A person pushed a shopping cart full past a shelter in downtown Hamilton, Ont., on Aug. 6.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
When Hamilton’s 541 Eatery & Exchange opened in 2014, it was a faith-based coffee shop and community hub with a mandate to give back. Customers could buy buttons along with their lattes, which could be redeemed by neighbours in need of a free sandwich or coffee.
Today, that need has become so overwhelming that the café – which had grown into a lifeline for the neighbourhood, providing free meals to 150 people each day – has been forced to close its doors.
“It’s safe to say we’re not resourced properly to offer all the support that our staff and community need, and we’re bearing witness to the harm this is causing,” the organization posted to social media in late July, announcing what it hopes is a temporary closure.
As homelessness reaches emergency levels in Hamilton, the café had become a critical piece of the social services infrastructure, without the funding or support to sustain it. The button jars were chronically empty. Staff and volunteers – who are baristas, not social workers – struggled with the impact of witnessing mental-health crises and overdoses on a daily basis, knowing there were few other places in the city for people to go.
The housing affordability crisis that has hit communities across the country is acutely visible in Hamilton, where real estate prices have risen faster than anywhere else in Canada, and where an increasing number of both building cranes and homeless encampments dot the downtown core.
At Woodlands Park, less than a minute from the 541 café on Barton Street, more than two dozen tents are set up in one of the city’s largest encampments. The city recently passed a protocol that puts rules in place – there can be no more than five tents in any given spot, and they must keep 100 metres away from schools, daycares, playgrounds, pools and splash pads – in recognition that encampments will be a reality for the near future.
As the city scrambles to deal with housing issues – which also include a 6,100-name waitlist for social housing and a chronically full shelter system – experts warn that addressing the crisis entails not just building and acquiring new affordable and supportive housing stock, but hanging on to what little is left.
The Jamesville townhouses at James and Strachan, in the north end of Hamilton, sit empty.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Over the last decade, according to the census, the city has lost roughly 16,000 private-market rental units going for $750 or less a month.
Rents are controlled in Ontario as long as tenants are in a unit. But the moment they leave – either on their own accord, or through eviction – landlords can hike the price as high as the market will allow. Overnight, a $900-a-month apartment can see the rent jump to between $1,600 and $2,000.
“We’ve kind of eroded and lost that lower end of the rent distribution,” says Steve Pomeroy, a professor who is part of McMaster University’s Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative (CHEC). “So there is just an absolute lack of lower rent units for low-income people.”
Particularly in cases where someone is evicted or squeezed out, the problem becomes two-fold, says Professor Jim Dunn, also with CHEC.
“Not only does it create an affordability problem for the person leaving, but it also means we’ve lost an affordable unit.”
Experts are seeing this happen on a large scale. Prof. Dunn recalls first hearing back in 2017 that a local apartment building owner had offered to cut cheques for tenants who would agree to move out. It was a troubling sign of how lucrative it was for them to turn over these units.
“Vacancy decontrol has created this situation where institutional investors and large landlords come in, they buy up these older buildings, and they’re underperforming because they’ve got all these tenants that are grandfathered into inflation-controlled rents,” Prof. Dunn said. “There’s an incentive to get rid of them.”
Condos are advertised at a construction site in downtown Hamilton.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
In a recent presentation to city council, Prof. Dunn and Prof. Pomeroy, outlined a roadmap to tackle the local housing crisis, stressing, among other things, the importance of boosting rental assistance to help keep tenants in affordable units when they are struggling to pay their rent.
“We want to keep those people in those units as long as possible,” Prof. Dunn said. “It would actually be a valuable investment for the city – for any municipality – to put money into those people’s hands.”
On Friday, City Council was set to vote on whether to enact a “safe apartment buildings bylaw” that would enforce stricter maintenance standards to help keep them from falling into disrepair (which landlords then use to justify renovictions).
Prof. Dunn and Prof. Pomeroy also stressed the value of helping local non-profits acquire rental properties, which would be much faster and cheaper than building new ones.
Ultimately, they say the crisis is also one of income inadequacy.
“The bottom line is growth in housing costs, both rental and ownership, are drastically outstripping increases in incomes,” Prof. Dunn said. “Social assistance is a joke, relative to current rents, for sure – but even people who are working are struggling.”
Currently, single working-age adults receive $733 a month through Ontario Works, the province’s main income assistance program, or $1,306 a month through the Ontario Disability Support Program.
A person working full time at minimum wage (currently $15.50 an hour, and set to rise to $16.55 an hour in October) would make about $2,700 a month, or $32,000 a year, before taxes.
An average one-bedroom apartment in the city now goes for $1,855, according to Rentals.ca.
According to Hamilton Food Share’s 2022 Hunger Report, more than 55 per cent of people using emergency food banks reported spending at least half of their income on rent – putting them at “extreme risk of homelessness.”
Tents sit in Hamilton's Woodlands Park.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Once a person loses their housing, they fall into a backlogged and overloaded system that only exacerbates their challenges.
At a recent town hall on encampments – which drew more than 1,000 people – the city’s director of housing services, Michelle Baird, spoke about the shelter system’s capacity issues, and an ever-growing waitlist for housing.
“Because rent costs overall are quite high and continue to grow, people who are in rent-geared-to-income units often can’t find another affordable place to move out to. So the system is a bit stuck,” she said in an interview. “We don’t have a lot of movement.”
Experts agree there is a desperate need for more supportive housing units, which provide wrap-around support for people on site, for everything from mental-health issues to diabetes management or meal supply.
Building new apartments, Ms. Baird said, costs somewhere between $500,000 and $550,000 per unit.
“It’s not something the municipality can take on on their own,” she said, adding that the city is working to maximize partnerships with other levels of government.
But like Mr. Pomeroy and Prof. Dunn, Ms. Baird said another key piece of the solution “is really to invest in the units we have and make sure they stay in the system.”