Toronto can end tents in parks: Here’s a city that solved street homelessness — and how we can do it too

Their technicolor shells are the most visible symptom of a city in over its head — with rents beyond even the reach of many mid-income earners, difficult to access mental health treatment, an increasingly toxic street drug supply, and a shelter system that turns away hundreds each day.

As homelessness grows more visible in shared public spaces like parks and subway cars, public sentiment has sharpened. In living rooms, Facebook groups and public forums, many Torontonians have expressed frustration with a problem that seems to grow unabated.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow is among those who’ve argued clearings are futile, saying they only shift the problem to ravines or transit lines. The answer, she and other city players say, is building affordable housing to get people back on their feet. But that isn’t happening fast enough yet to corral the crisis.

Meanwhile, an ocean away, another city has cracked the code. In Helsinki, Finland, street homelessness is effectively a problem of the past.

Four decades ago, the country was in the thick of its own crisis, with a homeless population of around 20,000. But it has managed to since drive that number below 4,000 people. By 2027, officials believe it’s possible they’ll end long-term homelessness entirely.

Juha Kahila has watched it happen from up close: his country decided the homelessness crisis was unacceptable, and radically shifted its housing system.

It isn’t too late for a similar outcome on Canadian soil, said Kahila, head of international affairs for Finland’s largest non-profit landlord. Theirs is a proven method, if elected officials are willing to treat the issue as a true emergency. 

“Change is possible,” he said. “It’s not inevitable that people end up being homeless.”

On freezing nights, through the 1960s, dozens of Finns died on the streets. Homelessness had been mounting for decades, especially since war veterans came to its major cities looking for work and found hopelessness instead. 

It’s from this anguish that Kahila’s team — a non-profit called the Y-Foundation, or Y-Säätiö — formed in the mid-1980s. Their mission was to buy modest market rental apartments and lease them at lower costs to single homeless people. It was one piece of a broader effort by government officials and non-profits to increase Finland’s affordable housing supply. 

Canada’s decision-makers also saw affordable housing as worth national effort back then, said former United Nations special housing rapporteur Leilani Farha, as the result of a perspective shift after the Second World War when decent housing was considered an essential part of a functioning society. 

But that enthusiasm began to wane, despite homelessness starting to rise. Toronto was gentrifying, with more affordable areas such as Cabbagetown and Parkdale becoming more expensive. Rooming houses were disappearing. Public sentiment about institutionalizing people with mental illnesses had shifted, but there was no real strategy for where patients would go when institutions shut down, University of Toronto housing expert David Hulchanski said.

In 1982, one report estimated at least 3,400 Torontonians had no fixed address. “The issue of homelessness has reached a level of urgency not witnessed since the Great Depression,” the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto warned the following year. 

Despite this, the federal government off-loaded responsibility for subsidized housing to provincial governments in the 1990s. From there, Ontario downloaded the job to its cities, who struggled to keep their aging subsidized housing in good repair, let alone build more.

Meanwhile, in Helsinki, homelessness started to improve. Officials had dismantled old barriers like requiring abstinence from substance use to qualify for housing aid. And they kept building affordable homes.

“You stopped, and we kept going,” Kahila said. “Now, of course, we can see what happened.” 

By the turn of the millennium, Finland had cut homelessness in half, down to a little more than 10,000 people. In Toronto, the problem was meanwhile ballooning, with a city report finding in 1998 more than 6,000 children alone passed through its shelters.

Then came the financial crisis in 2008. Households in cities like Helsinki were on shakier economic footing, Kahila said. While overall homelessness numbers were easing, chronic homelessness remained stubbornly high. But instead of backing off when budgets tightened, Finnish officials decided to double down.

Rather than its old “staircase model” — where someone was first given a temporary shelter bed, then began working on challenges like substance use, and, eventually, moved into a home of their own — officials outlined a new strategy where housing came first, with supports to address other challenges after. 

More housing was built, including scattered subsidized units in mixed-income communities as well as concentrated buildings with 24-hour support services for tenants with greater needs. Emergency shelters were used less, so officials started converting them into homes. It was not a quick or cheap intervention, but was seen as necessary, Kahila said.

“Nobody had money, but in Finland, the government made the decision that this is somewhere we want to put our efforts,” he recalled. “They prioritized the budget. They did some other things a little bit less … you take a little less for housing for students, for example.”

Some housing was built by non-profits like the Y-Foundation, and some directly by cities like Helsinki, which leveraged its mass of publicly owned land.

Some shelters still operated, but people stayed there for shorter periods, Kahila said. Occupants had their own rooms and staff would match them with a social worker to create a long-term plan. Families with kids were typically moved straight into housing.

Helsinki reinforced its social safety net further in 2016. With homelessness down to about 7,000 people, the city established new targets that say a quarter of new housing should be subsidized rentals.

It was a world away from Toronto’s surging crisis, with around 16,000 people relying on the Canadian city’s shelters in 2015 alone. Very little new subsidized housing was being built, with most supply dating back pre-‘90s.

In Toronto, a growing problem explodes

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic paralyzed cities and confined residents into their homes, metropolises around the world saw homelessness in a sharper light than ever before. In Toronto, the pandemic took a lit match to a problem that had been smouldering for years.

The city, which was already struggling with shelter capacity, removed and spaced out beds to prevent infection from spreading. Jails also discharged people to relieve crowding, many without any plan for housing.

At the same time, affordable housing was scarce, market rents had grown faster than incomes, and the wait-list for subsidized units was a decade or longer. The city opened more than two dozen temporary shelters during the pandemic, but people were still turned away, with homelessness overflowing into public spaces.

While you could previously find tents in the Rosedale ravine or beneath the Gardiner expressway, sizable encampments grew in highly visible places such as Lamport Stadium and tony neighbourhoods like Trinity Bellwoods.

Public tension followed. Then-mayor John Tory argued encampments were not safe or healthy, and backed a series of high-profile clearings in 2021. They were heavily protested, with critics accusing decision-makers of harming occupants without solving the problem.

As encampment clearings are back at the forefront of political debate, Kahila believes officials are shifting blame from decision-makers to individuals in desperate conditions. That wasn’t going to fix things, he said. 

“You are just moving people’s challenges to somewhere else,” he said. 

“They should offer people some real opportunities besides just sweeping streets and parks and making cities look like there is no homelessness.”

Today, in Toronto, more than 10,000 people are homeless, versus fewer than 4,000 across all of Finland. If someone in Helsinki lost their housing tomorrow, they’d fall into a safety net that has increasingly sewn up its gaps, with Kahila noting they effectively don’t see street homelessness anymore.

Not so in Toronto: the city’s subsidized housing wait-list is nearly 93,000 households long, plus a supportive housing queue of more than 28,000 individuals.

However, across Canada, there are signs of changing attitudes. On the national, provincial and Toronto level, politicians have increased their focus on housing in recent years, announcing a flurry of new spending to boost supply. Much of this spending focuses on market-priced housing, however one investment seen as especially effective in tackling homelessness has been the federal Rapid Housing Initiative, which was launched in 2020 and provides brick-and-mortar funding for deeply affordable and supportive housing. 

These funds have supported projects in Toronto like Dunn House — which offers 51 units of subsidized housing with specialized supports, aimed at homeless residents who chronically wind up in hospital emergency rooms.

That project caught Kahila’s attention; the Y-Foundation, earlier this year, invited its founding medical director, Andrew Boozary, to Helsinki to discuss it. Kahila believes Finnish officials can learn from Canadian examples, especially around the collection of statistics. He also sees Boozary as putting a clear face on the role of health care in housing, which Kahila sees as paramount. 

“The Dunn House is Boozary’s example of the fact that, above all, action is needed in addition to words,” Kahila said. 

Boozary, who took the foundation up on their offer in May, was struck by how different Helsinki felt from any major city in Canada. “You don’t see homelessness, and that’s the first thing that really hits you,” he said.

Its social housing was also virtually indistinguishable from market units, he said. It felt dignified.

Boozary wants Dunn House, which opened in October, to be a playbook for that same model at home. The Parkdale project leaned on around $14 million in Rapid Housing Initiative funds, hospital-owned land, and city and provincial support. Its operations are run by social agency Fred Victor.

To Kahila, it’s the kind of innovative approach that could make a real dent in Toronto’s homelessness crisis. The problem is scale.

While Dunn House is a specialized site, Toronto would need more than 200 times as many units to house Toronto’s total homeless population as of October.

In 2023, a federally appointed housing council pointed to the Rapid Housing Initiative as a promising way to deliver genuinely affordable homes. But it noted that program was dwarfed by other federal housing efforts. Today, it’s a $4-billion initiative compared to, for example, Ottawa’s $40-billion rental construction financing program. 

While Toronto-based studies have found housing is cheaper than emergency shelters — with a shelter bed pre-pandemic costing more than $40,000 per year (and doubling when shelter capacity was lowered during COVID-19) versus around $24,000 per year for a supportive housing unit — one key barrier to building affordable housing is steep upfront capital cost. 

Abi Bond, one of Toronto city hall’s top housing officials, sees the Rapid Housing Initiative as a game-changer. But it’s still an uphill climb for each project, often requiring negotiations with multiple governments for funds.

While Toronto has, for instance, been granted $610.8 million for supportive housing projects under the Rapid Housing Initiative — it asked for more than $1.6 billion — they also need the province to provide operating funds. “We’re piecing together this funding almost on a project-by-project basis,” she said.

The progress in Finland was “astounding,” Bond said. If Toronto wants a chance at replicating it, she believes governments need to get on the same page, with more consistent funding and a consensus on targets.

“The biggest difference is they have a larger and more predictable amount of funding,” Bond said. “We can’t move as fast — or at the scale — that’s necessary.”

It isn’t just Finland that Canada pales against; subsidized housing is a smaller share of our housing market than in countries such as the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Poland and Australia, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

This is the key problem Kahila sees here. In October, he attended a conference in Ottawa where he says politicians from multiple parties, including national Housing Minister Sean Fraser, were saying the right things — that stepping back from subsidized housing was a mistake, and Canada needed to create more. But Kahila believes there was a lack of specificity about how to do it.

“I think pragmatism is one of those things you guys could learn from us,” he said. “When we actually saw people dying on the streets, that was it. Enough was enough.”

He knows this kind of change often hinges on public opinion, but says politicians have to be bold. “In big countries like Canada, it can take one or two political champions who don’t care about the next election — they care about what they can do right now for the people.”

When Fraser looks to Finland, he says it makes him optimistic.

“It shows us that when partners across all orders of government and the private sector work together to solve a crisis, they can get it done,” he wrote in a statement to the Star, adding he believes his government is moving in the right direction, with current initiatives from homelessness research projects to funding that incentivizes cities to increase housing density. 

In Toronto, Chow envies the progress Helsinki has made, feeling the decisions of past politicians put her city on the back foot. To convert shelters, Toronto would need enough affordable housing to empty out its emergency beds, which just isn’t happening right now — save for one-off cases like the conversion of a temporary shelter at the Bond Hotel to permanent homes.

“Look at this Finland model,” Chow lamented. “Look how much money they’ve saved because of the buildings, because of the housing first policy.”

Kahila knows Toronto and Helsinki aren’t a perfect comparison. The Canadian city, for example, faces a worse opioid crisis that requires unique supports. But he believes Finland’s approach can be adapted for Toronto.

To U of T’s Hulchanski, it’s straightforward. “Finland’s people and governments have simply sustained a commitment to ending mass homelessness by doing what experts have been recommending for decades,” he said.

It’s a system Kahila sees as uplifting people and offering them more long-term stability, with ripple effects for entire cities. 

“It’s safer cities. It’s good for business, good for restaurants, good for tourists. It’s a win-win-win situation when you actually take care of the most vulnerable,” Kahila said.

“I think that’s something people have forgotten — what a city without homelessness actually feels like.”