On April 22, 2025, Kaite Burkholder Harris spoke at the City of Ottawa's Community Services Committee on behalf of the Alliance to End Homelessness, to support the need for continued and increased funding for rent allowances to close the gap between current demand and the approved budget.
You can read the remarks below, or watch the deputation here.
Rent subsidies are a critical part of ending homelessness. It is one of the few short-term mechanisms we have to rapidly re-house people. Without sustainable funding for this, people will remain in emergency shelters, with less stability, worse outcomes, and it will further strain the City’s resources. The cost of using an emergency shelter for a year is $36,500. In contrast, a housing allowance costs between $9500 - $12,500/ year. The City’s current recommendation to approve the additional $7 million to cover the cost of existing subsidies is far less expensive than the alternative, much higher cost.
More than cost however, the decision to invest in long-term solutions is heartening. In the face of a crisis, we tend to respond with the most easily accessible thing, and that’s more emergency responses. In Ontario, spending on emergency shelters has increased by 34% since 2016. Homelessness has increased by 32%. If we invest in homelessness, we will get more homelessness. The decision to continue to invest in new housing allowances, despite immense fiscal pressure, means that we are investing in an end to homelessness, not more management of the problem.
In January, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario released a report showing that municipalities are covering over 50% of the cost of homelessness. The other two levels of government are splitting the remaining cost. This isn’t fair, it’s not reasonable, and it’s not sustainable. However, cities are on the front lines of the housing crisis and have to respond.
The most recent publicly available HIFIS data shows that we saw just over 4000 people experience homelessness in a month. Over half of these are homeless families. That means children growing up in shelters. We can do so much better. Doing better starts with strategic decisions made looking at the big picture.
City staff are asking hard, but important questions right now, and their expertise along with that of community partners needs to lead the way in moving towards a more effective response to homelessness. The memo in today’s agenda suggests several different options to reduce inflow into our shelter system and increase the rate of people being housed. Increasing shelter diversion and even more upstream prevention like school-based options are seeing success in other communities and leading to long-term reductions in homelessness. The recent diversion pilot that the City has funded led to a 5% reduction in new people becoming homeless in the first few months. The scattered site housing model is another creative solution that prevents people from getting stuck in shelter by using the same money in a different, solutions-focused way.
I recognize that the City can only do so much without upper levels of government stepping up in a serious way. And frankly, it’s ridiculous that the wealthier levels of government don’t pay what they should while simultaneously limiting options for cities to accrue new revenue sources.
However, local system design is one area that you have control. In Canada, whenever there has been significant reductions in homelessness, local government and community partners have taken the reins on coordinating their housing and homelessness system, leveraging data, and using every possible tool to prevent people from becoming homeless and rapidly re-housing as many people as possible if they do.
Reading through the memo for today’s committee, it’s clear that all options are on the table to tackle homelessness in our city. Some of these include reforming local priorities for who receives housing allowances and social housing. In an attempt to support those who have been homeless the longest, it may be that we have created a systemic incentive to become homeless in the first place in order to receive a permanent, deeply affordable social housing unit or a rent subsidy. This is an incredibly challenging conversation to open up, but we must if we’re going to be successful in designing a better system at the local level.
Similarly, we have a housing wait list policy where a person is only offered one option once a unit becomes available or they go to the bottom of the 5-8 year waitlist. Are we setting people up for success? Or contributing to the revolving door of homelessness? Choice and autonomy matter. If a person does not have control of where to live - it is not that surprising that people don’t thrive, and in many cases return to homelessness. This too is a question of system design that we can locally control. There are many more examples of this, and I commend that these conversations are being had at the community level with City staff.
As we are working on the 10 year plan refresh, there are critical decisions that will be made moving forward. The Housing and Homelessness Leadership Table is the cross-sector space where City staff and agencies are having those discussions at a system level and pulling from the wider expertise of the sector. The past few years have shown a nimbleness and openness to creative, innovative solutions from City staff, Council and community partners. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that we need to address homelessness at a systems level.
While this work is happening, we need to remain laser-focused on reducing inflow - people becoming homeless, and speeding up outflow - how fast can we re-house and stabilize people. In the interim, staying the course with a relentless focus on housing and long-term solutions is key, and staff’s decision to continue to move forward with housing allowances is one critical tool.
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