Homelessness in Canada: Past, Present, Future

J. David Hulchanski, PhD

Cities Centre and Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto

Conference keynote address, Growing Home: Housing and Homelessness in Canada

University of Calgary, February 18, 2009

Here we are in 2009, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, following one of the greatest
economic booms of our times, at yet another national conference on ... homelessness.

As we begin, we need to reflect on how we got here and why this thing we call homelessness is
so persistent.

Will we gather again in 2029, the 20th anniversary of this conference? I hope we do gather, and
sooner, and often − but for different purposes; for example, to build on the great progress being
made; to tackle further nuances of the problem; and to address entirely different social issues.

I will return to this question, why homelessness persists, at the end. It is helpful first to be clear
about what we are talking about, and why, and where it came from.

Homelessness Past

International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, 1987

Twenty years is not a long time. We are here on the 22nd anniversary of the United Nations
International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH). In Canada, during 1987, there were local,
regional and national conferences on homelessness. There have been many since.

Many Canadians no longer remember the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. The United
Nations, in 1981, decided to focus on the fact that so many people in less developed countries
were unhoused. The focus was not on developed countries. The purpose of the General Assembly
in designating 1987 was, according to the resolution, “to focus the attention of the international
community on those problems” faced by “homeless people in urban and rural areas of the developing
countries.”1 There was no mention of countries like Canada in that 1981 UN resolution.

1 “That an international year devoted to the problems of homeless people in urban and rural areas of the developing countries
... to focus the attention of the international community on those problems, Recognizing the grave and generally worsening
situation of the homeless in the developing countries...” U.N. General Assembly, Resolution 36/71. International Year of
Shelter for the Homeless, 4 December 1981.
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Six years later, the focus of the International Year shifted to include many of the developed nations
of the world, including Canada. The many conferences on homelessness in Canada that year were
focused on the growing number of unhoused people in Canada, not those in developing countries.

From Rehousing to Dehousing Processes and Public Policies

As we reflect on homelessness in Canada, we need to make an important initial clarification

about this word we use so easily: homelessness.

The word homelessness was not used in that 1981 UN General Assembly resolution. There was,
therefore, no need to engage in a debate over how to define it. The 1981 UN resolution was
clear. Many millions of households in developing countries had no housing. They were
unhoused. They were homeless. They needed adequate housing.

Before the 1980s, large numbers of people in developed countries were, in contrast, not
unhoused, not homeless. They had housing, although for many, that housing was in poor
condition. There were also some transient single men in many cities who were assisted by
organizations like the Salvation Army. These men were referred to at times as homeless, though
they generally lived in poor-quality “skid-row” rooming houses and flophouses.

In 1960, for example, in a report titled Homeless and Transient Men by a committee of the
Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, the committee defined the “homeless man” as one
with few or no ties to a family group and who was thus without the economic or social support a
family home normally provides. A clear distinction exists in the report between house and home.
The men were “home”-less, not unhoused. Home refers to a social, psychological space not just a
house as a physical structure. These homeless men were housed. “Homeless men may be
considered from the point of view of their residence,” according to the report. They lived in
poor-quality physical spaces: rooming houses or accommodation provided by charities.
According to the report: “They live predominately in cheap rooming houses in the downtown
area. In times of emergency they turn to hostels or to welfare agencies, missions or churches for
assistance.”2 That was 1960. Canada thus had some homeless individuals, but no problem called
“homelessness” at that time.

About two decades later, in 1977, the City of Toronto Planning Board released a Report on Skid
Row, “an overview of a complex social, physical, economic and geographical phenomenon –
Toronto’s skid row.” This report never uses the word “homelessness” and uses the word “homeless”
only a few times. These men − and they were mainly men − were not homeless in the contemporary
sense of the word, i.e., unhoused. They were characterized by their “residence in a deteriorated
mixed commercial-residential area in older sections of the city,” by frequent changes in residence,
and by the low rent they paid.3 That was 1977. Canada still had no “homelessness” problem.

2 Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, Report on Homeless and Transient Men, 1960, pages 1, 5, 8.
3 City of Toronto Planning Board, Report on Skid Row, 1977, p.2. The report is focussed on the declining numbers of rooming
houses and flophouses for this population group. Though gentrification was not yet a term in common usage, the report
describes the process: “Today, because the inner city has become an attractive and desirable residential area for the young
and affluent middleclass, extensive renovation of houses has occurred. As a result, the availability of low cost housing in Don Vale
and Cabbagetown has decreased. This, along with the establishment of restaurants or specialty stores catering to these new
residents, has resulted in a shrinkage of the geographic area of skid row and a decline in the extent of services provided by
the private sector for the skid row population.” p.5.

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The word “homelessness” came into common use in developed countries in the early and mid-
1980s to refer to the problem of dehousing – the fact that an increasing number of people who
were once housed in these wealthy countries were no longer housed. Canada had started to
experience dehousing processes.

Until the 1980s in Canada, as in all Western nations, urban planners, public health officials,
social workers and related professionals were focused on rehousing people into better housing
and neighbourhoods.

This was because, during the 15 years of the Depression and the Second World War, very little
new housing was built and many people were living in poor-quality, aging, and overcrowded
housing, often in rundown neighbourhoods. After the War, we Canadians, with our tax money
and the governments we elected, revived the housing market, created a functioning mortgage
system with government mortgage insurance, built social housing, and subsidized private-sector
rental housing.

Adequately housing everyone was the objective. Note two key words here: adequately and everyone.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson, in a 1965 speech to the Ontario Association of Housing
Authorities, for example, noted that the immediate problem is “the necessity for everybody to
have a decent dwelling; not to make all homes mansions, but to ensure that none of them will be
hovels. It is only a very rare soul that can expand in a hovel. This objective of decent housing
simply has to be achieved in our democratic society.” He made no mention of homelessness – a
Canadian social problem that did not exist in 1965.

In addition, starting in that post-war period, people who needed to be protected during difficult
economic times and supported in ill health and old age received the assistance they needed.
Universal health insurance, Unemployment Insurance, Old Age Pension, and the Canada
Assistance Plan were all introduced or improved as national cost-shared programs during those
years. We had a federal urban renewal program followed by a Neighbourhood Improvement
Program and a federal Ministry of State for Urban Affairs. Canadians in poor-quality housing
were, year by year, obtaining new housing, as the suburbs were built and as rental housing,
public and private, was being constructed. About 20,000 social housing units were created every
year following the 1973 amendments to the National Housing Act.

In introducing the 1973 housing legislation, the Minister of Urban Affairs, a federal ministry we
no longer have today but which existed during most of the 1970s, clearly asserted that our
society has an obligation to see that all people are adequately housed.
When we talk … about the subject of housing, we are talking about an elemental
human need – the need for shelter, for physical and emotional comfort in that
shelter. When we talk about people’s basic needs – the requirements for survival –
society and the government obviously have an obligation to assure that these basic
needs of shelter are met.

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I have already acknowledged this obligation in stating that good housing at

reasonable cost is a social right of every citizen of this country. … [This] must be
our objective, our obligation, and our goal. The legislation which I am proposing
to the House today is an expression of the government’s policy, part of a broad
plan, to try to make this right and this objective a reality.4

Would we have the social problem of homelessness today if this 1970s philosophy had continued
through the 1980s and 1990s, to the present day? I think not. We need to hear a similar speech by
the government in the House of Commons today.

Homelessness Present
This brings us to the present, and the period that started in the early 1980s.

By the 1980s Canada clearly had a social problem that was and is called homelessness.

The proceedings of Canada’s 1987 national IYSH conference, for example, included a document
endorsed by the conference, called the “Canadian Agenda for Action on Housing and
Homelessness through the Year 2000.” This agenda included the following explicit summary of
the federal government’s failure to take action on the growing national affordable housing crisis.
A significant component of the homelessness problem is that housing has not
been a high priority for governments at any level…. [O]nly a small proportion of
government resources are directed to improving housing conditions…. In all
regions of the country, the demand for housing that is adequate and affordable to
low-income persons and the willingness of local organizations ready to build
greatly exceed the availability of government funds to carry out effective social
housing programs.5

This is a key reason why we began to have the widespread social problem we call homelessness
in the 1980s. The initial cutbacks in social housing and related programs began in 1984. The
government ignored the 1987 Agenda for Action. In 1993 all federal spending on the
construction of new social housing was terminated and in 1996 the federal government further
removed itself from low-income housing supply by transferring responsibility for most existing
federal social housing to the provinces.

4 Ron Basford, Minister of State for Urban Affairs, introducing the 1973 NHA amendments, Canada, House of Commons,
March 15, 1973, p.2257.
5 New Partnerships – Building for the Future: Proceedings of the Canadian Conference to Observe the International Year of
Shelter for the Homeless, September 13-16, Ottawa: Canadian Association of Housing and Renewal Officials, 1988.

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Homeless-ness

Researchers rightly refer to homelessness as “an odd-job word, pressed into service to impose
order on a hodgepodge of social dislocation, extreme poverty, seasonal or itinerant work, and
unconventional ways of life.”6

The word homeless has been used throughout history. Adding the suffix –less means without:
without home. To be homeless, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is to have
“no home or permanent abode.” This word is clear and simple. In a recent update to the OED,
likely due to the widespread and unfortunate use of the designation “the homeless,” the OED
added the word homeless as a noun with the definition: “homeless people as a class.” There is no
entry in the OED for homelessness.

By the early 1980s we needed a new term for a widespread mass phenomenon, a new social
problem found in many wealthy, developed nations. The response was to add yet another suffix
to further qualify the word homeless, to give us that odd-job word, homeless-ness.7 Adding the
suffix −ness makes the simple and clear word homeless into an abstract concept. As such, it
allows users, readers, and listeners to imagine whatever they want. It tosses all sorts of problems
into one handy term. We thus have the ongoing problem of defining what homeless-ness is and
isn’t. There is no single correct definition, given the different mix of problems that goes into the
hodgepodge of issues, and depending on who is using the term.

We, therefore, need to be careful when we use the words homeless and homelessness. While it is
true that all societies through history tend to have some people who are homeless – without a
home – we have not always had the set of social problems we associate with the word
homelessness.

Starting in the 1980s it was clear that homelessness referred to a poverty that includes being
unhoused. It is a poverty that means being without required social supports. And it is poverty so
deep that even poor-quality housing is not affordable. Canada has always had many people living
in poverty. In the 1980s more and more people were not only poor, but also found themselves
unhoused. 8

6 Kim Hopper and Jim Baumohl (1996) “Redefining the Cursed Word,” Chapter 1 of Homelessness in America, J. Baumohl,
editor, Phoenix: Oryx Press, p. 3
7 A search of the New York Times historical database covering 1851 to 2005, for example, finds that the word homelessness
was used in 4,755 articles, but that 87% of this usage (4,148 articles) was in the 20 years between 1985 and 2005. Before the
1980s, it is rare to find homelessness used to designate a social problem. The distinction here is use of homelessness to refer
to a person or some people who are homeless versus its use in reference to a general societal situation, as a social problem or
set of social problems. Source: analysis carried out by author.
8
Canadian Council on Social Development, 1987. Homelessness in Canada; Final Report of the National Enquiry to Canada
Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Ottawa: The Council. CMHC, 1987. Homelessness in Canada. Ottawa: Canada
Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Government of Ontario, 1988. More Than Just a Roof: Action to End Homelessness in
Ontario: Final Report. Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Housing, Minister's Advisory Committee on the International Year of
Shelter for the Homeless. Hulchanski, J. D., 1987. Who are the Homeless?: What is Homelessness? The Politics of Defining
an Emerging Policy Issue. Vancouver: School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia.

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In short, we have not used the word homelessness for very long. It was rarely used before the
1980s. It is a catch-all term for a host of serious social and economic policy failures – more
serious than in the past. Its widespread usage reflects what has happened to Canadian society –
the way we organize who gets what, and our failure to have in place systems for meeting basic
human needs in a universal, inclusive fashion. We were moving in that direction up to the 1980s.

There is one major exception to this failure to act and the decisions to weaken and terminate a
host of social supports. We continued to build and strengthen our universal health care system.
We could have and should have done this in the areas of housing, income, and support services.
Poverty would likely have been reduced and Canadians would likely have little need to define a
new set of severe interrelated social problems by adding that suffix –ness to the word homeless.

Progress since the 1980s?

So here we are in Calgary today. Instead of reviewing and improving upon the progress made in
the decades after the Depression and the Second World War and up to the 1980s, we have a very
different agenda. Regrettably, it is not very different from the agenda of the 1987 Canadian
Conference for the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.

Postwar progress in building a middle-income inclusive society in which everyone is adequately

housed was halted. Instead of rehousing processes and mechanisms, we have had, for at least two
decades now, dehousing processes and mechanisms. Before the 1980s, a natural disaster −
earthquake, flood or ice storm − did not unhouse many thousands of Canadians and keep them
unhoused. We, in fact, are quick to rehouse people whenever a natural disaster leaves people
homeless. But over the past two decades, instead of continuing public policies, including
appropriate regulation of the private sector where necessary for the general public good, we did
the opposite. We now have a huge social service, health and mental health sector focused on
dehoused people. This requires special skills and knowledge.

Over the past two decades we relied on an increasingly deregulated society in which the “genius
of market forces” would meet our needs, in which the tax cuts, made possible by program
spending cuts that usually benefited poor and average income people, were supposed to “trickle
down” to benefit those in need. The competitive economy required, we were told, wage
suppression and part-time jobs with no benefits. We may now be entering a new, very different
period caused by the global financial crisis, although this remains to be seen.

I used to be able to say that no one in Canada was born homeless. Unfortunately, with so many
homeless families in temporary shelters, children are today being born into unhoused families
across the country. We now have many Canadians who have first-hand experience of being
unhoused. Here is a quote from one such very experienced Canadian veteran of homelessness:
I don’t ever want to go back to being homeless. I’d rather try to do something to
prevent that happening, because everybody deserves their own place to call home.

This Canadian veteran of homelessness is a 12-year-old Calgary girl.

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Filmmaker Laura Sky and Street Nurse Cathy Crowe are currently chronicling the plight of
homeless families with children in their documentary project called Home Safe. Home Safe is a
four-part film series in what will be the keystone of a national community development initiative
on family homelessness. The first of the four films, Home Safe Calgary, is being shown at this
conference.9

What should we do?

In our sessions at this conference we need to reflect on whether we are making progress on this
hodgepodge of conditions we call homelessness. Someday someone will review all the programs
and proceedings of Canada’s conferences on homelessness. They will assess and attempt to
explain the extent to which progress is being made or whether the same issues and topics are
continually being discussed and whether the same conclusions are being drawn and the same
recommendations are being made.

I fear such a review will conclude that to some degree, we are simply spinning our wheels.

If this is the case, and I believe it is, why? Why are we spinning our wheels? We need to
approach the issue in a better, more carefully defined manner.

We need to recognize that action must take places at three levels: the level of individuals and
families; the community level, with initiatives at the local and municipal level; and the macro
(federal and provincial) level, where the resources − for the most part, our tax dollars − are
located. The failure to act appropriately at all three levels means that partial efforts have little
chance of success – if success means having fewer homeless people and a dramatically smaller
need for expensive services for homeless people.

We are here because major supports for people who find themselves in difficult situations were
withdrawn to save money and to decrease the size and role of government, and to allegedly make
the economy more competitive. But this was and is a one-sided bargain. The costs and the
benefits go to different social strata.

Our federal finance department issues an annual report called Fiscal Reference Tables. How’s
that for an exciting title? But the document is more informative than the budget and the speeches
and claims of our political leaders. We get 30- and 40-year summaries of trends. These indicate
how much capacity we have as Canadians to address serious social problems.

One example is the trend in federal programs that provide support for (direct transfers to)
individuals and families. This spending equalled about 5% of the GDP through the 1970s and
1980s, reaching 6% in 1993. Last year it was 3.8% of GDP.

9 Home Safe Calgary is directed by award-winning filmmaker Laura Sky. Street nurse, advocate and author Cathy Crowe is the
executive producer. Home Safe Calgary will tour across the country for community screenings and workshops. It is available
for use by colleges and universities, community groups and activists, teachers and school boards and is part of a tool kit of
materials to help plan local strategies for action and change. For more information contact Sky Works at (416) 536 6581;
[email protected]; skyworksfoundation.org To order DVDs contact V-Tape at (416) 351 1317;
[email protected]; www.vtape.org.

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The trend is the same with federal transfers to other levels of government. It averaged about 4%
of GDP in the 1970s and 1980s. It is now about 3% of GDP.10

The federal surpluses of the past decade − note that Canada is the only OECD country to have
such surpluses − the ability to pay down some of the debt, the huge federal tax cuts to higher-
income individuals and corporations, and the recent cut in the GST, all came from federal budget
cuts, some of which left the most vulnerable members of society without the ability to achieve a
minimum standard of living, including adequate, secure housing.

In view of these trends, which need to be reversed, I see three areas of action that we must focus on.

1. Housing

The first is housing. We need to recognize the central importance of adequate, affordable
housing and help achieve more action at the federal and provincial levels on the affordable
housing agenda.

We need to separate out the one common feature shared by all homeless people from all the
other complex social situations associated with the word homelessness. The best summary of the
core of the problem came from long-time U.S. housing researcher and activist Cushing Dolbeare
about 10 years ago. It is a statement I quote often. She wrote:
The one thing all homeless people have in common is a lack of housing.
Whatever other problems they face, adequate, stable, affordable housing is a
prerequisite to solving them. Homelessness may not be only a housing problem,
but it is always a housing problem; housing is necessary, although sometimes not
sufficient, to solve the problem of homelessness.11

Some people have denied this claim, saying that homelessness is not a housing problem. Housing
is an expensive problem to address. It is simpler and cheaper to blame people for their personal
failures. We all have our personal failures. But only for some does it mean finding themselves
and their families unhoused.

Is it right that we have two kinds of health and mental health care: one for the housed population
and another for the unhoused population? Is it right when we have all the evidence we need
about the health impacts, including premature death, of being unhoused for any extended period
of time?

Is it right that we work to create more and better emergency shelters rather than assisting
unhoused people to settle into adequate, stable and affordable housing?

Is it right to give priority to the homeownership sector and to ignore the rental and social housing
sectors? Is it right that Canada does not have a tenure-neutral housing system, meaning that
owners and renters are treated very differently in terms of subsidies and helpful regulations?

10 Canada, Department of Finance, Fiscal Reference Tables, September 2008, Table 8.

11 Cushing N. Dolbeare, 1996, “Housing Policy: A General Consideration,” in Homelessness in America, 1996, p, 34.

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Though many will agree with what I am saying, the huge imbalance in the allocation of
resources continues. We have limited resources for the prevention of dehousing and for quick
rehousing. Most resources and professional attention are focused on supporting people in their
homelessness. This is the situation in which we are stuck today.

2. The Cause and the Solution: Housing, Income, Support Services

The second thing we need to do is to recognize that homelessness is not a complex problem. Yes,
I did say that it is not a complex problem.

After all these years of research and policy analysis and documenting the lived experience of
those affected and those who provide support services, we know what the causes of the problem
are. That means we know what the solutions are.

When individuals or families run into serious difficulty in one or more of the three key areas that
support a decent standard of living, they may find themselves unhoused and potentially on a
downward spiral. The three areas are: housing, income, and support services. Starting in the
1980s, more and more individuals and families could not afford housing, or could not find jobs
or income support at a living wage, or could not obtain appropriate addiction or mental health
support.

An adequate standard of living means that a good society not only ensures that good-quality
health care is available to everyone, but also access to adequate housing, employment at a living
wage, and essential support services must also be available for everyone, not just those who can
afford them.

3. Take Legal Action: A Court Challenge; Homelessness is a Violation of the Charter of

Rights and Freedoms

A third area of action is one wealthy people and corporations use frequently to get what they
want and to obtain redress when their rights have been violated. There are many modes of
seeking change in democratic societies. One is through the court system.

Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate housing. These are
among the fundamental human rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, a human rights treaty that
Canada ratified in 1976.

But what do these social and economic rights mean if our government ignores them? Are they
even enforceable under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? We will soon find out.

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A Charter challenge is being launched. I will read four sentences from an early draft of the
pleading that is currently being written and revised. This conveys the urgency and serious nature
of the human rights violation that homelessness represents.
As the facts of the present case make clear, adequate housing is a fundamental
prerequisite to the security of the person. The lack of adequate housing creates
hopelessness, vulnerability to violence, loss of self-esteem, social isolation, ill
health and early death. The lack of adequate housing prevented the applicants
from making “basic choices going to the core of what it means to enjoy individual
dignity and independence.” The challenged government measures – both
government action and government failures to act – reflect disregard for “the
well-being of the living person” and disrespect “for the intrinsic value of human
life and ... the inherent dignity of every human being.” By making it impossible to
maintain a level of existence compatible with human life at a socially acceptable
standard of physical and mental health, security, dignity, human decency and self-
respect, the Respondents [the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario]
violated the Applicants’ right to life, liberty and security of the person.12

The court will be asked to declare that our government’s failure to take reasonable measures to
respond to the crisis of homelessness violates the right to security of the person and to equality
for disadvantaged groups under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter. The remedy being sought is that
the government should be given a reasonable period, perhaps six months, to design and
implement a strategic response to homelessness. Such a response must include, at a minimum, a
national and provincial housing strategy, with consultation with affected groups, a timetable, a
reporting and monitoring regime, outcome measurements, and a complaints mechanism.

Interestingly, this year, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, after a review of Canada’s
human rights record, asked Canada to agree to do the same thing. Under the review process,
Canada is required to consider recommendations made by members of the Human Rights
Council on how it can better comply with its international human rights obligations. Not
surprisingly, the Council expressed concern that one of the richest countries in the world has
allowed poverty and homelessness to reach epidemic proportions. They have recommended that
Canada adopt a Poverty Elimination Strategy that integrates social and economic rights, such as
the right to adequate housing, ensuring that those denied access to adequate housing can go to
the courts or to a human rights tribunal to enforce their rights. Members of the Council also
recommended an enhanced program to address homelessness and poverty that would focus on
the needs of Aboriginal communities, single mothers, women with disabilities, parents forced to
relinquish children because of homelessness, and other vulnerable groups. These are precisely
the groups that are bringing forward the Charter challenge.

12 Godbout v. Longueil (City), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 844 at para. 66, per LaForest J; Victoria v. Adams, [2008] B.C.J. No. 1935
at para. 143; Rodriguez v. B.C. (A.G.), [1993] 3 S.C.R. 519 at 585, per Sopinka J. See also, M. Jackman, Protection of
Welfare rights Under the Charter, 20:2 Ottawa L. Rev. 257.

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The Government of Canada must inform the United Nations by June of this year whether it
accepts these recommendations or not. Surely in the face of this economic crisis, we should
expect our government to take up the challenge of the UN recommendations, and together with
the provinces, territories, civil society and indigenous organizations, entrench and implement the
right to adequate housing as a human right in Canada.

This Charter challenge will be accompanied by a national community educational and advocacy
campaign. You will be hearing more about this shortly.

Homelessness Future
Sadly, the future of homelessness in Canada − that set of interrelated severe social problems −
looks very bright. It does not have to. There are three possible future scenarios.13

1) Homelessness becomes routine

Homelessness can become a routine, normal part of our social and political landscape.

2) Homelessness is no longer a problem

Homelessness can cease to be a problem, as we make progress in changing and compensating
for the homeless by making processes that are at work.

3) Homelessness worsens
Homelessness, as well as other manifestations of poverty, can become much worse as our
support systems are further weakened and our public priorities remain elsewhere.

The seeds of each scenario exist in the present.

Homeless Makers and Homeless-Making Processes

The question I raised at the opening remains. Why does homelessness persist? What I refer to as
“Homelessness Present” is about 25 years old.

Who is in favour of homelessness? Who lobbies for homelessness? Which economists tell us
homelessness is good for the economy? If no one is doing these things, why does homelessness
persist?
Homelessness does not occur in a social vacuum. In general, the events that make
people homeless are initiated and controlled by other people whom our society
allows to engage in the various enterprises that contribute to the homelessness of
others. The primary purpose of these enterprises is not to make people homeless
but, rather, to achieve socially condoned aims such as making a living, becoming
rich, obtaining a more desirable home, increasing the efficiency at the workplace,
promoting the growth of cultural institutions, giving cities a competitive
advantage, or helping local or federal governments to balance their budgets or
limit their debts. Homelessness occurs as a side effect.

13 See: Ralph S Hambrick Jr. and Gary T. Johnson, “The future of homelessness,” Society, Sept./Oct., 1998.

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This statement is from an insightful 1992 article called “Homeless-Making Processes and
Homeless Makers.”14 Homelessness is the “natural” outcome of the way we have organized our
housing system, and the way we allocate or fail to allocate income and support services when
they are desperately needed.

Though no one favours homelessness, many contribute to it by doing what societal norms and
government laws and regulations allow.

For a long time, sociologists and social policy experts have recognized the especially difficult
nature of some social problems – which is why some persist. Here is one explanation:
a social problem is an enterprise in finding ways of getting something done or
prevented, while not interfering with the rights, interests, and activities of all
those who are involved in the failure to do, or the persistence in doing, what is the
subject of the problem.15

This is not a new observation. It comes from a 1925 article on the nature of social problems. This
refers to what we might call the tyranny of the status quo. A significant majority, or at least an
influential minority, are doing fine and benefit from the changes that were made in the 1980s to
the present.

So keeping things the same and tinkering at the edges, acting only at the local community level
and individual level of the problem, without addressing the larger dynamics that are producing
the problem in the first place, means, obviously, that the problem will persist.

By tossing a broad set of socially undesirable outcomes under the rubric of homelessness, society
can recognize and condemn the undesirable social outcome we call homelessness. No one I
know of is in favour of homelessness. But simply condemning the problem while at the same
time not doing anything to change the social dynamics that produce the undesirable outcomes,
means that things will stay the same or worsen. In addition, the social dynamics creating the
problem remain unnamed, subsumed under the rubric of the abstract term homelessness. The
homeless-makers carry on their work and the homeless-making processes continue.

It is up to us which of the three potential future scenarios for homelessness will play out. The
second, in which homelessness disappears, is still possible. We have the knowledge and the
resources.

In closing, we are fortunate to have this opportunity to come together over these three days, to
network and share what we know and to learn from one another.

The broad, messy mix of serious social problems we call homelessness will not go away by
itself. We have an advantage, in that we are perhaps on the cusp of a new era in social and
economic policy, due to the global financial crisis. It is a time to think more broadly than we
have in the past.

14 Rene I. Jahiel, “Homeless-Makers and Homeless Making Processes,” Chapter 18 in Homelessness: A Prevention-Oriented
Approach, R.I. Jahiel, editor, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p.269.
15 L.K. Frank, “Social Problems, The American Journal of Sociology, 30(4), 1925:468.

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J.D. Hulchanski
Homelessness in Canada

We need to focus on the bigger picture – we need to take action on the three causes, and thus the
three solutions, to homelessness: adequate housing, adequate income, and adequate support
services to meet the basic human needs that define an adequate standard of living for all.

I hope these remarks are helpful as we embark on this three-day journey. I am convinced this is
not a difficult problem so long as we frame it properly and work at all three levels.

For further information

www.NHC2009.ca

www.homelesshub.ca

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