Homes are the key to health and Toronto’s ultra tight vacancy rate means the city should focus on building new units in the fight to end chronic homelessness, according to a leading U.S. public health expert.

“Toronto has to figure out, under the circumstances of Toronto, what works,” said Dr. Mitchell Katz, head of New York City’s Health and Hospitals corporation and the former head of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “But what is needed and was needed in LA and needed in San Francisco is the commitment that we do not find it acceptable to house people in shelters and on the street.”

Katz met up with the Star on Tuesday morning, in the midst of a minor media blitz that concluded with a late afternoon speaking engagement on the subject of city-specific solutions to combat homelessness, as part of the annual Louis L. Odette lecture, hosted at St. Michael’s Hospital.

“The solution shouldn’t be simply to build more shelters. The solution should be to build more housing,” said Katz, who founded and led successful programs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, that focused on getting people out of shelters, hospitals and nursing homes and into permanent housing — with the expectation that a home was the best way to improve individual health and reduce the burden on the health-care system.

“In Los Angeles, we were able to tap into more of the private rental market, which I understand is a challenge here in Toronto as it is in New York City,” Katz said. “It sounds like for Toronto, if we are going to be housing homeless people in Toronto there needs to be building of units, you are not going to get it off the private market.”

Share your thoughts

Read more:

Displaced 650 Parliament residents scrambling to find temporary homes

Katz said in Los Angeles they were able to use a flexible rent subsidy to get people into available units, and in San Francisco one solution to the problem was the city taking over the use of older hotels to create housing.

In Los Angeles, his work included successfully campaigning for constituents to agree to a property tax increase to be put toward housing programs; In San Francisco, he founded Housing for Health and pushed for the use of health service dollars to supplement rent to get chronically ill people into homes.

Those fights, he noted, also involved fighting to change the perception around who needs housing support and convincing the public that money was better spent on homes, rather than pushing marginalized people into crisis and the health-care system.

The Toronto speaking event included a panel discussion with local experts in housing and homelessness, including Mark Aston, the chief executive officer of the Fred Victor Centre, Dr. Stephen Hwang, director for the Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Mike’s, and Mary-Anne Bedard, director for service planning, development and infrastructure with the city’s shelter, support and housing administration division.

In an interview with the Star, Bedard said nobody considers shelters an acceptable long-term solution, but the reality is a range of options are needed to manage varying degrees of need. She is currently focused on the creation of 1,000 new emergency shelter beds by 2020, a target mandated by council last winter following a brutal cold snap. Two new emergency shelters are scheduled to open in November, with estimated room for 100 to 200 people, she said.

In 2017, about 19,000 people used roughly 5,000 beds across the city, she said. About 20 per cent of the people using the emergency shelter system were doing so for more than six months, she said, or would fall under the definition of chronically homeless.

“What we are trying to do is return the emergency system back to emergency system, instead of a de facto housing system,” Bedard said. The city’s Home for Good program, a partnership with the province, was designed with the goal of getting 2,000 people who fall into that group into housing over the next two years with the supports they need to keep it, she said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

In Toronto, one of the new solutions to an overflowing emergency system and the increasing need for low-barrier options is the use of at least three modular, tent-like structures that will temporarily house up to 400 people over the winter season. Katz said one question the city could be asking, or exploring, is why can’t that space be used instead for prefabricated, smaller housing units.

“If you have space for prefabricated tents then you have space for low-cost shipping container modular housing,” Katz said. “What is the barrier? Is the barrier money, is the barrier politics?”

Affordable housing has become one of the defining issues of the municipal election. Mayor John Tory and mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat have both pledged to boost affordable rental housing stock, promising to create 40,000 new units in 12 years and 100,000 over 10 years, respectively.