Everything you need to know about London's 'audacious' new homeless plan
An “audacious” proposal to save Londoners living and dying on the streets will create more than a dozen new 24/7 shelter hubs throughout the city and 600 supportive housing units, organizers announced Tuesday.
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An “audacious” proposal to save Londoners living and dying on the streets will create more than a dozen new 24/7 shelter hubs throughout the city and 600 supportive housing units, organizers announced Tuesday.
Developers, merchants, business leaders, hospital chief executives, police and others have joined exhausted social service workers and organizations to push for a new system — a unified front never before seen in London nor, likely, in all of Ontario.
The stakes are high.
“We’re trying to save lives. And in order to do that, we need a better system,” city hall’s top manager, Lynne Livingstone, told The London Free Press.
“The proposed system aims to support those who are most marginalized, those working in the system, and those trying to provide support, including businesses and community members who also experience the impacts of this crisis,” she said.
Even as the new system was unveiled Tuesday, the official count of homeless deaths in January stood at seven — meaning 206 people experiencing homelessness in London had died since the start of 2020.
The official title of the new system is a mouthful, “the whole of community system response to health and homelessness.”
But the heart of the new system is straightforward, said Dr. Alex Summers, the medical officer of health for London and surrounding Middlesex County.
“This is about, how do we move a person across a system from homeless and ill to housed and well? A whole of community response is not about different sector responses,” he said. “It’s a system where every single step is accounted for, so that we are confident that there are not gaps.”
The front line of the system — it’s too big to call a plan, its creators say — would be up to 15 hubs spread throughout London that each provide 24/7 “low barrier” shelter and a multitude of services from primary and mental health care to housing help.
Low barrier shelters have fewer rules and more flexibility than traditional shelters, and would focus on reducing harms associated with substance use rather than insisting on abstinence.
“A whole lot of different kinds of services and supports would be provided in one place, where someone can come and go and get the help they need that gets them to housing, as fast as we can get it,” Livingstone said.
Not only would each hub provide the same level and ranges of service as the others, but one phone number would connect merchants, residents and outreach workers to all the hubs, she said.
Up to five of those hubs could be built this year, and each hub would serve from 25 to 30 people. About 100 “high support housing units” would be built immediately, with 600 erected over the next three years.
“It’s audacious,” Scott Courtice, executive director of the London InterCommunity Health Centre, said of the plan. “It’s risky enough and big enough that it actually is going to make a difference. It’s an enormous change.”
Proposing 600 supportive housing units is certainly audacious in a province where not even basic social housing units — those without supports — have been built in years.
But the London effort has commitment to build and advocates from large developers, the London Development Institute and the London Economic Development Corporation (LEDC).
London cannot reach its economic potential without solving the homelessness crisis and building a strong city, said Kapil Lakhotia, chief executive and president of the LEDC.
“When you think about workforce development, attracting skilled people to London, we need to focus on building a community that is vibrant and inviting enough for these people to stay,” he said.
“Providing supports for people who need housing and people who need mental health and addiction relief, in turn, helps the businesses at the same time, by reducing vandalism, by reducing break-ins, by creating more inviting environments, especially in the core.”
Several of London’s largest developers have participated in the three summits that led to the proposal.
“Many of the most of the high-density and medium-density housing providers in London are local, and are family businesses. And they all care about London. They have the experience and the ability,” said Mike Wallace, president of the London Development Institute, an umbrella group for the industry.
Developers are ready to help find, build and retrofit existing buildings — whatever it takes — to create the first hubs, and are also ready to advocate for provincial support of the new system, he said.
“Taking part in the summit process was an eye-opening experience,” Adam Carapella, vice president of operations for TriCar Developments, said in a written statement.
“It is clear that we all have a role to play, including the development community, in ensuring the most marginalized in our community are cared for, and to build a healthy, prosperous, livable London for today and generations to come.”
Besides the development community, the leaders of both the London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) and St. Joseph’s Health Care London have promised to use their clout and health funding to help.
Among outreach workers and organizations, LHSC has been seen as a barrier to helping homeless people because of past treatment in emergency departments and poor discharge planning.
In this new system, the hospital is embracing a new role in homelessness, offering to share resources and expertise, as well as improving its culture, admittance and discharge policies, its leader says.
“Historically, LHSC didn’t see its role, or even the appropriateness of a role, in a call to action for matters that were viewed as social or community,” LHSC chief executive and president Jackie Schleifer Taylor said.
“Health is in every single societal policy. The pandemic taught us that wellness means a very different thing in tough times and the different arms of the health care system and the social and community system had to work together.”
The effort also has a $25-million private donation behind it, and a fundraising effort just beginning.
But it will take sustainable provincial funding to support, and perhaps build, the range of housing choices where people who have lived on the streets can thrive, organizers said.
Advocating for provincial dollars will begin next month, as will designing the details of the first hubs, including locations and construction, and creating a governance model for the system and the spending of the donations.
The new system has support from the frontline leaders who have been most critical of past efforts to help homeless people in London.
Among those are Dr. Andrea Sereda, a family physician at London InterCommunity Health Centre and creator of a safer opioid drug supply program. London hasn’t done enough to build homes for those most desperate and organizations have worked too long in silos that prevented helping people, Sereda has long said.
“There is a desire to do things differently,” she says now. “And I’m very hopeful that’s going to translate into implementation and practice.”
Sereda was one of the leaders of #TheForgotten519 coalition of frontline workers, which staged a hunger strike last summer to push for changes to prevent more deaths.
The strike led to some changes in city hall’s response to homeless encampments and a winter homelessness response developed by a network of community organizations and city hall.
About the same time, city manager Livingstone began contacting hospital leaders and others to begin discussions about a better way to solve the crisis. Those discussions led to three summits, where about 200 participants from more than 70 organizations, companies and agencies met to develop a new system.
The system carries its share of risks and hope, said Brian Lester, executive director of Regional HIV/AIDS Connection.
“It’s riskier to do nothing,” he said. “This is about the unacceptable deaths in our alleys, deaths in storefronts, deaths in tents and in parks.”
ABOUT THE HUBS
- 24/7 shelter and services
- Up to 15 across the city
WHAT THEY’LL PROVIDE
- Coordinated multi-agency intake, outreach
- Basic needs (food, shower, laundry, rest)
- Quick access to acute and primary care
- Housing access and income supports
- Some hubs would be for specific populations, such as youth or women
- Range of spaces, private and congregate
- One number to call for referral
THE HOUSING
- An immediate 100 units with intense supports
- 600 units in next three years
- London developers to help plan and build
- Province to fund operational costs
THE DONATION
- $25M from anonymous, private donor
- Directed to new system
- Donor will match $5M raised locally, for a potential total of $35 million
- Visit fundforchange.ca
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