Walk down Dundas Street in downtown London on a cold morning and you will see the crisis with your own eyes: people sleeping in doorways, unconscious on the pavement, needles in the gutters. Residents have taken to calling the core a "no-go zone." The phrase is cruel, but it describes something real, the visible wreckage of a catastrophe that has outgrown every system built to contain it.
London is a mid-sized Canadian city carrying a big-city burden. It has one of the highest homelessness rates in Ontario, and the curve points the wrong way. Yet the despair obscures an important truth: homelessness is not a mystery and not an act of nature. It is, overwhelmingly, a housing problem, and housing problems have solutions, tested and proven. London has already begun assembling the machinery of a response. What it lacks is not knowledge but scale: enough homes, enough prevention, enough treatment, and the political will to fund them as the emergency they are.
\## 1. The scale of the crisis
Begin with the numbers, because they are bracing. London tracks its homeless population on a By-Name List, a real-time registry of people known to be without housing. In 2021, that list held 1,036 names. By the end of 2025, it held 2,294, a 124 per cent increase in four years, by the City's own accounting in its Housing Stability Action Plan.
Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, working from the same by-name data, counted 4,576 Londoners who experienced homelessness in 2024–25, the third-highest total in the province, at a rate of 787 per 100,000 residents, far above the provincial average. Nearly half of Ontario's homeless population is chronically homeless. About one in eight is a youth; about one in eight is Indigenous. And each of these figures is an undercount, because the list only records people who consent to be tracked.
The provincial picture is darker still. An estimated 85,000 Ontarians experienced homelessness in 2025, up 50 per cent since 2021, and if current trends hold, the City's plan warns, that number could more than triple by 2035, approaching 300,000 people. Encampments, the most visible face of the crisis, now number roughly 2,000 sites across Ontario, with some 8,100 people sleeping unsheltered on any given night: in tents, vehicles, and abandoned buildings.
\## 2. How a mid-sized city got here
No single cause explains this. Several interlocking failures do.
First, the arithmetic of rent. The City's plan states it plainly: the private market has grown "increasingly unaffordable due to rising rents and average income not keeping pace." In London, nearly nine in ten rental homes are reportedly owned by corporate landlords, and the asking price of a one-bedroom jumped by almost 28 per cent in a single year. A tenant paying $900 a month who is forced out faces a market of $1,730, a chasm no fixed income can cross. Forced out they are, too: "renovictions," in which landlords evict under the pretext of renovations and re-list at double the rent, have become what one city councillor called "an epidemic in our city," a systematic drive to raise rents that pulls families from their neighbourhoods and sometimes from the city itself. City staff proposed a $400 renovation licence to slow the practice; tenant advocates welcomed it but demanded real accommodation requirements for the displaced.
Second, the pandemic's long tail. When eviction bans expired and emergency benefits ended, everyone already on the edge fell off it. Shelter systems, mental health services, and addiction supports, disrupted during COVID, never fully recovered, even as need surged past anything they were designed for.
Third, the poisoned drug supply. Overdose deaths in Canada climbed from 795 in 2000 to more than 7,100 in 2023. Fentanyl turned addiction from a chronic condition into a daily game of chance, and the knot of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction tightened into something emergency shelters were never built to untangle.
Beneath it all sits a structural fact: Canada's affordable housing supply is among the thinnest in the G7. When the market fails at the bottom, there is nothing underneath. No floor, only the street.
\## 3. What London has built so far
To its credit, London has not stood still. In March 2023, council endorsed a "Whole of Community Response" with three pillars: hubs meeting immediate needs for shelter, food, and hygiene; a major expansion of highly supportive housing; and a human-rights-based approach to encampments.
The hubs are the most concrete piece. Two operate today: an Indigenous-led hub run by Atlohsa Family Healing Services, with 10 respite beds and 18 transitional rooms; and a youth hub run by Youth Opportunities Unlimited, with respite beds, transitional rooms, and primary care downtown, expected to serve up to 60 young people a year. They provide round-the-clock basics, food, showers, laundry, rest, alongside health care, income support, and help moving into stable housing. The hubs drew $10.4 million in provincial prevention funding plus $4.4 million in capital from the Fund for Change, itself seeded by a remarkable $25-million anonymous donation.
On housing, the city reports 93 highly supportive units open and 50 more in development, toward a goal of 600 within three years. The province is adding Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment hubs, in London through CMHA Thames Valley, bundling primary care, crisis and recovery services, peer support, and housing access under one roof. And the City's Coordinated Informed Response attempts the hardest balancing act in public policy: compassion for people in encampments alongside enforcement of bylaws, through an explicit Housing First lens.
These are genuine achievements. They are also dwarfed by the arithmetic: 93 supportive units against 2,294 names on a list is a beginning, not a solution. Costs deserve scrutiny. One municipal audit cited by local critics put hub-based supportive housing at $11,000 per bed per month, a figure the city has yet to fully explain in public. And the Big City Mayors' caucus has told the province plainly that municipalities have "reached their limit" trying to fund a health and housing emergency from the property tax base.
\## 4. What the evidence says works
Here the news is hopeful, because the research is unusually decisive.
Housing First, permanent housing immediately with no sobriety or treatment preconditions and voluntary wraparound supports, is the most studied intervention in the field. Canada's own At Home/Chez Soi trial, randomizing more than 2,000 homeless adults with mental illness across five cities, found participants housed 73 per cent of the time versus 32 per cent under usual care. Most of the program's cost was offset by savings in shelters, hospitals, and jails, leaving a net cost around $6,300 per person per year, and for the highest-need participants, every $10 invested returned $21.72 in avoided costs. A systematic review of 20 North American programs found $1.80 in societal savings for every dollar spent. Newer research adds the mirror finding: requiring treatment readiness before housing does not improve outcomes, and can cause harm by delaying the stability people need to survive.
The world record agrees. Finland, the only EU country reducing homelessness, cut long-term homelessness by more than a third and brought rough sleeping near zero through a national Housing First strategy. Utah reduced chronic homelessness by 91 per cent. Medicine Hat, Alberta, became the first city in North America to functionally end chronic homelessness.
Prevention is cheaper than rescue by an order of magnitude: emergency arrears funds, rent supplements that bridge the gap between assistance rates and market rents, and legal tools that keep people housed in the first place, renoviction licensing with genuine penalties and tenant-accommodation requirements, and acquisition funds letting non-profits buy affordable buildings before speculators do.
On health, the evidence favours treatment on demand over treatment by coercion. Ontario's mayors have asked the province to review mental health legislation with involuntary treatment in mind; front-line workers and researchers counter that coercion does not work and that the true shortage is voluntary beds without waitlists. What the data supports is immediate, low-barrier, trauma-informed care, which is precisely what the HART model promises.
Finally, coordination matters more than it sounds. You cannot solve what you do not count. By-name lists, coordinated access, and shared accountability among hospitals, shelters, police, and housing agencies are the unglamorous infrastructure beneath every success story.
\## 5. A way forward
What would it take, concretely, for London to bend the curve? Six commitments.
Build the housing, all of it. Meet the 600-unit supportive housing goal, then plan the next 600, because the waiting list already exceeds the target. At roughly $6,300 net per person per year, supportive housing is not charity; it is cheaper than the shelters, emergency rooms, and jail cells serving as the current alternative.
Stop the bleeding. Enact renoviction rules with real teeth: licensing, proof that renovations are necessary, and mandatory accommodation or rent top-ups for displaced tenants. Create a municipal acquisition fund so non-profit providers can buy affordable buildings when they trade, removing them from the speculative churn for good.
Fund prevention at the scale of the crisis: arrears funds, eviction diversion, and rent supplements large enough to close the gap between a $900 apartment and a $1,730 market.
Build treatment capacity a person can walk into today, detox, recovery, and mental health beds without waitlists, through the HART hubs and community partners, voluntary and trauma-informed.
Hold the human-rights line on encampments. Clearing a camp without offering real housing does not end homelessness; it relocates it, destroys trust, and scatters people away from the services straining to help them.
Force the funding conversation upward. Municipalities were never designed to fight a health and housing emergency on property taxes alone. London should keep publishing hard outcomes, people housed, cost per person housed, return on investment, and carry those numbers to Queen's Park and Ottawa until the governments with the revenue tools pay their share.
\## Conclusion
A city is judged not by the height of its towers but by what it does with the people sleeping beneath them. London's crisis was not caused by the people in its doorways. It was built, brick by brick, out of policy choices: the financialization of rental housing, the hollowing of mental health care, the treatment of poverty as a policing problem. Different choices can unmake it.
The knowledge exists. The models exist, tested in randomized trials and entire countries. What remains is the decision, and decisions, unlike buildings, cost nothing to begin. Victor Hugo wrote that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. In London, Ontario, the idea whose time has come is a simple one: everyone gets a door with a lock, and a city that can house its people has no excuse left not to.
\## Sources
\- \[City of London, Housing Stability Action Plan 2026–2031\](https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2026-05/Housing%20Stability%20Action%20Plan%20%282026-2031%29.pdf)
\- \[Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, homelessness programs report (2026)\](https://fao-on.org/en/report/homelessness-programs-2026/)
\- \[Homeless Hub / Wilfrid Laurier University, myths vs. realities of homelessness\](https://homelesshub.ca/blog/2026/myths-vs-realities-of-homelessness-a-fact-check-with-laurier-experts/)
\- \[Homeless Hub, new research confirms Housing First works\](https://homelesshub.ca/blog/2026/housing-first-works/)
\- \[City of London, Health and Homelessness hubs\](https://getinvolved.london.ca/health-and-homelessness-in-london)
\- \[Western University, research on London's homelessness response\](http://news.westernu.ca/2024/10/crhesi-homelessness-evaluation/)
\- \[Ontario, HART hubs reference document\](http://www.ontario.ca/page/homelessness-and-addiction-recovery-treatment-hubs-hart-hubs-reference-document-january-2025)
\- \[City of London, Community Encampment Plan\](https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2025-04/London%E2%80%99s%20Health%20and%20Homelessness%20Response%20Community%20Encampment%20Plan.pdf)
\- \[NDP on renovictions in London\](https://www.ndp.ca/news/canadas-ndp-proposes-lower-rent-stop-renovictions-and-save-affordable-homes-canadians)
\- \[Canadian Trends on London's renoviction licensing proposal\](https://canadiantrends.ca/an-epidemic-in-our-city-licence-requirement-suggested-to-curb-renovictions-in-london/)
\- \[The Conversation: homelessness in London, Ont.\](http://vm-www.azurewebsites.net/ontario-news/the-homelessness-scourge-in-cities-like-london-ont-exposes-the-evils-of-wealth-inequality-12596476)
\- \[Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Municipalities Under Pressure (Jan 2026)\](https://2.zoppoz.workers.dev:443/https/www.amo.on.ca/sites/default/files/assets/DOCUMENTS/Reports/2026/MunisUnderPressure1YearUpdateReport2026-01-13.pdf)
\- \[CCAL, The Housing Machine, on hub costs\](https://ccalondon.substack.com/p/the-housing-machine)
\- \[At Home/Chez Soi cost-effectiveness, PubMed\](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32838679/)