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Ending Homelessness in Toronto

Executive Summary

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.

On the night of the City's most recent count, October 22, 2025, an estimated 12,196 people in Toronto had no home of their own — sleeping in the shelter system, in provincially run facilities, or outdoors (City of Toronto, Street Needs Assessment research page). That is 21% fewer than the all-time high of 15,418 counted a year earlier (City of Toronto, 2024 Street Needs Assessment, July 7, 2025) — a drop driven predominantly by the ebbing of the 2021–2024 refugee-claimant surge described in Chapter 1, not by City management or program improvement, per this book's own research base. But it is still 66% above the 7,347 people counted in April 2021, and Toronto now spends roughly $786–$898 million a year on shelters and homelessness services alone just to manage that population in a system built for emergencies, not for housing anyone permanently (City of Toronto, 2025 and 2026 Budget Notes, Toronto Shelter and Support Services). Indigenous people are overrepresented in every count the City has taken since its first in 2006 — three- to sixteen-fold, depending on the measure and the year; Black Torontonians made up 58% of 2024 survey respondents while being roughly one-tenth of the city's population (City of Toronto, 2024 SNA).

Homelessness at this scale is not a mystery, and it is not inevitable. It is the traceable product of specific policy decisions — most made in a five-year window in the 1990s — that this book walks through in Chapter 2: the federal government's 1993/94 withdrawal from funding new social housing, Ontario's 1995 cancellation of roughly 17,000 non-profit and co-op homes already underway alongside a 21.6% cut to welfare rates, the 1998 provincial "download" of housing and social-assistance administration onto municipalities, and the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care without the community supports promised alongside it. Those choices produced Toronto's 1998 declaration of homelessness as a national disaster and the 105-recommendation Golden Report of January 1999. A quarter-century later, most of that report's core asks — dedicated, indexed funding for new social and supportive housing and for income supports that track the cost of rent — still have not been met at the scale required, and homelessness has climbed in nearly every count since.

For Indigenous people, this modern history sits on a much older and deeper one. Residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the continuing, disproportionate apprehension of Indigenous children into Ontario's child-welfare system are direct, documented drivers of the homelessness Indigenous Torontonians experience at what that report's own analysis estimates as three to ten times the rate of the general population (City of Toronto Shelter, Support and Housing Administration and Toronto Indigenous Community Advisory Board, "Indigenous Peoples' Experience of Homelessness in Toronto," June 12, 2023). This book treats the Indigenous dimension of the crisis not as a footnote but as a thread through every chapter — because ending homelessness in Toronto cannot be separated from reconciliation, and because Indigenous-led organizations already operating in this city are among the strongest evidence we have for what works.

This book argues Toronto can move from managing homelessness to ending it as a mass, chronic condition through four moves, each built on programs and institutions that already exist here:

  1. Stop the inflow by closing the gap between what income supports pay and what rent costs, scaling eviction prevention that is already outperforming its targets, and fixing the institutional discharge pipelines (jails, hospitals, foster care) that hand people directly from an institution to the street (Chapter 3).
  2. Make the shelter and emergency system the best in the world for the people who still need it — low-barrier, trauma-informed, genuinely 24/7, with a single point of access that does not turn people away — while it shrinks from a permanent housing substitute into what it should always have been: a short, safe bridge (Chapter 4).
  3. Rapidly rehouse everyone currently homeless within one year — conditional on landlord-recruitment and staffing benchmarks being met, the condition Chapter 9 itself prescribes, using the same sequence that has worked everywhere Housing First has actually worked: portable rent supplements into the existing rental market first (fastest, cheapest), acquisition of existing buildings second, and fast-build modular and supportive housing third (Chapter 5).
  4. Redirect the money already being spent. Canada's own At Home/Chez Soi trial found every $10 invested in Housing First for the highest-needs participants nationally returned $9.60 in avoided shelter, hospital, and justice costs, and 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, 2014 report — did even better: every $10 invested returned $15.05 in avoided costs, on an intervention that cost $21,089 per person per year and produced $31,747 in service-cost reductions over the two-year study period; 80% of Toronto's Housing First participants were stably housed at study end, against 54% of the comparison group (Gozdzik et al., At Home/Chez Soi Project: Toronto Site Final Report, Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2014). Rebuilt bottom-up from the City's own audited unit-cost benchmarks and the delivery-tool mix Chapter 5 recommends, the one-time capital cost of permanently housing everyone currently homeless in Toronto falls in the range of $0.7 billion to $1.5 billion, depending on exactly how the population splits across rent supplements, acquisition, and modular build (see Receipts & Methods for the full scenario table). This book's recommended point estimate is the balanced scenario — 50% rent supplement / 30% acquisition / 20% modular build — at $1.01–$1.49 billion in capital and roughly $242 million a year in ongoing Housing First support. Even applying the Auditor General's own measured 63% Modular Housing Initiative cost overrun to the most build-heavy, most pessimistic scenario modeled, the capital bill tops out at $2.24 billion — still less than three years of the current shelter budget in every case, though in that worst case only just: 2.85 of 3.0 years (Chapter 7).

None of this requires inventing new tools. It requires Toronto, Ontario, and the federal government to fund, at scale and on a fixed timeline, things that are already proven here and elsewhere: Housing First (invented in New York, proven in Toronto's own At Home/Chez Soi trial), Built for Zero methodology (already used by Medicine Hat, Alberta, and London, Ontario), coordinated eviction prevention (already outperforming its ten-year target in Toronto after five), and Indigenous-led housing delivery (already running through Na-Me-Res, Wigwamen, and at least seven other City-funded or TASSC-member Indigenous organizations, with an eighth in development). Chapter 8 sets out the best-documented cases from around the world — Finland, Houston, Vienna, Scotland, and the cautionary tale of Utah — for Toronto to model itself on, and Chapter 6 is honest about the fact that the single biggest threat to any of this is not a missing idea but a missing dollar: federal funding for Toronto's refugee-response shelter costs was cut by roughly 68%, from $300 million (2025) to a budgeted $97.078 million (2026) (City of Toronto, 2026 TSSS Budget Notes, backgroundfile-261532.pdf).

Every recommendation in this book assumes no miracle. It works if — and only if — Toronto, Ontario, and Ottawa fund these proven tools simultaneously, on a fixed public timeline. That has not happened once in the twenty-seven years since the Golden Report. Chapter 6 examines why, and what would have to change for it to happen this time.