Good Shepherd plans to raze shelter, build supportive housing
Social-service agency aims to build 155-unit residence
Good Shepherd plans to tear down its men’s shelter and build a 10storey supportive-housing residence in its place just east of downtown Hamilton.
The hope is that in demolishing the 54-bed shelter, which dates to 1972, and creating 156 units of housing with support services on-site, more men exit homelessness.
“If people are given the right supports, they can in fact move from homelessness to having a home,” Brother Richard MacPhee, Good Shepherd’s chief executive officer, told The Spectator.
In fact, MacPhee expects some who’d stay at the Mary Street shelter would transition to the future building at Mary and Cannon streets.
That’s what happened when Good Shepherd opened Dorothy Day Centre, a 73-unit supportive-housing building for women and gender-diverse people in May 2023.
Women staying at a temporary overflow shelter at the old Cathedral Boy’s school site on Main Street East moved to the apartments on Arkledun Avenue.
After a year, the vast majority have maintained successful tenancies, MacPhee said.
Like Dorothy Day, the men’s building will provide housing with support services for residents, including those with serious addiction and mental-health issues.
The roughly $50-million construction plan, as of a December 2021 estimate, calls for a common dining area along with addiction, social and housing services on two of the floors.
The Good Shepherd men’s shelter isn’t the only one in Hamilton that has been the focus of shifting plans recently.
Last year, after more than 70 years on James Street North, Mission Services moved its men’s shelter to a refurbished building on King Street East near Victoria Avenue. In doing so, Mission Services kept its 58 shelter beds and added 50 transitional-housing units.
At 82 beds, the Salvation Army operates Hamilton’s largest men’s shelter on York Boulevard, where it has offered such emergency lodging since the 1950s.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the homeless-serving sector experienced a reckoning with the traditional close-quarter dorms that have served as emergency shelters for decades.
Increasingly, municipalities, including Hamilton, aim to place more stock in affordable, supportive housing to solve homelessness, rather than responding to it as an emergency through shelters.
“At a high level, this is exactly the kind of thing that Finland did a number of years ago and they are very close as a country to ending homelessness,” said Tim Richter, president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said of Good Shepherd’s Mary Street plan.
In 2018, the CEO of Finland’s largest non-governmental affordablehousing provider explained how his country had nearly eradicated homelessness by moving people into stable housing quickly while providing long-term support.
That achievement involved the conversion of emergency shelters and hostels into a variety of socialand assisted-living flats through strong government incentives, Juha Kaakinen told a national conference at the Hamilton Convention Centre. “You don’t see people sleeping on the streets.”
That’s not the case in Hamilton, where encampments set up in parks and green spaces are an everpresent reminder of the enduring crisis. Roughly 1,600 people are homeless, according to the city’s latest available figures. Of those, more than 200 are living outside, city staff recently estimated.
Shelters have been packed in recent years and there aren’t enough beds for everyone, city housing director Michelle Baird told council.
“The real challenge is that we don’t have outflow solutions to get people out of shelters in order to get other folks in.”
It’s likely that there will always be a need for some emergency shelter capacity, but Canadian municipalities are realizing that among those flowing in and out of shelter, a significant number “are stuck,” for long periods, Richter said.
Those people, many of whom can have complex needs and require on-site support, are “basically using the shelter as housing,” he said. “So if you can convert a shelter to permanent housing, you’re solving their homelessness.”
On that score, Good Shepherd’s shift on Mary Street would be a “very smart move,” Richter said.
The agency’s proposal goes before the city’s committee of adjustment on June 11 to request minor variances to make the plan work on the site.
MacPhee says he can’t yet predict when construction might start. For now, next steps involve community fundraising and lining up government funding to make the project happen.
“Show us the money and we’ll be able to build.”