The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) report on homelessness released Thursday should serve as a "stark warning," according to a local housing advocate.
On Jan. 9, AMO released its ‘Municipalities Under Pressure’ report, which it calls the most ambitious study of homelessness ever conducted across Ontario.
It found that, in 2024, 81,515 people experienced homelessness in Ontario.
In Orillia, emergency shelters have been operating at full capacity for years.
“One of the things that we found, from 2023 to 2024, is that our shelter has been at capacity for adults and youth, so we can’t increase to what we don’t have,” said Linda Goodall, executive director of The Lighthouse.
She said the number of people accessing The Lighthouse’s bagged lunch program increased by 43 per cent in 2024, and the shelter’s outreach team has been supporting more people on the streets “than ever before.”
On the nights it’s open, the Orillia overnight warming centre has seen 15 to 20 people per night, with an additional five per night stopping in to get warm.
“A lot of the increase in homelessness is put on non-profits and the social services, and we can only do so much, and we do whatever we can,” Goodall said.
Collingwood housing advocate Marg Scheben-Edey, who's a member of the town’s affordable housing task force, applauded the deep dive on the issue.
“The result is a stark warning to all of us that the problems are enormous, they are growing and cannot be tamed without heavy investments at all levels of government,” she said. “It validates, yet again, that the only real path out of the homelessness crisis is to build supportive housing and to invest in the creation of permanent affordable housing.”
The information included in the report was based on data from the province’s 47 service managers, who help manage homelessness, provided to AMO.
The County of Simcoe is the service provider for homelessness and housing services across the region.
“For homelessness, it’s never been a great data space, so it’s good on AMO and others to come together to really do a deep dive,” said Mina Fayez-Bahgat, the county's general manager of social and community services.
The county has pushed forward on an open-data strategy on housing and homelessness over the past few years through open.simcoe.ca, a data portal that shows a snapshot in time on local shelter utilization, shelter system flow and affordable housing indicators.
Fayez-Bahgat said that made it easy when AMO came knocking looking for local information.
“For us, it wasn’t shocking because we’ve been at these tables and working on this issue from a data perspective for many years now,” he said. “But, it’s obviously concerning because numbers are going in the wrong direction.”
AMO found that more than half of people in Ontario who were homeless last year did so chronically — meaning they were without somewhere to live for prolonged or repeated periods.
In total, the study found that 25 per cent more people experienced homelessness in Ontario in 2024 than had in 2022.
On average, homelessness has increased by about 50 per cent in Ontario communities since 2016. The group highlighted, however, that rural and northern Ontario communities have experienced significantly sharper rises in homelessness. Compared to eight years earlier, there were 150 per cent more homeless people in rural communities, and more than 200 per cent more homeless people in northern Ontario.
The report shows that known homelessness in Ontario has gone up by 51 per cent since 2016, and chronic homelessness has more than tripled.
“This is significant, because it shows people are not able to move through our shelter system back into housing quickly, and this is in large part because there isn't enough affordable supportive housing to meet the need,” said Jennifer van Gennip, director of communications and advocacy with Redwood Park Communities in Barrie and co-chair of the Ontario Alliance to End Homelessness.
“The experience of homelessness is very traumatic, and the longer people spend homeless, the more supports they need to recover,” she added.
Fayez-Bahgat said the county’s numbers haven’t increased as much as the provincial number – comparing 2022 to 2024, he said homelessness in Simcoe County has only increased by 10 per cent, while chronic homelessness has gone up 23 per cent.
“While our (numbers) are lower, they’re obviously still increasing, which is still a problem and concern for us,” he said.
The report highlights the issue of shelter capacity as being one that prevents people from coming out of homelessness. Of the 27,138 spaces intended for people who are housing insecure across Ontario, 65.2 per cent of people are in the emergency shelter system, while 13 per cent are in transitional housing and 21.6 per cent are in supportive housing.
In 2024, 268,241 households were on Ontario’s wait list for rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing, which is equivalent to one in 20 households in Ontario.
Between 2016 and 2024, the estimated funding for housing and homelessness more than doubled, increasing from $1.9 billion to $4.1 billion. However, municipalities are finding themselves shouldering a larger share of the overall financial burden, particularly for housing programs.
Municipal contributions accounted for 51.5 per cent of that amount.
According to the report’s projections, without significant intervention, homelessness in Ontario could more than triple by 2035, leaving up to 294,266 people without stable housing.
“In housing, municipalities have increasingly stepped in to address mounting pressures,” notes the report. “Those contributions have been essential ... however, the scale of the issue, and the infrastructure required to solve it, extends far beyond what municipalities alone can sustainably fund.”
The report recommends a modelling scenario to push Ontario to achieve functional zero homelessness, which is estimated to cost $11 billion over 10 years.
Under the model, 75,050 new housing and support spaces would be created to house people permanently.
The report also contemplates a scenario that would cost $2 billion, which would create 5,700 new housing and support spaces to get people out of encampments quickly.
“You need a perfect confluence of events – an increase in funding, you need to know your data ... and you need to have all the willing partners (municipalities, community agencies and provincial/federal support) to shore up the services to create the housing in the right way,” said Fayez-Bahgat. “Whatever funding we receive from any level of government, we’re ready to go.”
Sara Peddle, executive director of the Busby Centre's Barrie and South Georgian Bay chapters, said it was good to see that “an army of people in cities across Ontario” contributed to the report.
“It’s good to see that municipalities are aligned with what we’ve been advocating for on the front line of this crisis for many years,” she said told Village Media. “There needs to be a balanced approach of emergency supports, transitional and supportive housing.
“We’re not surprised by the increase in numbers. We are feeling it at the front-line level. People are suffering right now and there’s not a lot of outflow to housing. It’s heartbreaking to watch,” Peddle added.
Peddle said it is, however, reassuring that so much work went into creating the report.
“Homelessness isn’t going away tomorrow,” she said. “As a society, we have spent years creating this crisis. Now, it’s going to take years, thoughtfulness and authentic conversation to get out of that.”
— With files from Charlie Pinkerton
