There are few struggles more Sisyphean than the push to end homelessness. But in 2015, the landscape shifted — and the uphill climb suddenly got a little flatter.

“It’s potentially a turning point,” said Tim Richter, president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “It’s not like homelessness was solved in 2015. But this is the year we might look back and say it may have been a breakthrough.”

People working to solve homelessness know better than to get ahead of themselves. But 2015 has given Richter reasons to feel “cautious optimism.”

In June, his organization launched a national campaign to house 20,000 people, and 29 communities have already signed on. Momentum is also growing in cities like Medicine Hat, where city officials claim to have eradicated chronic homelessness.

In October, Ontario joined Alberta and Newfoundland in announcing a plan to end chronic homelessness, which it hopes to do by the end of the decade. But perhaps the brightest signal change on the horizon is the recent federal election.

“We had a federal election where housing was actually something talked about and we have a new government committing to take a new leadership role on housing,” Richter said. “(This is) critically important because modern mass homelessness in Canada is really a byproduct of the federal withdrawal from housing 25 or 20 years ago.”

Richter sees a shift from managing homelessness to actually trying to eliminate it. (While there are different definitions for “ending homelessness,” Richter considers the goal is that homelessness becomes rare, brief and nonrecurring.)

He credits a growing movement of communities and leaders who are now coalescing around the issue. Critically, more people are also “seeing that homelessness is a solvable problem,” Richter added.

“There’s never been that glimmer of hope that it can actually be fixed. People have been struggling for a solution and we’ve now been given examples of what works.”

Many of those examples come from the United States. A report to Congress in November estimated that the number of Americans who are homeless on any given night has dropped by 11 per cent since 2007. The goal of ending veteran homelessness is also “within sight,” according to the report, with numbers declining by 35 per cent since 2009.

In Europe, Finland has made great strides, with numbers falling from 18,000 homeless in 1987 to less than 8,000 last year.

Many of these successes are linked to the “Housing First” principle, which is being adopted across Canada. The principle reverses the traditional “treatment first” approach and is instead based on the belief that providing people with immediate housing will help them tackle the factors that make them homeless, such as addiction and mental illness.

The approach also saves money, studies have found. A 2014 report from the Mental Health Commission of Canada found that every $10 invested resulted in an average savings of $9.60 for high-needs individuals.

For Mark Aston, executive director of the non-profit Fred Victor, he is encouraged by the Trudeau government’s early commitments on ending child poverty and creating a national housing strategy.

“We need supportive and complementary macro-level policy development that can really restrict the pipeline into homelessness,” Aston said.

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Richter believes 2015 opened a critical window for Canada to vanquish chronic homelessness once and for all. It is a time that is both hopeful and dangerous, he said, because the stakes are so high.

“This may be the year it really turns around, but it’s cautious optimism,” Richter said. “There’s a long way to go before homelessness is solved in Canada but this is perhaps the most hopeful year we’ve had in two or three decades.”