A ten-year strategy to end homelessness is, among other things, a claim about what you know. It claims that the problem is understood well enough to set a direction, allocate resources, and hold institutions accountable over a decade. The question is whether that claim is grounded in the experience of the people the strategy is actually about.
The evidence provided to the expert panel shaping Toronto’s long-term homelessness strategy came directly from the people living inside the system it was trying to change. A comprehensive survey of long-term residents at Seaton House and the Women’s Residence documented the nature and scale of complex co-morbidities — physical health, mental health, substance use, social care needs — among people for whom emergency shelter had become permanent. This was not aggregate data. It was a detailed account of what long-term homelessness looked like from the inside, produced at a scale that policymakers could not dismiss.
The contribution to the strategy was not technical. It was epistemic: ensuring that a decade-long commitment to structural change was anchored in a clear understanding of who it needed to reach and what reaching them would actually demand.
Strategies fail when they optimise for the system rather than the people the system is supposed to serve. This work was an attempt to make that harder to do.