How much do you actually know about homelessness in Windsor?

Research consistently shows the opposite. Stable housing is one of four pillars of addiction recovery identified by SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). Housing First programs — which house people without treatment requirements — produce better outcomes than treatment-first models. Multiple peer-reviewed studies confirm: housing provides the stability that makes recovery possible, not the other way around.

Windsor's HART Hub provides treatment-oriented mental health, addiction, and housing-related supports. Transitional housing and other housing supports are only offered once an individual engages in treatment. Critics argue that this represents a shift away from the harm-reduction and Housing First model associated with SafePoint. Evidence shows that Housing First approaches produce significantly better housing stability outcomes for people with addiction than treatment-first models.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission's final report (2024) found the opposite: "Forced encampment evictions make people more unsafe and expose them to greater risk of harm and violence. Evictions destabilize people, remove them from their support systems, and cause them to lose the tools and equipment they need to survive." Clearances result in the loss of important documents and ID required for housing applications, cell phones they desperately rely on to maintain contact with the services they are already receiving, and sentimental items that remind them of what they are still living for. You cannot claim you are helping someone by first destroying everything they have — even if you "connect them to services", those services are useless (and often have been for these people) as long as the barriers to housing remain unaddressed. Housing workers don't own magic wands.

True — and by a wide margin. Toronto's Auditor General confirmed emergency shelter costs ~$136 per person per night — over $50,000 per year (this number is even higher for some shelters as of 2025), with minimal housing outcomes. Studies also found that the average cost of a hospitalization for a person experiencing homelessness in Canada was more than double that of an average hospital stay ($16,785 vs. $7,803) — and nearly all homeless patients arrived through the emergency department, suggesting a near-complete lack of access to primary care. The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness: "It costs more to ignore our housing problem than it would to simply fix it."

Shelters were designed for short-term crisis response — a night or two, maybe a week. Not 5–10 years. Yet for thousands of Canadians, that is exactly what has happened. Here is what that life actually looks like: You are woken up early and told to leave. You cannot stay during the day. You line up again that evening with no guarantee you will get a bed. When you do get a space, you may be on a crash mat on a hard floor — in Windsor, H4's overflow shelter uses crash mats laid out in a former gym, and the Downtown Mission's own executive director once described guests sleeping "twelve inches away from the next person, on the floor." Not a bed. A mat. In a row. With strangers on either side. You are allowed to bring two bags. There is nowhere safe to store them, so you carry everything you own, every day. You cannot cook your own food. You cannot close a door. Your partner has to go to a different shelter or sleep outside — most shelters separate couples (though our Downtown Mission allows them to stick together ♥). Your pet is not allowed. Honestly? I would feel safer and more secure in a tent. Wouldn't you?

Confirmed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Federal Housing Advocate's multi-region research (2024), and encampment studies across North America. Every clearance scatters people from their support networks — outreach workers lose track of individuals they've spent months building trust with, and that relationship has to start over from scratch. People are displaced to unfamiliar areas, away from the services, programs, and community connections they depend on. For someone already navigating the fragile path toward housing stability, a clearance can set them back months or years. The trauma compounds. The timeline extends. And the housing crisis underneath — the unaffordable rent, the waitlist, the failed applications — remains completely untouched.

Two things can be true at once. Most landlords are decent people — and they also have employees, mortgages, and real financial risks they cannot absorb alone. Boston's landlord incentive program proved this: when landlords received signing bonuses, damage guarantees, and a dedicated point of contact, they participated willingly. They don't need to be pressured. They need to be supported.

False — this is the most important myth to bust. Boston's landlord incentive program helped house more than 160 people using roughly $1 million in targeted incentives to unlock existing units. Finland converted existing shelter buildings into supported housing for a fraction of new construction costs. Real solutions can be affordable. What's expensive is doing nothing.

Hundreds of units are sitting empty right now.
Vacancy rates suggest that property owners may be motivated to collaborate.
There may be a mutually satisfactory solution here.
Landlords fill units. The government mitigates perceived risk. People are housed. Our parks stay clean.

False — Clearing encampments does not improve the downtown core. It moves suffering out of your line of sight, until it returns again. The encampments keep popping up because the underlying causes — unaffordable housing, impossible waitlists, failed applications, exclusion from the rental market — remain completely untouched. You can be a good person, care about your neighbourhood, AND demand that government address the root causes. Those things are not in conflict. When the underlying causes are addressed, the encampments go away. For good.

We know what works. The research is decades deep. Continuing to clear encampments while ignoring the evidence is like a surgeon prescribing Tylenol for a broken leg and insisting it's the path to healing. The bone doesn't heal. The pain gets managed. And the patient keeps coming back — because the actual problem was never addressed. We just need our government to actually do what the research tells them to do — isn't that their job?

This is called dehumanization, and it is extensively documented in academic literature across political science, social psychology, and neuroscience. Here is what the research actually shows: when a group of people is framed as dangerous, morally inferior, or fundamentally different from "us," the public becomes significantly less likely to demand action on their behalf — and significantly more likely to tolerate harm being done to them. This is not an accident. It is a documented mechanism, and it works. Every time a news story focuses on addiction or criminal history instead of the housing policies that created the crisis, every time a politician talks about "cleaning up" encampments instead of housing people, the narrative does its job: it shifts blame onto the individual, away from the system, and away from the people responsible for fixing it. The government gets to do less. Change less. And the public, feeling that those people brought it on themselves, lets them. You have been absorbing this framing your whole life. So have the people making the decisions. The research has known this for decades. Now you do too. Recognizing it is the first step toward resisting it.

False. Windsor's own 2024 Point-in-Time Count found that over half of people experiencing homelessness had stable housing within the last three years. Canada's national data shows many older adults are experiencing homelessness for the first time later in life due to financial strain, job loss, or the death of a partner. These are our neighbours — not a separate class of people.

True. Canada's National Shelter Study found that roughly 1 in 4 shelter users are aged 50 or older — a proportion that has grown dramatically since 2005, when older adults made up just 13.5% of shelter users. The Canadian Medical Association Journal called this rise "alarming." Shelters are not designed or equipped to meet the health needs of aging adults. This is a growing crisis within a crisis.

False — and this is Windsor-specific data. The City of Windsor's 2024 Point-in-Time Count explicitly states: "The majority of those surveyed did not indicate mental health and substance use as primary drivers of homelessness." The top reasons were income (27%) and conflict with a significant other (21%). Addiction is real, present, and highly visible — but the government blaming addiction as the primary cause of homelessness reduces public pressure, which leaves them off the hook for the housing and income policies that actually drive homelessness. And even for those who are struggling with addiction, the research is clear: people are significantly more likely to recover once they have stable housing. Housing is not the reward for getting sober. It is the condition that makes addiction recovery possible.

False. People in encampments would rather live in a tent than at the shelter — and if you read Q4, you understand why. But living in a tent is not "housed" either. It is not a preference. It is adaptation. Shelters don't meet the basic human need for permanency, a secure base, privacy, or safety. People can only survive that kind of instability for so long before they have to adapt to a new reality.

Most people in encampments have tried to get housing. Housing workers have worked their asses off — often for months — navigating waitlists, failed applications, and a system that keeps saying no. Until, quietly, the person gives up. They curl up in their tent and emerge only for their next meal. They are not there by choice. They are there because the system has exhausted every other option for them. The social housing waitlist in Windsor is 5 to 10 years. That is not a typo.

True. Windsor's homelessness count more than doubled between 2021 and 2024 — the same period that average rent in Windsor nearly doubled. Windsor's own 2024 Point-in-Time Count found income was the top cited cause of homelessness. Windsor's 2024 PiT Count found that over half of those surveyed had stable housing within the last three years. Rental criteria have become increasingly strict, screening out anyone with damaged credit, a gap in rental history, or no co-signer — exactly the people destabilized by the market. The floor gave out. That is a system failure.

False. Over half had a home within the last three years. They are our neighbours — the ones who suddenly disappeared from next door. The only thing separating many of us from their situation is another rental increase, the landlord telling you to leave because "their family member is moving in", the loss of a spouse or job, your kid getting sick one more time this week. Not addressing the underlying barriers experienced by people without homes puts ALL OF US at risk. The existence of encampments is evidence of a failing safety net.

True. Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, receipt of public assistance is protected in housing. Discrimination based on the source of income is a Code violation. Landlords cannot decline an application solely because someone receives Ontario Works or ODSP — and yet this is happening all the time. Our City has a program that helps lower-income individuals, OW, and ODSP recipients with rental deposits, but many landlords are refusing to even consider these applications. This technicality within their application process results in discrimination of an entire group, and it is in violation of the Human Rights Code.

True — and this is a significant driver of the housing crisis. Under section 6.1 of the Residential Tenancies Act, units first occupied after November 15, 2018 are fully exempt from rent control. There is no legal cap on how much a landlord can raise the rent — they only need to give 90 days written notice and can only increase once per year. Most new rental units built in Windsor fall into this category.

True. Canada's Federal Housing Advocate released her final report on February 13, 2024 — "Upholding Dignity and Human Rights: The Federal Housing Advocate's Review of Homeless Encampments" — and it states explicitly: "Forced evictions are a violation of human rights, as contained in section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms." Section 7 guarantees the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. When a clearance destroys someone's only home, their documents, their medications, and severs their connection to outreach support — it puts their life and security directly at risk. Courts have not issued a blanket ruling, but the legal argument is live, documented, and growing. The Advocate called on all levels of government to immediately end forced evictions. Our government has not.

I drove someone to an appointment the other day. When I asked her where to next, she said "home" — she lives in a tent. This is one of the people our government claimed to "help" during the last encampment clearing (April 2026).

False. Decades of political science research confirm that elected officials respond to sustained, visible constituent pressure — especially at the local and provincial level. Municipalities across Canada changed their approach to encampments when communities organized and demanded housing solutions. But the pressure has to be about housing — not just "clean up our parks." That can be a byproduct. Real housing solutions have to be the demand.

You can make a real difference here. We can make a difference. We need to insist: Don't harm them. Don't hide them. HOUSE them. Windsorites, let's solve homelessness.