August 14, 2026
Hope is powerful. It can focus our goals. It can keep us focused when progress isn’t evident and it can help us recharge when we have setbacks. But when it comes to homelessness, I sometimes wonder whether we are giving people enough reason to hope that their circumstances can actually change.
London is doing many important things to respond to homelessness. We have innovative organizations, dedicated frontline workers, new supportive housing, a Whole of Community System Response and a new Housing Stability Action Plan. There is much to be proud of.
But I think we need to ask a more fundamental question:
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Are we trying to manage homelessness more effectively—or are we trying to reduce it and, ultimately, eliminate it? That question jumped out at me this week when I saw the challenging debates taking place among London councillors about what participants are allowed to bring into shelter and then juxtaposed by news that St. Thomas has reduced its homelessness and is working towards achieving zero homelessness in 2027!
I believe London needs clear, measurable targets for reducing homelessness.
Targets would not solve homelessness on their own. But they would give us something incredibly important: a destination.
We should know how many fewer people we want experiencing homelessness next year, how much we want chronic homelessness to decline, how many people need to move into permanent housing and, ultimately, what it will take to reach a point where homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring.
London has already demonstrated that ambitious goals can make a difference. We became the first community in Canada to achieve functional zero for veteran homelessness by using data, collaboration and a focused effort around a clearly defined outcome. So why couldn’t we bring that same ambition to homelessness more broadly?
Setting a target isn’t about pretending that homelessness is simple. It isn’t about blaming organizations when circumstances don’t go according to plan. And it certainly isn’t about reducing people’s lives to statistics.
It’s about accountability.
It’s about knowing whether what we are doing is actually working.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s about hope.
Because hope isn’t simply believing that things will get better.
Hope is believing that a better future is possible—and then having the courage to set a goal and work together to make it happen.
That’s the conversation I think London needs to have.
In this week’s video segment, I talk about the important impact having clear goals would create and I share a story about how stories of success can inspire hope in this vitally important and complex topic.
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