The Current - Houston halved homelessness. Will that plan work in Winnipeg?

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Winnipeg has a bold new plan to move people out of encampments and into housing, modelled on a strategy that reduced homelessness by 60 per cent in Houston, Texas. But one critic warns the plan involves moving people out of public housing to make space in a tight rental market — and could put a cohort of lower-income people at risk.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It has been very cold across Manitoba this week with the wind chill nearing minus 50 in some areas on Monday. And is driving home with the urgent need for a solution to the homelessness crisis in Winnipeg. Jesse Winberg who has lived in shelters and encampments is hoping for more than just a roof over his head. I guess more supports on my behalf so to get I gets motivation I guess and try to get into a stable environment away from drugs. Last week the Manitoba government announced a new strategy that it hopes will help get people away

from drugs out of encampments and into housing. This is something that was promised by the Premier Wab Kanu and we'll hear more about the plan in Winnipeg in just a moment. But this plan has been inspired by a city far south of Winnipeg, that is the city of Houston, Texas in four years, that Texas city has reduced the chronic homelessness population by something like 60%. Mandy Chapman Semple is the architect of this

strategy. She's a former special assistant for homeless initiatives to the mayor of Houston and is now the managing partner of Clutch Consulting. She's in Houston. Mandy, hello. Hello. When it comes to homelessness, can you just briefly describe what your city,

what Houston looked like when you first started your work in the Mayor's office? Yeah. At the time, in 2012, Houston had over 8,000 individuals experiencing homelessness on any given night and more than half of those individuals were living unsheltered in tents on the streets of Houston. And so I said in the introduction that the population of those experiencing homelessness

has dropped by something like 60% since this plan was put into place? Yeah, that's right. And we've actually reduced the number of individuals sleeping outside by over 70%. How have you been able to do that? Walk us through how this strategy works. Yeah, so the system became really focused on emergency rehousing activities. So instead of thinking about how to simply bring individuals

inside into shelter, every partner in Houston really focused on how do we move folks into housing as quickly as possible, oftentimes skipping shelter altogether and going directly to housing and then wrapping supports around individuals in that housing so they can stabilize and recover. Why was the approach of shelters not appropriate? You've said that our natural instinct when we see homelessness is to hire more outreach workers and to increase the number of shelter beds. What's wrong with that? Well, so it's not that shelter is particularly bad.

It's just not necessarily the solution and it's quite costly. And so at the end of the day, if we have limited resources and we're dealing with precious lives, we want to cut right to the remedy. And if the remedy is housing with supports, then we in Houston elected to put our resources into the remedy and then use the existing emergency shelter beds that we had to their maximum potential. So the more people we can move through those beds, the less that bed costs per person.

And then it becomes an efficient complement to a larger rehousing initiative. So this is a housing first initiative. Tell me about the housing. How do you find housing to put people into? So we had incredible partnerships with our housing authorities, and those housing authorities provided us

with the housing vouchers, so the rental subsidies. So we could go into the private market and rent units with that subsidy, in essence, creating a social housing option with a regular market rate unit. And what would that cost? I mean, again, the assumption from some people a social housing option with a regular market rate unit. And what would that cost? I mean, again, the assumption from some people might be that if you are paying the rent,

if you are providing that housing, that costs more than perhaps operating a shelter or hiring outreach workers. How much did that cost compared to the shelter solution? Yes, so to pay for an individual's rental subsidy for about 12 months and the supportive services that they need costs around $24,000 a year. And so what we understood, particularly about those individuals who were experiencing chronic

homelessness, is they were costing our system far more than that, oftentimes closer to $50,000 a year. And that was to live on the streets and to use our crisis services. So it was an easy pivot to a more affordable, cost-effective model that also really promoted the health of both the individual and the community. How did you go about convincing people to leave encampments

with this as a solution that you were kind of hanging in front of them? Believe it or not. It was really easy that over 90% of the individuals when approached Willingly accept the housing that's being offered What's interesting is the opposite is true only about 10% Except shelter if that's all that's being offered simply because the experience is often that shelter doesn't lead to a remedy. And so by offering housing directly and seeing such a large number of people accept that,

it really validated our understanding that housing is the remedy and that individuals want housing and are really willing to engage in a process to get out of an encampment and back to stability. It's not just housing that you're providing. You mentioned earlier that there are wraparound supports as well. What are those supports that you're giving so that people don't just end up in housing but that the housing sticks? Yeah, so everyone is assigned a case manager and that case manager meets with them in their

home. And then in addition, there are more multidisciplinary teams that can provide more robust behavioral health services and physical health services that also can be deployed on an individual basis, depending on the unique needs of the individual. And why is that important to make sure that those services are provided? Well, I think we can all relate to sometimes the difficulty

of navigating the healthcare system. And for someone who is working to regain stability, bringing those services to that individual helps ensure that that individual is getting the services they need in real time and helps them establish a more regular pattern for how to engage in those services long-term. What was the biggest obstacle you faced in trying to make this work?

I think there were different obstacles at different times. Certainly the first was helping everyone in the homeless services sector kind of pivot and adjust and build new skills. When you're primarily responding to crisis, that's a different set of skills than when you're moving individuals into housing and helping individuals stabilize in that housing. So it was that retraining. We talk about it as building our rehousing muscles. And then after that, certainly we experienced challenges in finding enough rental units and we had to develop new techniques

that shifted from expecting a social worker or expecting the client themselves to go find a unit to actually negotiating in the rental market, using incentives, really thinking at scale in a more sophisticated way to fully harness the opportunities in the market, bring those opportunities to these individuals in need and create a rehousing system. One of the things that you have to your advantage is that Houston has a much higher housing vacancy rate than cities like Winnipeg.

Is this strategy actually replicable, do you think, in other cities which might have a tighter housing market? Yeah, so certainly we've since supported many cities across the United States to implement the same model, many of them having very challenging and tight housing markets. And there is a universal truth here, which is that regardless of supply, we still have an affordability crisis. So we still need the voucher and we still have to go convince that private market to accept our voucher.

And that's pretty much a universal truth. And interestingly enough, oftentimes we need less than 1% of the rental market to end homelessness in any city. So it's just a matter of bringing the tools to the table that allow us to go and gain access to that 1%. People are paying attention to this. We're going to hear about how this is going to be replicated,

stolen with permission perhaps, in the city of Winnipeg and in Manitoba more broadly. Mandy, thank you very much for this. Thank you for having me. Mandy Chapman Semple is the architect of Houston's homelessness strategy, managing partner as well of Clutch Consulting.

I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth.

How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. Tessa Blakey-Whitecloud is the Manitoba Premier, Wab Kanu's new senior advisor on ending chronic homelessness. She's overseeing the province's new strategy,

also the outgoing CEO of Silo Mission, which is a downtown shelter in Winnipeg. Tessa, good morning to you. Good morning. Wab Kanu promised to end chronic homelessness when he was running to be the Premier. How much do you think of an inspiration was what's happening in Houston to what you're

going to do in Manitoba? I certainly think there was a lot of lessons learned and delegation went from Winnipeg and we took what we thought could make sense here to build a Manitoba plan. So this is also learning from lessons in other jurisdictions across Canada and saying how do we apply this to the specific context of Winnipeg. So you already mentioned a much lower vacancy rate here.

Also, you know, a lot of different experiences leading people to homelessness than there might be in a city like Houston when we think about the implications of residential school impact or folks coming from reserve communities to Winnipeg for services and then getting stuck here. So we really wanted to build a Manitoba-focused plan. And so that's what this is, but certainly learning from everybody who's having success addressing this issue and this humanitarian crisis.

How's it going to work? I think the key part of this is that it starts with units. So there are 300 units committed in the encampment strategy response alone, but there's also other units committed more broadly to come online as we build out that more elaborate framework that's going to take us over the

next seven years. And we know that really units are that need. And so it is about getting folks into that housing that's going to work for them and have those supports and look like housing that they want to choose over that encampment. And I, you know, your previous guest mentioned folks aren't going gonna choose shelter all the time. And so it needs to be a space where they're excited to go start their life there. And so it's really about building those units first, building relationships,

which our sector has already done that work. And so figuring out who in encampments today and who living in unsheltered lifestyles today wants to move into housing, if that housing again had everything that they wanted in it. So it's going to be about the relationship aspect and making sure that those supports are there in that housing so people can thrive

for the longterm. There's this 30 day transition period for people who are living in encampments. What is that? Yeah. So a big piece of that is about going from encampment to encampment. So it's 30 days when we start engaging with an

encampment because we have housing online that we think will work for them. So it's going to have to start before that because we have to figure out what the housing that would work for them would look like. And then after that 30 day window, it's really a way that 30 day window starts. It's really a way to put pressure on all of the systems that would normally get in the way. So you need to have ID to move in. You need to have, you know, maybe connections to social assistance to move in or whatever that is. So it's a way to accelerate all of the government processes to say, we only have 30 days for when this individual accepts that housing to make sure that we can move them into that housing. So let's take away that red tape and move. So that 30 day timeline is about,

you know, ensuring that we have a process for the entire encampment to be able to move into housing as they need to. And if people aren't ready within those 30 days, what happens? Yeah, I think that that's a big conversation. It's going to be person centered. So what's in the way, right? Is it, uh, you know, access to more mental health supports that's in the way?

Is it that somebody else in an encampment, uh, and maybe not the same one, cause this is again, is an encampment by encampment strategy, uh, needs support for them to feel okay getting housed. You know, there's a lot of folks coming out of homelessness who can feel like they left street family behind. So how do we make sure that we're, you know, supporting an entire family of a chosen family? And so that will be a person centered response. One of the concerns here is that, and we hinted at this, I mean, Houston has a vacancy rate

of something like 13.1% when it launched this. The latest data says that Winnipeg's apartment vacancy rate is 1.8%. And even worse than the deeply affordable units, right? Like even worse. So is there enough housing for people to, I mean, one of the concerns is, is that if you're looking at public housing, there are people who are currently

in public housing who might have to be moved out to move people from encampments in. So two pieces on that. So absolutely there's not enough housing. Um, and that's why again, the 30 day window starts once that housing is secured and ready to go, um, and part of that larger framework. So there's kind of three pieces to the announcement last week.

So one was we're bringing on 300 units in the next year or so to address encampments specifically and make sure that we're building that housing to solve that issue. There's a recognition that more social housing units need to come online and that there needs to be more ways to create vacancy in social housing units for a housing first program. That's going to be all by people's choice. So there's people that want to move out of Manitoba housing and with a subsidy could and could maybe return to a neighborhood that they grew up in or get closer to work or whatever that looks like. So as people's choice, there'll be a process to support them to move out of social housing and closer to a neighborhood that makes sense

for them in the private rental market with a subsidy. But the other piece of this announcement was about, you know, building out that longer term strategy and that longer term strategy is going to need to include more housing investment. And the province is already working on a couple of partnerships, including the recently announced Char REIT, which is a community housing REIT, to make sure that we build more housing

and address that issue rapidly. And the other piece of this is a big part of my role is working inter-departmentally within government to say, where are we creating homelessness by allowing system gaps? So how do we stop people from falling through the cracks moving forward by changing government systems? Province can afford to do this? I think that it's going to be all of Manitoba approach. So the private sector's at the table, the nonprofit sector's at the table, grantors and the Winnipeg Foundation are at the table. Well, I think that this is going to be expensive

in the short term. We heard already from the woman speaking in Houston and similar research has happened actually in Winnipeg with the at home stay swap project that proved that housing first is significantly less expensive when you look at the total cost. Nevermind it's more dignified. It has way more capacity to have people turn around

and give back to their community. So in the long term, this is going to be a much less expensive plan than the one we've been living with. It's really interesting. We'll be watching and hopefully talk again as, as this unfolds. Tessa, thank you very much. Thank you.

Tessa Blakey-Wettklaut is the outgoing CEO of Silo Mission, it's a shelter in downtown Winnipeg, also the new senior advisor on ending chronic homelessness for the premier of Manitoba, Wab Kanu. Shawna McKinnon is a professor and chair of the Department of Urban and Inner City Studies at the University of Winnipeg, also a member of the Right to Housing Coalition.

She's been listening. And Shawna, good morning to you. Good morning. You wrote an opinion piece last summer saying that politicians need to move on from the Houston model. Why wouldn't, from your perspective, that Houston model work in Manitoba? Yeah, so the central issue that we have with the Houston model

is, again, the context, and you laid some of that out, but it's especially concerning to us is the pretty much sole reliance on the private sector. And that's not something that we believe we should be looking at. Um we think that the right to housing coalition has been working for 20 years now to making the case that what we really need is an expansion of social housing. Um and so investment in housing that's you know non market housing. Um and uh with the government

subsidy to ensure that it's rent geared to income at less than 30% of rent. And then of course, all the supports that people have already talked about. So that's a concern for us that there's this idea that we should be following an American model. And we know that there's very minimal supply of the kinds of housing that we're talking about. So that reliance on the private sector is a problem for us.

Tessa said that one of the things this would be, would be an all of, of Manitoba approach. Does that give you some assurance that everybody's going to be involved in this? It's not just the private sector, government is going to be spending huge sums of money on this as well. Yeah, well, no, it doesn't. Yeah, it might just charge cause these, you know,

that all of Manitoba, um, uh, doesn't really, you know, what, it's't. I might just charge because these, you know, that all of Manitoba doesn't really, you know, it's not really clear what that means. But I will say that what we've called for at the Right to Housing Coalition is that we need 10,000 minimum new units of social housing. That number has grown over the years since I started doing this work. And so we're saying we need at least a thousand units a year of rent geared to income social housing to begin to provide the kind of housing we need and not just for people in encampments. Obviously that's the most critical issue, but also to ensure that people who are living in low income have safe places to live so that they don't fall into homelessness. So

we've got no indication that there's any commitment to that level of social housing. That would be a long-term commitment and presumably would take a long time to build. What happens in the interim for people who are living, I said it's minus 50 with the wind chill this week, for people who are living in encampments now. Yeah, yeah.

So here's a big concern for me in this plan and you touched on it briefly, this idea that we don't have enough housing, and so what we're doing is looking at existing public housing and we're going to be asking people who live in that housing to consider moving into the private sector. And we're going to give them subsidies so that they can do that. You've already noted that there's not enough housing, and recently the, even the Property Managers Association has said the type of housing that's available

for low-income folks is in really bad condition. So we're suggesting to people that there are options for them, we're going to give them a subsidy, they go out into the private sector and they find that there isn't anything for them, or they find something in the private sector and suddenly the rents go up or they're evicted for some reason and now they end up on the wait list to get back into Manitoba housing.

So that's a really concerning approach for us. It's disrupting other folks who are low income to make room for people with more complicated issues. And I can say there's, this is already happening. I had a call just after the, the, this, this plan was released from a woman who was in tears, who currently lives in public housing, a seniors building, which is no longer a seniors building. And they are, they're already going through this issue where people are being moved in with no supports and they're feeling in, you know, at risk.

I have to let you go, but just very, very briefly. I mean, encampments aren't the solution. I think everybody agrees. Agreed. Do you worry that, that perfection is the enemy of the good in something like this? We're not looking for perfection, but we're looking for real significant commitments

that are actually genuinely engaging the community. A lot of folks in the community are doing this work and they haven't been involved in the development of this plan. So again, it just feels like we're just putting the cart before the horse. And my concern is, is that we're actually putting more people at risk that are currently safely

housed in public housing by moving too quickly when we don't have the housing that's required. Shaun, I'm really glad to hear from you on this. Thank you. putting more people at risk that are currently safely housed in public housing by moving too quickly when we don't have the housing that's required. Shaun, I'm really glad to hear from you on this. Thank you very much. Great. Thanks. Shaun McKinnon is a professor and chair in the department of urban and inner city studies at the University of Winnipeg, also a member of the Right to Housing Coalition.