City officials hope a new 24-unit supportive-housing building in downtown Hamilton can inspire provincial funding and more of its kind to help those with high needs escape homelessness.
“It’s about demonstrating this for the province,” Adam Sweedland, CEO of CityHousing Hamilton, told The Spectator about 257 King William St. this week.
CityHousing’s new three-storey building, situated in a former parking lot near Wellington Street North, is expected to be finished in August.
The building, which was constructed with prefabricated modular components, will be run in partnership with Indwell, a non-profit that specializes in deeply affordable and supportive housing.
“The key thing is that this is an extremely strategic way for the city to address the issue of homelessness, in particular encampment-related homelessness,” Graham Cubitt, director of projects and development with Indwell, told The Spectator.
Such supportive housing isn’t unique locally, but this project marks the first time Indwell has teamed up to provide services for a municipal partner’s building in Hamilton, Cubitt noted.
It’s a relationship that has proven successful elsewhere, including in St. Thomas, Ont., where Indwell operates 15 units of highly supportive housing called the Railway City Lofts on the second floor of the city’s public transit office.
Last year, as part of a suite of initiatives to respond to homelessness, council approved $1.2 million for high-level support services from Indwell for the King William project.
On the capital side, council allocated about $6.5 million in federal rapid housing funds toward its construction, which carries an overall budget of $14.4 million.
Sweedland said the King William program is meant for people with higher needs, including those with mental health and addiction challenges, than CityHousing supports in other buildings.
The hope is that the CityHousing-Indwell partnership can land provincial funding to maintain its support services and that it can be scaled up to tackle homelessness on a wider scale, Coun. Nrinder Nann said.
“We’re going to need multiples of these … 24-unit solutions throughout the city in order to meet our population’s needs,” Nann, who’s president of the CityHousing board, told The Spectator.
Future residents of the King William project are to be drawn from Hamilton’s roughly 1,600-person list of those experiencing homelessness.
“The goal is that this is a long-term program and a long-term relationship, but everyone knows that the province’s responsibility is to deliver health supports,” Cubitt said.
City officials and housing advocates have long called for upper-level government funding — provincial health dollars, in particular — to create more supportive housing to address Hamilton’s homelessness crisis.
The calls come as more than 200 people live in upwards of 100 encampment sites in local parks and other urban spaces while shelters regularly fill up.
Amid complaints from residents about debris, open drug use and violence, council recently approved $1.8 million in additional measures to shore up shelters, drop-in programs and outreach programs while tweaking rules for where encampments can set up.
The King William building, meanwhile, is among a few CityHousing projects in the works or recently completed:
106 Bay Street North, a 55-unit, six-storey building on another former parking lot at Cannon Street West is expected to be finished at the end of October
55 Queenston Rd. a 40-unit, six-storey building at the former City Motor Hotel site at the Queenston traffic circle is on track to welcome tenants next fall. It’s the first of two buildings at that location.
8 Roxanne Dr. is a new 103-unit apartment building off Queenston Road in the east end where tenants have lived for about a year. It was built in partnership with a private consortium that razed CityHousing townhouses to redevelop the area into a mixed-income subdivision.
405 James St. N., another partnership with private builders and Indwell, also proposes to demolish CityHousing townhouses in order to build a denser mixed-income community in the North End. An appeal by Canadian National Railway to the Ontario Land Tribunal has held up construction.
In April, Mayor Andrea Horwath blasted CN for having “dragged us through” the OLT appeal over what the rail giant has cited as a potential “conflict” with its bayfront shunting yard on Stuart Street and concerns over safety, odour, vibration and noise.
Horwath offered that broadside amid another delay in tribunal proceedings with lawyers pushing what was supposed to be a hearing this past May to February 2025 to allow for more talks amid significantly revised plans that include a 20-storey building.
At the time, a CN, which launched its appeal in September 2022, said it remained “committed to finding a solution with the city and the developer.”
“We’re still in that hopeful place,” Nann said Tuesday about talks potentially heading off a hearing. “We’ve made it very clear as a municipality that we’re open to dialogue to get us to a resolution.”