, and Miziwe Biik Development Corporation are already active, capable Indigenous housing developers in Toronto; the constraint on their scale is funding and land, not capacity or willingness.