A University of Ottawa professor who specializes in housing, homelessness and community mental health says transitional housing models, including ones like the facility just opened on Queen Street by the City of Ottawa, miss the mark in effectively addressing homelessness.
Dr. Tim Aubry is a professor in the university’s school of psychology and senior researcher at the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services. He’s been studying homelessness, its causes and the possible solutions for decades, and he says transitional housing facilities that provide long-term housing options on a temporary basis could be perpetuating the problems, despite receiving support from the community and City.
Aubry was part of the research group that studied the Housing First (HF) approach over a decade ago and conducted a report based on engagement with 2,000 people. According to this research, Aubry says the most effective approach is to house people — permanently — and follow up with support and resources. Unlike transitional housing, which has been advertised across the country as a necessary in-between step, HF does not have a time limit for how long people can stay.
To address the ongoing homelessness crisis, the City of Ottawa has opened a new transitional housing facility that will provide temporary housing for up to 140 people. The city has leased the building at 230 Queen St. for a 10-year term to establish a transitional housing facility that will provide “temporary” accommodation for people experiencing homelessness and connect them with employment and housing resources.
“This is technically considered a shelter. It’s not permanent housing, so it sits within the shelter system,” said Kale Brown, director of housing with the city. “The way our system works in terms of who ends up going to this building is you’re assessed by your needs and then we determine a placement, working with our various shelter partners.”
The Queen Street facility will focus on newcomers to Canada but can serve anyone who meets the criteria, Brown said, and will offer supportive temporary accommodations, the building includes kitchens, dining areas, washrooms, showers, laundry facilities, lounge areas, and dedicated rooms for meetings and workshops.
Clients will also have access to settlement and employment support, housing search case management, short-term mental health crisis workers, and weekly life skills workshops
This is the second transitional housing facility for single adults in Ottawa — the other, St-Joseph Transitional Housing Program in the east end, exclusively serves newcomers seeking asylum in Canada who are experiencing homelessness.
While emergency shelters like the Ottawa Mission and Shepherds of Good Hope aim to shelter people for only 30 days, they can stay in transitional housing for up to a year until they “get on their feet”, said Brown.
The “Housing First” program and research followed 2,000 individuals as well as hundreds of service providers across Canada over two years. Across all cities, HF participants obtained housing and retained their housing at a much higher rate than the treatment as usual (TAU) group.
In the last six months of the study, 62 per cent of HF participants were housed all of the time, 22 per cent some of the time, and 16 per cent none of the time. In comparison, 31 per cent of TAU participants were housed all of the time, 23 per cent some of the time, and 46 per cent none of the time.
“The idea is to rehouse people without condition, so they don’t have to go through any kind of transitional process,” Aubry told Ottawa Compass. “This approach targets people with histories of chronic homelessness, particularly histories of mental health problems and often with addiction.”
Transitional models have been useful in the past, he said, and have been used for decades to help people transition from living in psychiatric hospitals, for example, to living independently.
The Queen Street housing consists of sleeping “pods” with shared living spaces, allowing some independence with plenty of support and resources. But there isn’t a lot of privacy — due to the layout of the building, the pods don’t have floor-to-ceiling walls.
“What we’re seeing here in the city, I think it’s really just more emergency shelter space, just with sort of a different model,” Aubry said.
The Queen Street facility is geared towards newcomers to Canada, as is a facility on St. Joseph Boulevard, and in these cases, Aubry said transitional housing could help as people get on their feet.
But in the context of chronic homelessness, it might be a different conversation.
“Housing First involved housing and support in line with people’s needs. So it can be quite intensive, but the actual rental housing is a big problem,” said Aubry. “Many people who are homeless are on social benefits here in Ontario, and they don’t have enough money to pay the rent in the private market.”
Through Housing First programs, people can receive a housing supplement that Aubry said would “ideally” pay more than 30 per cent of rent. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing in Ontario and extremely low vacancy rates.
The report found that HF approaches resulted in savings over time, with the most significant for the participants with highest costs at entry.
For this group, the intervention cost was $19,582 per person per year on average, and over the two-year period following study entry, every $10 invested in HF services resulted in an average savings of $21.72, the report stated.
When the report was first released, the federal government mandated communities across the country to invest in Housing First initiatives. However, in 2017, the Liberals released a new national housing strategy that placed the focus on social housing.
“There was nothing about Housing First in the strategy, so things have stalled,” said Aubry.
“If you look at the last six or seven years, we’ve grown some of the HF programs, but we really haven’t seen any kind of scaling up of them, despite the fact that we know that chronic homelessness has increased significantly,” he continued.
“We have a lot more visible homelessness, a lot more people unsheltered — they’re living in encampments, and they’re really not tied to any kind of system. And this is the kind of approach that could address that.”
