10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan
Local housing and homelessness services are guided by a 10-year Housing and Homelessness Plan. This plan aims to address affordable housing and homelessness throughout the complete housing continuum; including homelessness prevention, emergency shelters, transitional housing, supportive housing and affordable rental and/or home ownership.
Homelessness Prevention Team
The Homelessness Prevention Team provides a Housing First approach with wrap around intensive housing based case management to those who are experiencing homelessness and those who are at risk of homelessness.
A new waitlist category for subsidized housing now exists. This waitlist category accepts referrals from shelter, jail and hospital and follows up accordingly with each. The waitlist was created to prioritize safe, affordable housing for participants.
Since its inception in 2014, this new category has housed approximately 60 clients and has had only 9 individuals either stop their participation in the program, find alternate housing, or get evicted.
The HPT team is now working with Built for Zero Canada to tweak the current process with a goal of aligning within the national plan to end homelessness. Our community, thanks to the HPT is extremely close to achieving ‘functional zero’, which is defined as being reached when the number who are homeless, whether sheltered or unsheltered is no greater than the monthly housing placement rate.
In 2019, the HPT team was awarded the Local Municipal Champion Award from the Ontario Municipal Social Services Association.
Homelessness Report Card
Homelessness Report Card – 2020 Snapshot