In Hamilton, a promising partnership has formed to tackle the housing crisis. Hamilton is Home, a coalition of the eight largest non-profit housing providers serving the city, has forged a strong working relationship with municipal government. Together, the coalition and municipal partners are reshaping public policy in order to get affordable housing built faster.
“How else to get out of a housing crisis than to be onboarding, collaborating, with the people who are going to be building the housing – the not-for-profit housing sector – right?” said Justin Lewis, the Director of the City of Hamilton’s Housing Secretariat Division. He said the City’s relationship with Hamilton is Home “has strengthened our ability to respond to housing needs more urgently and at scale.”
Crisis spurs collaboration
There were more than 6,200 households on Hamilton’s waitlist for social housing in 2023, the latest year for which data are available, according to the City’s 2023 Access to Housing Centralized Waitlist Update. The report noted that the actual number of households needing social housing was higher, because the list did not include a backlog of applications that hadn’t yet been processed. In 2023, the City was able to house only 14% of households on the waitlist that year.
The most recent data on the number of homeless people in Hamilton is provided by a 2024 count conducted on a single day in 2024 as part of the national Point-in-Time Count of Homelessness. The City of Hamilton’s participation in this national effort is referred to as the 2024 Point-in-Time Connection. On November 4, 2024, this initiative tallied 1,216 people experiencing homelessness in Hamilton that day.
Rising costs of housing and increased visible street homelessness after the COVID pandemic have increased pressure on all levels of government to get directly involved in ensuring safe, sufficient housing is available for people with lower incomes. As the City of Hamilton has worked to address the crisis, it has created a range of new programs and policies in recent years that, alongside increased federal funding, aim to more urgently address this challenge.
At the same time, the housing crisis also motivated Hamilton’s non-profit housing sector to come together to form the Hamilton is Home coalition, with the aim of unifying and amplifying the voices of the city’s experienced nonprofit housing providers at a moment when housing was becoming an increasingly central public policy issue. The ultimate goal was, of course, to get more affordable housing built and to eliminate the waitlist for social housing for all households in need.
With the City of Hamilton’s priorities increasingly aligned with the long-time mission of the nonprofit housing sector, building a strong relationship between the Hamilton is Home coalition and City government increasingly made sense for both sides.
Coalition offers insights as City of Hamilton steps up to address housing needs
In the past, the City of Hamilton had a minimal role in the creation or preservation of affordable and supportive housing. An affordable housing project might occasionally receive funding from the City, but it was a one-off process with little transparency for nonprofit housing providers and no systematic or long-term strategy. City housing efforts focused mostly on temporary emergency and transitional housing, not increasing the supply of permanent, affordable homes.
That has changed with the onset of the crisis and heightened pressure for governments to act. Hamilton City Council adopted the Housing Sustainability and Investment Roadmap in April 2023, laying out a policy framework for becoming more actively involved in solving housing issues. As part of that legislation, the City’s Housing Secretariat Division was formed, a new part of the City government with a mandate to work effectively with housing stakeholders.
The Housing Sustainability and Investment Roadmap, or HSIR, as it’s often referred to, “is a guiding document for the Secretariat, and Hamilton is Home helped inform that document,” said Hamilton is Home Coalition Chair Graham Cubitt. “Hamilton is Home also helped the City shape the Housing Secretariat Division so it could be effective rather than just another layer of bureaucracy.”
Cubitt explained why the coalition’s involvement was so important in policy and process development. “Sometimes they invest the solutions internal to City Hall without knowing how it’s going to work on the ground,” he said. Rather than something we have to try to shoehorn our projects into compliance, the HSIR is usable for the nonprofit sector to actually get behind. The creation of the Housing Secretariat Division helped coordinate City Hall voices as well, so unified nonprofits could communicate with a more unified municipal office dealing with the issue,” Cubitt explained.
Justin Lewis, the Director of the City of Hamilton’s Housing Secretariat Division, agrees wholeheartedly with Cubitt’s assessment. “Hamilton is Home, the coalition, has played, I would say, a very critical and valuable role in all the work that is being done around the affordable housing, supportive housing file here at the City of Hamilton,” he said, including helping to shape the Housing Sustainability and Investment Roadmap and the Housing Secretariat Division, work that preceded his tenure in leadership there.
“As soon as I came on as the Director of the Housing Secretariat in July of 2023, right away I started working with the Hamilton is Home coalition,” Lewis said. “They’ve helped us create policies by providing very practical, delivery-focused insights from the not-for-profit housing sector. When we needed to work out the kinks we would often go to them. We would say, ‘What have you experienced?’ I think it’s that collaboration that’s really assisted us and the not-for-profit housing projects coming to fruition and starting to get funding. So I’d have to say that their feedback has consistently helped ensure our programs are workable, timely and aligned with real conditions within projects.”
Lewis added that his experience working with the coalition in Hamilton contrasts favourably with prior experience working on housing issues in Toronto. Lewis previously served as the Director of Infrastructure, Planning and Development for the Shelter, Support and Housing Administration Division of the City of Toronto. “We did not have a coalition like this,” Lewis said, referring to Hamilton is Home. “It made it very difficult to bring everybody together. We did have groups that came together and talked about stuff, but it wasn’t an ongoing coalition where they worked together and signed off to be collaborative on all aspects. So when I first started at the City of Hamilton, this was one of the big things that I really loved, because it helped us get our work done in a better way.”
Leveraging cooperation for increased federal funding
With the City and the nonprofit housing sector aligned and cooperating to support the creation of more affordable housing in Hamilton, the stage was set to capture and rapidly deploy increased federal funding for affordable housing, along with new municipal funding for that purpose.
Lewis saw the need for a transparent open procurement system to fund affordable housing providers and initiated the creation of the Affordable Housing Development Project Stream. This created a predictable and transparent way for nonprofit housing providers to request funding for projects, and a systematic way for the City to evaluate applications and provide funding. The Project Stream channels money provided by the federal government through its Housing Accelerator Fund agreement with the City of Hamilton as well as additional City funding for permanent affordable housing.
“I knew that the not-for-profit housing providers were an untapped sector that we could be funding to get out of the housing crisis,” Lewis said. With the development of the Project Stream, “That’s exactly what has happened.”
The Affordable Housing Development Project Stream’s first round of funding announced in early 2025 provided about $8.2 million to 11 approved projects, representing 440 units of affordable housing and 435 units of supportive housing, all ready to break ground that same year. Every member of the Hamilton is Home coalition was awarded project funding.
As the Project Stream was developed, Lewis said the Housing Secretariat worked very closely with Hamilton is Home to ensure the city’s new standardized funding agreements reflected the practical needs of housing providers, with the City attorneys collaborating with Hamilton is Home coalition members’ attorneys to draft contract language that worked for both sides.
This kind of detailed, in-the-weeds collaboration may sound less than exciting, but produces real-world results once a workable process is in place. The City government providing early-stage funding for affordable housing projects in a reliable, efficient and timely way can help nonprofit housing providers position themselves to successfully apply for additional federal funding that gets projects built much faster. For example, Letters of Intent provided by the City for each development funded through the Project Stream offer important early documentation of the City’s commitment, allowing the nonprofits to leverage that early investment by the City to apply for additional provincial and federal affordable housing funds to advance housing development, faster.
Streamlining affordable housing approvals
Another example of the City of Hamilton better aligning its priorities and processes with the needs of nonprofit housing developers is the All4One Pilot, a laboratory for creating a more efficient site plan approvals process for developments. This had previously been a labyrinthine process for nonprofit housing developers to navigate, with multiple points of contact with different City government departments and often vague or contradictory guidance that could take months to resolve. The cross-departmental All4One Pilot is an initiative of Mayor Andrea Horwath, and part of a broader City effort to implement municipal government best practices through participation in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
Graham Cubitt, Hamilton is Home coalition Chair, said the coalition’s member organizations participating in this pilot have found the approvals process for their projects much more streamlined and efficient. “It’s led to new synergies, creativity and cooperation,” he said. Instead of sending around emails to multiple City departments for weeks or months trying to understand and meet their requirements – from waste management to urban design, to engineering, transportation planning, parks and recreations, corridor management, Alectra, HSR, the public transit agency, among others – “everybody shows up to one table in person and makes decisions together,” Cubitt said. “There is peer responsibility to say we’re all actually committed to this goal, and the goal to get it done in two meetings.”
According to the City, the All4One Pilot has resulted in a 60 per cent decrease in the response rate to applicants with feedback, and a 70 per cent decrease in the processing time for Site Plan applications from receipt to the issuance of a Conditional Site Plan, allowing projects to move forward faster.
Cubitt said this reflects the City placing higher priority on facilitating affordable housing projects, and is, critically, another “way for City government to ensure it’s not the roadblock for federal funding coming to Hamilton.”
Land donation
An additional way the City of Hamilton is working more productively with affordable housing providers is through a new land donation program. The City is cataloguing sites it owns that could be suitable for housing developments and in some cases moving forward with the preparatory work to get vacant lands ready for development, taking on the costs and risks associated with environmental assessments and cleanup, rezoning and more, along with providing the land for free to nonprofit housing developers.
Aligning priorities to achieve more, together
Overall, voices for the City of Hamilton’s housing efforts and its nonprofit housing sector credit the positive working relationship they’ve developed with a significantly increased capacity to build affordable housing for residents.
Graham Cubitt, Hamilton is Home coalition Chair, said the positive working relationship between nonprofit developers and the City of Hamilton through the range of new City programs and policies has “shown that it is possible to work with City Hall in a different way.”
The City is embracing that shift. “Having Hamilton is Home serve as a coordinated voice for the sector has helped us improve our City’s engagement processes, so it really has brought everyone together in such a good way,” said Justin Lewis, head of the City’s Housing Secretariat Division. The official members of the Hamilton is Home coalition plus numerous allied nonprofit organizations that participate in meetings as well have created a “consolidated voice and feedback” that the City can draw on as it continues to build out its affordable housing policies and investments.
“We’ve seen reductions in duplication of work and red tape within our processes,” Lewis said. “We’ve clarified our shared priorities so very often we’re synchronizing our priorities” with the nonprofit housing sector directly, he said. “It helps us get through things much quicker. It's been especially helpful as we accelerate policy development and program delivery in response to this crisis, for sure.”