“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

A San Francisco nonprofit’s rise illustrates the unaccountable growth of homeless services.

Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco–based homeless-services nonprofit, is an organization of many slogans. Those include, among others: No fuckery (“Fuckery is lying. Fuckery is injustice. Fuckery is letting ego override empathy”); Don’t look, see it through your third eye (“The third eye represents the part of us that cannot be cheated, manipulated, or deceived”); and Once you see us, you can’t unsee us (“We are game changers, impact makers and community healers”).

The mortgage renewal shock many experts have been predicting appears to have arrived.

Mortgage delinquencies in Ontario have skyrocketed 50 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels, and more than 11,000 mortgages in the province missed at least one payment in the fourth quarter of 2024, nearly three times the number seen in 2022, Equifax Canada said in its quarterly credit report.

Your paycheque — if you’ve got one — probably doesn’t go quite as far as it used to.

Since June 2022, the price of groceries in Ontario has gone up more than 11 per cent. Vegetables, in particular, have shot up by almost 20 per cent. Meat? 9.2 per cent. Dairy and eggs? 10.6.

Shelter? That other big thing the United Nations counts as a universal human right? That hasn’t been easy, either. Between October 2022 and October 2024, the price of an average two-bedroom rental in Ontario has gone up 12.8 per cent, according to the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation.

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced our Weekly Housing Affordability Metric (WHAM) and showed how housing affordability has changed over time in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and London, Ontario. Naturally, readers wanted to know what the situation looked like in their city, so let’s take a look.

A WHAM score measures the number of weeks of pre-tax income needed to save for a 20% downpayment for a home and the first five years of mortgage payments, taking into account 5-year fixed mortgage rates, the median weekly wage in a province for 25-to-54-year-olds, and home prices.

Across Canada, the push for homeless shelters means keeping neighbours who live with them in the dark. Now they are pushing back

In theory, Toronto city staff were supposed to execute the purchase of a large, vacant commercial building in the eastern suburb of Scarborough in late October without anyone finding out about it. For a city bureaucracy not exactly known for its ability to keep secrets, it was a tall order. Before the sale had been completed, a television reporter named Alan Carter was standing in front of the building in question with a story so juicy it ran as an exclusive on Toronto’s CityNews.

This week we bid farewell to Edmonton’s downtown Italian Bakery, which has turned out to be one of those nice things we can’t have anymore. The bakery’s been in the same location in the city’s Chinatown since 1960 — our Chinatown has some Vietnam, Italian and Portuguese seasoning. In 2020, with social conditions in the neighbourhood in free fall, the building fell victim to arson, but after a prolonged renovation it reopened 13 months ago.

I had a beautiful Christmas, full of laughter and light. But through it all, I kept wondering about the woman on the sidewalk.

She is camped out on a busy street just a few blocks from my house in west-end Toronto. She sits on one of those folding camp chairs with her back to a small tree. Her feet rest on a second chair. Layers of blankets and sleeping bags cover her from head to foot.

She has been there – or spots nearby – for months. Day after day, night after night, in all weathers, she sits silent and unmoving in the same place. She wears a big hood and a vest that covers her neck and mouth, so only her eyes are visible – wary, watching. If it rains or snows, she raises an umbrella and holds it on her lap.

Homelessness soared to the highest level on record this year, driven by forces that included a surge in migrants seeking asylum, a national housing crisis and the end of pandemic-era measures to protect the needy, the federal government reported on Friday.

The number of people experiencing homelessness topped 770,000, an increase of more than 18 percent over last year and the largest annual increase since the count began in 2007. Nearly every category of unhoused people grew, with the rise especially steep among children and people in families.

The report, released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, showed that homelessness had risen by a third in the past two years, after years of only modest fluctuations. The agency blamed factors such as “our worsening national affordable-housing crisis,” inflation and the end of certain aid programs from the pandemic.

Twenty-six years ago, Lorenzo Berardinetti was a leader at the dawn of a new civic era, the head of the Scarborough delegation in the first Toronto megacity council.

Six years ago, he was at Queen’s Park, helping steer the province from the helm of its justice policy standing committee after winning four elections as a Liberal MPP.

Tonight, he will have his bag searched. He will take his shoes off and have them inspected for weapons and drugs. He will sleep in a room with 23 other people.

An Ontario Superior Court judge issued a ruling Monday that the City of Hamilton did not infringe upon the Charter rights of 14 homeless people who were evicted from local park encampments between 2021 and 2023. As Canadian jurisprudence on this issue seems tinged with judicial activism, and has often protected violent encampments at the public’s expense, this decision is an unexpected victory for common sense.