How Edmonton compares to cities finding success in tackling homelessness

As Edmonton enters an election year with rising housing prices and record numbers of residents who are homeless, Taproot spoke to experts to explore how other cities have found success transitioning people from being homeless to housed.

There were about 4,700 homeless people living in Edmonton in September, an increase of nearly 2,000 from the same time last year, according to Homeward Trust's point-in-time count. Nearly 1,200 people in Edmonton were without any shelter in September, about 850 were staying in shelters, and 2,700 were provisionally accommodated in temporary housing.

Nearly all cities face unique housing challenges, with homelessness often being the biggest. One approach that has gained popularity over the past decade is called Housing First. In Housing First programs, homeless people receive subsidized housing regardless of their challenges, removing the once-common requirement that people had to be sober or meet other difficult criteria before receiving housing. Still, each city, including Edmonton, has its own approach to Housing First.

Several North American cities have claimed to achieve "functional zero homelessness," which is usually defined by homelessness being rare and brief. These cities are typically part of the Built For Zero initiative, which uses a data-driven approach to optimize local homeless systems, its website reads. Edmonton is among the Canadian cities participating in the initiative and aiming to eliminate homelessness. The others are Red Deer, Fort McMurray, Toronto, and Halifax.

Medicine Hat received national attention in 2021 when it announced it had reached functional zero homelessness, meaning there were fewer than three homeless people in the city for three consecutive months. City officials and social service providers said this was achieved by using rich data combined with a Housing First approach.

However, the number of homeless people in Medicine Hat has climbed back up. Data from March 2024 shows there were 21 homeless people, eight of whom were new to homelessness that month, in the southern Alberta city of 63,000.

Houston, Texas, was able to more than halve the number of people living on the streets between 2011 and 2020, with experts attributing the decrease to coordinated efforts across dozens of non-profits.

The neighbourhood of East Atlanta Village in Atlanta, Georgia, has hired a social worker to support homeless people. The support worker is Michael Nolan, and he emphasizes autonomy and dignity in his approach. Nolan helps resolve conflicts between those living rough and those living in homes in the neighbourhood. For example, instead of fining or banning a man who had set up a tent in a park, Nolan worked with him to find a permanent home and helped him move his tent to a less-frequented space. In a year, Nolan helped move 13 people off the streets and into housing, and facilitated more than 180 medical and mental health care visits. Ishita Chordia, a researcher from the University of Washington who helped the neighbourhood organize the project, said it could be a model for other cities.

Katie MacDonald, of Athabasca University and Community Housing Canada, said Finland has come close to eliminating chronic homelessness. Finland has invested in a robust supply of social and supportive housing and uses those units for Housing First instead of simply subsidizing rents through private landlords. "It's a different kind of landlord than what we often have to do here in Edmonton, which is to partner with a private landlord," MacDonald said. "Some of them are honest actors, but many of them are looking for profit, and so when the subsidy of Housing First ends, people can't afford that market rent, and then they lose their housing." Social housing is mainly provided by Helsinki and a few nationwide non-profit organizations. Helsinki's municipal government owns 70% of the city's land area, including a portfolio of 60,000 housing units, with most new housing being built on city property. The city builds 1,500 new housing units each year, half of which are subsidized rental housing.

In Helsinki, this approach led to a 72% reduction in people sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation from 2008 to 2022, wrote Daniel Kudla, a sociology professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

As the North American and international examples show, cities that have seen some success in addressing homelessness have collected rich data, coordinated disjointed social services, and approached homeless care with compassion, dignity, and autonomy.

How does Edmonton compare?

Homeward Trust, the main entity that responds to homelessness in Edmonton, counts the city's homeless population and used to share the number of available shelter beds each day in an interactive table.

But there have been issues with data collection. In January, critics expressed concern as Edmonton removed homeless encampments when it was unclear whether there were enough emergency shelter beds for the people evicted from camps. Amidst the controversy, Homeward Trust said the provincial government told it to remove its shelter capacity numbers from its website, and the province said Homeward Trust had the wrong numbers. Until this November, the province provided shelter capacity numbers in a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet did not provide daily numbers. On Nov. 21, the province introduced a webpage showing the daily capacity and utilization of shelters in Edmonton, Calgary, and the rest of the province.

During the encampment removal controversy, the province introduced a navigation and support centre for homeless people in an effort to coordinate disjointed social services. The centre is located in the Karis Centre in the Hope Mission shelter at 10302 107 Street NW. Reports on the success of this approach have been mixed. The province said nearly 3,000 people had accessed the centre as of August. The province expanded the model to Calgary in July. However, Postmedia obtained police data that suggests 80% of people evicted from camps in the winter and early spring refused transportation to the navigation centre. Edmonton police chief Dale McFee said those numbers were "a slice of data," and many people walked to the centre on their own.

Whether this approach involves compassion, dignity, and autonomy is also unclear. Homeless advocates told Taproot in March that the centre had led to "abject misery" for some. Before the centre was created, a person sleeping rough would only have their shelter removed every two or three months, Jim Gurnett, spokesperson for the Edmonton Coalition on Housing & Homelessness, said. Removals were happening daily in March. Gurnett added that because of these frequent removals, any belongings a person can't carry with them are now at risk of being thrown out and lost. "A lot of the people that I'm connecting with now, they've got nothing left except maybe a blanket or a single tarp," he said.

There are other examples of social services coordinating with each other on an ad-hoc basis. After Boyle Street Community Services moved out of its building behind Rogers Place in September 2023, it moved some of its services into a nearby Bissell Centre building. The partnership improved integration and inclusivity, BSCS's Elliott Tanti told Taproot four months after the move. "One of the greatest barriers in our work is having to send people from place, to place, to place … so anytime that we can be more collaborative in our service delivery approach — ask people to recite their stories and their traumas less often — the easier it is for us to connect people to services," Tanti said.

Meanwhile, BSCS took over the daily operations of the CHEW Project and Youth Empowerment and Support Services started training the centre's employees in April 2024 as CHEW struggled with staffing.

Damian Collins, the director of the Community Housing Canada Research Partnership at the University of Alberta, told Taproot he gives the City of Edmonton a lot of credit for what it has been doing to transition homeless people into stable housing. He pointed to the city declaring a housing and homelessness emergency during the encampment removals, as well as Mayor Amarjeet Sohi's task force aimed at tackling the issue.

However, Collins said the city's response is varied. The Coalition for Justice and Human Rights attempted to sue the City of Edmonton to stop the dismantling of homeless encampments in January. That lawsuit was thrown out on the same day council declared a housing and homelessness emergency. Collins said the timing of those two events tells a story about Edmonton's response to homelessness.

"You know, there's those two things don't line up — those are, I would argue, contradictory actions on the part of the city," he said.