Canada's best homeless strategy comes from...Stephen Harper?

Here's a national story with some implications for Toronto: the federal government has since 2009 been funding a large pilot project with a new-to-Canada type of homelessness management strategy. From the Canadian Press:

The approach, known as "housing first", rejects the traditional method of trying to fix homeless people's underlying problems before guiding them towards affordable housing. Instead, the home comes first ? heavily subsidized and with no strings attached. Then, a support team swoops in and bombards the homeless people with services of all kinds, if they want them.

The government was not about to embrace an experimental approach to the homeless wholesale. Instead, taking their cue from Harper, officials decided to zero in on a sub-group: the mentally ill.

Then they narrowed their focus further. In five cities across the country, they targeted a particularly vulnerable sector of the mentally ill homeless population. In Vancouver, it was substance abusers. In Winnipeg, urban aboriginals. In Toronto, visible minorities. In Moncton, migrants from rural areas. And in Montreal, access to social housing was emphasized.

And the website for the Mental Health Commission notes that this research builds on pre-existing programs in Toronto, namely the Streets to Homes program. Streets to Homes has not exactly been met with a warm embrace from the Mayor's office. In March, Rob Ford told the Toronto Sun he'd be taking a long hard look at the program's budget.

The "Housing First" approach is important for a bunch of reasons, but one of the biggest appeals is that when it's compared to more traditional methods of dealing with the homeless (which involve frequent arrests and hospitalizations) it can be cheaper. Malcolm Gladwell looked at the early results of U.S. research in to Housing First back in 2006 for the New Yorker.

Is it ironic that it's the Conservative government, and notably a bleeding-heart Stephen Harper in particular, that's funding this intiative? Maybe. But if it leads the way to a broader effort to deal with homelessness in Toronto few people will remember the irony. The test will be to see what happens after the program winds down in 2013?and what Ottawa and the provinces will do to replace it.

Blog photo by dave416 via Flickr.

Source: http://toronto.openfile.ca/blog/curator-blog/curated-news/2011/canadas-best-homeless-strategy-comes-fromstephen-harper

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