Advocates say despite a report on the state of homelessness in Winnipeg posting positive results, housing everyone who needs it won’t happen any time soon.
The End Homelessness Winnipeg annual report, due to be presented to council on Tuesday, showed that while some aspects of the organization’s five-year plan have been achieved, much work remains.
End Homelessness Winnipeg President Jason Whitford said even though the targets presented in their five-year plan were low, they weren’t low enough.
Whitford doesn’t see homelessness ending in the next decade. “That’s just not going to happen, unfortunately,” he said.
Some targets of the five-year plan were exceeded, including expanding the use of HIFIS technology — which collects and shares shelter-use data from shelters and communities — to 45 organizations in the city. The report noted in 2023 the use of HIFIS climbed to 76 programs in 2023.
Other goals, however, remain unachieved.
In 2020, the City of Winnipeg Comprehensive Housing Needs Assessment identified the need for 4,125 new units by 2025. In 2018 it was estimated only 1,340 units were needed, and the latest numbers show the organization is 339 housing units short of their 2025 target.
The report says its key challenges continue to be creating an adequate housing supply and addressing the over-representation of Indigenous people among those experiencing homelessness.
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Kate Sjoberg, director of community initiatives at Main Street Project, said the city is losing low-income housing faster than it is being created and affordable, social and supportive housing desperately needs attention.
She also remarked the time spent in shelters needs to be addressed.
“We need to prevent not only people from becoming unsheltered in the first place but to reduce the amount of time that people spend unsheltered,” Sjoberg said.
The five-year goal was to shorten shelter stays so that 92 per cent are less than 10 days. Data shows an improvement from the baseline year but fell from 2020 and 2021. Currently, 87.7 per cent of shelter stays are shorter than 10 days.
Mayor Scott Gillingham said ending homelessness won’t happen overnight but he and premier-designate Wab Kinew committed to moving forward on a shared plan.
He also pointed to a need for continued collaboration on the issue.
“Not everybody is coordinating, and not everybody is sharing data, and that includes the Province of Manitoba in the city, so we really all have to come together on one page if we’re really going to make an impact on homelessness,” he said.
Whitford said time is of the essence.
“We need to find out why there’s such delays. We need to shorten that time and do things more and more efficiently and at a broader scale.”
— with files from Rosanna Hempel
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