London is showing signs of getting the upper hand on homelessness, the latest report from the city’s homeless coalition says.

The demand for emergency shelter beds is down and the number of beds used has dropped, with money saved being diverted to helping more people find homes.

The success comes as other major cities, some of them publicly declaring deadlines to end homelessness, have struggled to meet their goals, Abe Oudshoorn, co-ordinator of the London Homeless Coalition, said Monday.

“We haven’t declared a timeline. We are just doing the work,” he said.

London’s agencies have embraced the housing first model and are working together, “program by program,” Oudshoorn said.

The city has identified several groups of chronically homeless people to target with extra efforts, including veterans, youth, indigenous populations and street-level sex workers.

Some of those efforts are already in place, such as a successful program housing homeless veterans, Oudshoorn said.

The strategy for helping sex workers should be up and running this year, said Jan Richardson, the city’s manager of homeless prevention.

A request for funding to build a shelter for youth is expected in 2017, with operation starting in 2018.

Figuring out who needs the most help first will grow easier as the city develops a database of homeless people and trains agencies how to work with the database together, Richardson said.

“We are starting to see some results from working together and we have a long way to go.”

In 2014, the city of London spent about $11.5 million on emergency shelters, finding people homes, and helping people stay in their homes, with about $1.3 million of its own money and the bulk of the rest from the province.

Of that, $5.2 million was spent on emergency shelters. The forecast for 2015 has about $4.9 million going to shelters, with the savings going to helping people find and maintain permanent housing, Richardson said.

One of the few negatives in Oudshoorn’s annual report comes in the wait list for rent-geared-to-income housing, so-called social housing.

The number of households waiting for social housing in London increased from 2,172 in 2012 to 2,807 in 2014, according to the most recent waiting list survey by the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association.

Before 2012, waiting lists in London had yo-yoed from about a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 4,500.

The wait list “is very dynamic and there are multiple factors that impact both the active members on the list at any given time and average wait times,” Josh Browne, a city housing division manager, said in an email.

“Although the City of London has seen an increasing demand for affordable housing in recent years, as one would expect given the economic reality of the region, the average wait time for RGI (rent-geared-to-income) housing has actually stayed relatively constant and in some cases have decreased.”

Emergency shelter use by the numbers

3,400 Stays in 2011

3,143 Stays in 2013

360 Beds used in 2012

320 Beds used in 2014

$5.2M Cost in 2014

$4.9M Forecast cost for 2015