This Ontario town is on a mission to end homelessness by 2027. Here’s how it’s going

This story is part of The Hometown Edition, a special series airing on CBC Radio’s As It Happens Nov. 3-7, showcasing the struggles and triumphs of Canada’s small towns. Listen here to learn more about what’s happening in St. Thomas, Ont.

When Sara Pepper was living on the streets of St. Thomas, Ont., a few years back, she says there wasn’t much in the way of support.

“It wasn’t the place to be homeless, that’s for sure,” Pepper told As It Happens host Nil KÓ§ksal. 

“There weren’t a lot of open doors, not many services were offered and, socially, people just didn’t understand it.”

Now, thanks to the town’s aggressive plan to end chronic homelessness, Pepper has a roof over her head and a warm bed to sleep in every night as she puts the pieces of her life back together.

And if things go according to plan, within two years, nobody will be living long-term on the streets of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas is a city of about 46,000 in southwestern Ontario. For 44 years, the local Ford plant was the city’s main economic driver, until it closed in 2011. 

Like many towns and cities across Canada, St. Thomas has found itself facing three overlapping crises: a housing shortage, an opioid epidemic, and surge of homelessness.

It used to keep Mayor Joe Preston up at night. But these days, with a Volkswagen electric battery plant on the way and an anti-homelessness plan showing tangible results, he tells Kӧksal, he’s feeling optimistic. 

“We’re on the cusp. We’re moving forward,” Preston said. “We’re solving a problem ahead of many other cities across Canada.”

For roughly five years now, the city has been working on a strategy to get people off the streets and into housing, based on the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness’ national Built For Zero program. 

St. Thomas has partnered with the province, the feds, community organizations and non-profits to ramp up shelter spaces, but also quickly transition people out of shelters and into supportive housing with access services like counselling, health-care and more. 

Danielle Neilson, manager of housing stability services for the St. Thomas-Elgin region, says it’s important to understand that while emergency shelters are important, they are not the solution to the homelessness crisis.

“That’s somewhere that, in my humble opinion, we’ve gone wrong for decades,” Neilson said. “The solution to homelessness has always been housing.”

So far, it seems to be working. 

Last year, St. Thomas announced it had reduced chronic homelessness — meaning people who are unhoused repeatedly or for an extended period of time — by 30 per cent. 

The city says it will have enough shelter spaces this winter to accommodate the roughly 130 people who are still living in the streets.

What’s more, it says it’s on track to meet its goal of ending chronic homelessness in St. Thomas by 2027.

“We call it a ‘functional’ end to homelessness, because you can never stop it from happening,” Neilson said.  “But what you need to do is create a system where … you’ve essentially cleared the bottleneck.”

That means that, while people continue to fall into homelessness, they don’t stay that way for long. It also also means the city can’t rest on its laurels once it achieves its goal.

“We also know we can’t stop there,” she said. “[Or] you’ll end up right back in the same bottleneck again.”

Pepper has lived in a supportive housing unit for the last two years. Before that, she spent four years on the streets in St. Thomas.

It’s not a life she ever would have expected for herself. 

“I met cocaine, and that definitely sent me sideways,” she said. “My marriage dissolved and that kind of thing, and I was on the street before I knew it.”

Back then, the city’s only overnight shelter, Inn Out Of The Cold, operated out of a church basement in winters only. 

“We would go there, pull out our cot, we had to set up everything, and then have our sleep,” Pepper said.  “We had to be out of there by six o’clock, I believe it was, in the morning. It was pretty busy. Very exhausting.”

Today, things are looking brighter.

The Inn is now a year-round, 24-hour municipal emergency shelter, with its own dedicated space, that offers three meals a day and access to health care and mental health support. 

Pepper, meanwhile, lives at The Station, a subsidized supportive housing complex built in 2023 and operated by Indwell, a charity developer the city has partnered with.

Having stable housing, she says, has made an “astronomical” difference in her life. 

“Here, I can breathe a little bit. I’m guaranteed that I have meals. I have the space that I can plan my future, you know?” she said. “Spending every day trying to keep yourself even fed or warm or comfortable in places that you’re not getting kicked out of, it’s exhausting.”

Indwell also opened The Railway City Lofts in 2021, which helps people who are coming directly out of homelessness by offering addiction support, behavioural therapy, health care and help with medication and meals. 

The city is also working on building affordable homes, says Neilson, for people who are ready to transition out of supportive housing into something more independent, including tiny homes built by the local YMCA.

Take a look inside affordable tiny homes in St. Thomas

But one of the biggest differences Pepper has noticed over the last five years is a change in attitudes.

“People are more willing to help, people are more willing to ask if you’re OK,” she said. “They seem to be coming back around to realizing that we’re human beings.”

Despite all the progress she’s seen, Pepper says she still encounters barriers that make it hard for people to get a leg up.

“The biggest thing that I see is some kind of [missing] link between the people that are experiencing the homelessness and the people who are running the systems and programs. There’s not a lot of people that have lived experience, not a lot of people that really can empathize because they’ve never been there, you know?” she said.

She’s calling on the city and Indwell and other services to offer more peer-led programs, and employ people who have experienced homelessness first-hand. 

Natasha Thuemler, Indwell’s regional director, says charity’s staff come from “varying backgrounds of both lived and educational experiences.”

“Organizationally, we aspire to maintain healthy therapeutic relationships with our residents so the disclosure of those personal experiences by staff are not always made public,” Thuemler told CBC in an email. 

“Our model of supportive housing also doesn’t meet the needs of everyone…. Unfortunately, there are still system gaps so we work with sector partners and individuals to help advocate and ensure all people’s health and housing needs get met.”

Pepper knows first-hand the difference lived experience makes. She now volunteers with The Nameless, an anti-poverty mutual aid group in St Thomas, where she runs a peer-support group focused on harm reduction.

“They know that I get it. They don’t feel judged,” she said. “When they can speak freely and openly, then you have the opportunity to actually help them from every angle, because you know the whole story.”

She is skeptical about whether St. Thomas will achieve its goal of ending chronic homelessness within the next two years.

But Indwell’s newest housing project, she says, gives her hope. 

The charity is currently in the process of transforming the empty Balaclava Public School into 78 supportive housing units.

“If it can be successful in getting the people into the apartments, and then helping the people to keep their apartments, then it could be perfect,” Pepper said. “It really could happen.”