The small city of Medicine Hat, Alta., has spent years trying to stamp out homelessness. Today, experts say, serving its unhoused community takes a dynamic and multifaceted response.
In 2015, the city of Medicine Hat, Alta., made a bold declaration: It had ended chronic homelessness. The definition city leaders applied, years before any nationally recognized criteria were established, was that no one would experience homelessness for more than 10 days before they had access to the housing and support they needed. That lasted for 15 months.
Five years later, in June, 2021, the city announced a new milestone: It had reached ‘functional zero’ homelessness – wherein no more than three people are unhoused for more than three months straight.
Seven months later, the city’s unhoused community began to grow again. And while Medicine Hat can no longer claim to be at what’s called ‘functional zero,’ the city of 65,000 currently has less than 20 people unhoused and remains focused on solutions.
“No one level of government can independently solve homelessness,” says Medicine Hat Mayor Linnsie Clark, who was elected in 2021. “It’s health, it’s public safety, it’s affordability.”
Across Canada, cities are grappling with a growing homelessness crisis. Housing affordability, mental-health and addiction challenges, and family breakdown have converged to create rising numbers of unhoused people, visible and hidden. Experts say it’s a complex problem – one that demands a multifaceted response.
Even keeping track of the numbers is challenging; federal government statistics dating from 2017 indicate 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness in any given year and acknowledge that the hidden homeless, such as couch surfers or those going from shelter to shelter, were not included in those estimates. In 2021, Statistics Canada asked Canadian households whether they had ever experienced homelessness, and one in 10 respondents said they had. Advocates warn of a “humanitarian crisis,” and in some parts of the country, critics say government responses have been inadequate.
“Solving the homelessness crisis,” Ms. Clark, of Medicine Hat says, “has to be a collaborative effort which also involves members of the community.”
Some 600 kilometres north of Medicine Hat, Edmonton has learned this firsthand. In January, the city declared a state of emergency on housing and homelessness. Health crises such as rising amputations owing to frostbite were mounting, and a month prior, city police dismantled several housing encampments, leading city councillors to vote on the declaration. The city earmarked $3.5-million to address the issue, and sent its staff on a mission to find solutions within existing programs and initiatives.
“In less than a month, our staff came back with over 47 actions for what more we could do, and faster,” says Edmonton city councillor Anne Stevenson, an urban planner by profession. “That means expediting permit processes for affordable housing with a view to potentially removing fees altogether, the potential development of surplus school sites for affordable housing, and directing dividends from investment to housing-specific funding.”
The province has also established a new low-barrier navigation and support centre that provides individuals, many from the now-closed encampments, with access to beds, addiction services and Indigenous community support. Those using the centre can bring pets and store their belongings safely. This is making a difference, too, Ms. Stevenson says.
“We have successful programs and know what works,” she says. “We just need to scale up those solutions and do more of them.”
Medicine Hat first began investing in similar solutions in 2001, as part of an Alberta-wide program called Seven Cities, in which it joined Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge and three other cities in a push to end homelessness. With the help of provincial funding, local leaders collaborated with front-line agencies, businesses and the community at large. All the while, they kept service users’ needs at the heart of this work.
In 2014, the city launched a refocused plan with a suite of services that integrate health, income assistance and corrections support. Social workers staff the libraries; the city provides informal work opportunities via the Casual Cash Employment program; and their incubator program, LYNX House, a 16-bed sober living facility, has expanded with the help of provincial funding.
This work was primarily carried out by the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society (MHCHS), a one-stop community-based organization mandated by both the federal and provincial governments to manage housing and homelessness in the city. At Home in Medicine Hat, their updated strategic plan, as well as a complementary community well-being plan, draws on data that identify how public systems like emergency rooms, shelters, libraries and policing are used. It also uses this data to continuously evaluate how its programs can be made more efficient.
Jaime Rogers, manager of homeless and housing development at MHCHS, includes food banks, immigrant services, developers, local businesses, women’s shelters, taxi drivers and “even people who are angry with us” in the summits they hold to write and advance this strategy.
“That old adage, ‘We fund it because we’ve always done that,’ is not something we use,” Ms. Rogers says. “It’s about course correcting and who needs to be funding certain initiatives. If we have an issue of addiction and mental health, then [Alberta] Health should be at the table funding.”
Indigenous individuals are disproportionately affected by homelessness in Medicine Hat – they comprise 14 per cent of people MHCHS serves, but just 5.22 per cent of the general population. Accordingly, Medicine Hat incorporates Indigenous practices into its services, and is taking steps toward decolonizing and indigenizing its offerings, using native languages, changing treatment plans to incorporate natural healing, and offering mentorships with elders in the community. That’s integral to the upcoming Spencer Street project – 20 housing units for Indigenous citizens, which will break ground in the spring. Ms. Rogers is also awaiting funding for an additional 44-unit build.
Never losing sight of the human element is fundamental, too, she says. “Success looks different these days: We’re not only looking at numbers – how many people are getting housing and staying housed,” Ms. Rogers says.
Rather, her team is asking questions like, “Does that individual still have hope in their life?” she says. “Are suicide rates going down? Have they reconnected with their families? I want to know about that kind of impact.”
For young people especially, there is immediate need, says researcher Amanda Buchnea, strategy, policy, and innovation specialist at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, a research and policy partnership project based at York University in North York, Ont. Communities are working to figure out what is needed to ensure that people released from corrections, rehabilitation or the child protective system, for example, don’t fall into homelessness upon release, she says.
According to the 2018 Statistics Canada homelessness snapshot Everyone Counts, 50 per cent of all people experiencing homelessness had their first experiences before the age of 25. “The alarm bells should be raised that these are long term trajectories into homelessness,” Ms. Buchnea says. Youth programs like Reconnect, a community-based intervention program pioneered in Australia and currently administered at RAFT Niagara, offer options for first steps, she says.
Focused on stability, security and self-esteem, the program operates on a ‘Housing First’ principle, offering 24/7 shelter access for youth between the ages of 16 to 24. It emphasizes the importance of connection to safe and secure housing; offers youth support in reconnecting with their families, community, and education; and provides personal growth and employment training.
Damian Collins, the director of the Community Housing Canada Research Partnership and a professor at University of Alberta highlights the value of the ‘Housing First’ approach, which views access to housing as an essential human right. It’s a framework that provides independent housing alongside health and social-service supports with no prerequisite for sobriety, and is a vital avenue for cities to rehouse their unhoused communities, he says.
“It’s a fluid system, though,” Mr. Collins says. “For every person who exits homelessness, 1.5 or two people are entering it. Increasing supply for more transitional housing, especially for those in greatest need, is key.”
Medicine Hat was one of the first cities in the country to commit to a Housing First approach in 2009.
That approach was crucial to helping the city achieve its initial zero homelessness figures, if for a short time. Today, Ms. Rogers says, it’s less relevant.
“In Medicine Hat, because we’ve addressed mostly the chronically homeless that are effectively served by that type of intervention,” she says, “who we have left is not going to be served well through that.”
Ms. Rogers and her team are committed to serving these individuals in other ways. But their response is nimble: Medicine Hat continues to take a critical eye to what’s working, turning to other social supports to fill in the gaps.