Rising homelessness is no mystery – it’s socially assisted

Ontario’s homelessness crisis is the predictable outcome of our social assistance system – and Indigenous people, racialized communities, and people with disabilities bear the brunt of these policy choices.

Social assistance should protect people from homelessness, yet new data obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveals a disturbing truth: In July 2025, more than 30,000 people were homeless while receiving social assistance benefits – an increase of 72 per cent since July 2019. This isn’t anecdotal or a matter of opinion; it’s coming from the provincial government’s own records.

And it’s getting worse. In just three years, Ontario’s poverty rate climbed from 6.8 per cent in 2020 to 11.1 per cent in 2023 – meaning the number of people living in poverty jumped from fewer than 1 million to 1.7 million. During the COVID-19 pandemic, quick and decisive government action cut poverty to historically low levels. But subsequent policy choices have driven it back up, so that poverty in the province is now worse than it was before the pandemic.

A new report from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario shows that nearly 85,000 Ontarians experienced known homelessness in 2025, up 7.8 per cent from 2024. This trend is reinforced by the data we obtained. Homelessness among social assistance recipients is growing.

The reason is straightforward: Rents have risen much faster than social assistance benefits. Average rent for a bachelor apartment in Ontario has more than doubled since 2004 and surged by hundreds of dollars per month in just the past five years. The asking rent for a single room – the very lowest end of the private rental market – recently surpassed the maximum monthly Ontario Works benefit of $733 for a single person. This means that even if a person spends their entire benefit on rent, they may not be able to afford a place to live.

Even worse, the shelter benefit portion of social assistance is designed in a way that punishes people who are already struggling. Because current market rents often exceed or consume nearly the entire income of people receiving Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program benefits, many people cannot afford to keep their home and are pushed into homelessness. Social assistance only pays the shelter portion of benefits when recipients can provide housing receipts, so people who lose their home also lose more than half of their benefit. This creates a vicious cycle in which people lose their home because social assistance benefits are too low, and then they lose their shelter income, making it nearly impossible to get back into housing.

This is simple math: Inadequate incomes + rising rents = homelessness.

These interconnected system failures do not affect everyone equally; they deepen and entrench inequities for people who already face structural barriers. Indigenous people and racialized communities face much higher poverty rates than non-Indigenous and non-racialized Ontarians, and people with disabilities are also more likely to live in poverty than those without disabilities. These gaps are even more pronounced in the homelessness data. Indigenous people remain vastly overrepresented among those experiencing homelessness, and racialized groups – particularly Black Ontarians – face ongoing housing precarity and higher rates of core housing need. For people with disabilities, higher poverty rates often coincide with a greater risk of unsheltered and chronic homelessness.

These outcomes also reflect systemic discrimination across employment and housing systems, which put specific communities at a disadvantage from the start. Inadequate social assistance rates leave little room to overcome those barriers, raising the risk of poverty and homelessness and making it much harder to get back on your feet after you lose your home.

Social assistance is effectively Ontario’s largest housing program, but the data tells us that it’s making our housing crisis worse.  

Yet despite the evidence, the government continues to focus resources on short-term, downstream responses to homelessness. While ensuring that every person can access emergency shelter is a minimum core obligation of governments under the right to adequate housing, without addressing the upstream causes rooted in a failing social assistance system, the province will continue to struggle to merely manage homelessness. People, particularly social assistance recipients who are Indigenous, racialized, or have disabilities, will continue to be pushed out of their homes.

Instead, the province must reform the social assistance system to prevent homelessness in the first place – for example, by raising rates and ensuring every recipient receives the full shelter portion of the benefit. Our social assistance system has a duty to actually assist people by helping them to afford to stay in their homes, rather than pushing them into homelessness.