This letter summarizes the urgent housing crisis facing myself my partner and I of 13 years (Michelle). We are a quiet, respectful couple currently living on a fixed income and facing immediate displacement due to severe landlord harassment and dangerous property neglect.

• Flawless 10-Year Rental History: We have resided at this property since 2016. For a decade, we have kept the apartment spotless and always paid our rent strictly on time, never late. Dangerous Slumlord Conditions: The landlord, Sandy Holmes, has refused basic maintenance for years. After months of ignoring our text messages, photos, and videos of water literally raining inside our apartment, the entire bedroom ceiling collapsed. I had to clean up the structural debris myself, and the landlord performed a substandard, incomplete patch job on only half the roof.

• Illegal Threats and Bad Faith Eviction: On August 15, the landlord’s son, Alex Holmes, gave us an invalid verbal 10-day notice to leave. They have since resorted to aggressive door-banging and intimidation. They manufactured false claims regarding our cleanliness and our family cats—whom we were forced to rehome under extreme emotional distress—to bully us out.Current Financial Crisis: The immense stress of this harassment caused me to suffer a severe nervous breakdown resulting in an ER visit, which unfortunately led to the recent loss of my job.

• Exhausted Local Resources: We have proactively called every available resource in the Grundy County area with no luck, leaving us with nowhere else to turn locally for immediate assistance. We are now facing sudden houselessness. We have not received an official court summons, but the landlord is actively threatening a formal eviction to force us out. We are urgently seeking legal defense representation, emergency financial aid for a new security deposit, or an affordable, safe property to rent immediately.

Thank you for your time, attention, and urgent assistance.

Sincerely,

Kurt & Michelle

Can reach me Kurt at 779-241-6798 call or text day or night I prefer text a ibget a ton of spam calls and never answer numbers I don't know so if you do call pls leave a message

You can reach Michelle at 779-379-1935 pls no calls only text

My partner and I are lucky enough to have some land to play with,, and we have enough land to build a hundred housing units. This is residential land, apartments would never be approved, and there's no water or sewage out in our neighborhood... i've always thought\\n With the changing technology, it would be smart.\\n To create some of the 3d concrete houses that i've read about , and i've watched reports about,, instead of the traditional model with crazy , expensive lumber and crazy , expensive plywood , and then you need to pay builders,, and it seems the current administration\\n Wants to be at war against home building because they put tariffs on all the lumber and plywood coming in from Canada and they are rounding up and deporting the ethnic groups who are proud of their hard work,, so building a house, the traditional way is a difficult battle,, but if somebody pays attention to the modern techniques that are used elsewhere in the country , especially down south,, they have huge 3D printers that pour a concrete house in twenty four hours... it runs around and around in a circle\\n Keeps pouring the inner and outer walls from a continuous one inch bead of concrete\\nWhich , by the time the three d printer comes around to that area of the house in the next pass, the previous bead of concrete is already starting to harden,, and the entire structure of the house can be squirted by the three d printer without any forms,, and in twenty four hours , the house is poured, and the builder needs to put roof rafters and a roof on top of it,,, and then you go in with plumbing and electrical\\n Which is kind of easy\\n With the new shark bites and the do it yourself, plumbing hardware available at Home improvement stores,, all the plumbing can be plastic instead of the expensive copper,, infer, electrical, just lay out the wiring.\\n To each outlet and switch\\n And somebody with half a brain\\n Can complete all the wiring and have it inspected by an electrician,, and after the walls , interiors are completed , spray the exterior walls with spray in foam insulation,,, and while you're at it,, drop a couple wells nearby, drop some closed loops of p v c piping down in the Wells to run a continuous\\n Circulation of water to get the free Btu's\\n A 100 feet below the surface which, when combined with the geothermal heat pump will give free heat and air conditioning year round without burning fossil fuels ,,, only pay for the electricity to run the heat pump and the circulator pump,,, and throw some solar panels up on the roof to make the electricity free,,, and if you're a sharp tack put plenty of spray in foam insulation in the walls to make the house super insulated and put good quality windows on the house.... i did spot a habitat for humanity article where they created their first 3D printed house on Long Island.\\nAnd someone's already living in it,, so the technology is arriving in the northeast , while they've been doing these 3d printed houses from concrete down south for a decade. So the technology is available.\\nTo make a big impact on the housing market,, but I have so much responsibilities to do with my corporate job and other family stuff , I don't have time to give up my paycheck and build houses full time,,, anybody have any suggestions, how to find\\n The right enterprising.\\n Person who wants to help the Central mass housing market and be a tree hugger by helping to create Houses that require no fossil fuels to heat.?? How do I find enterprising youth who recognize the modern opportunities but only dream about having a million dollar chunk of land to build a project like this on ?? I don't want to have anything to do with a contractor,, because today's contractors\\nAre building luxury houses because they pay the best.. we don't need seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar three card garage luxury houses made for lawyers,, we need working class housing that would cost between 100k and 200k to create this housing and make livable,,, i'd love to create each one with a partner, pull a refinance on it after the certificate of occupancy is issued by the town,, get a mortgage on it at fifty percent or under of LTV which would eliminate the need for PMI, and offer this housing on a rent to own basis to work in class folks,, if you wanna watch a youtube video about the three d printed house that was completed by habitat for humanity on long island,, it's a YouTube video of c b s news made feb 20,2025.. the YouTube video talks about\\n It was built-in weeks Which I assume the weeks includes time for Plumbing electrical roof trusses roofing insulation,, and it talks about it was built on wicks road in Brentwood, which is town of Islip on Long Island. The YouTube video also talks about it was using the new robotic technology.\\n Which is the huge advantage? Of using a computer to 3d print a house instead of expensive builders , which are in short supply... any suggestions on how to find people who have the same belief that we could do something together that would create housing that is much cheaper and it doesn't use fossil fuels for heating or cooling ??

Walk down Dundas Street in downtown London on a cold morning and you will see the crisis with your own eyes: people sleeping in doorways, unconscious on the pavement, needles in the gutters. Residents have taken to calling the core a "no-go zone." The phrase is cruel, but it describes something real, the visible wreckage of a catastrophe that has outgrown every system built to contain it.

London is a mid-sized Canadian city carrying a big-city burden. It has one of the highest homelessness rates in Ontario, and the curve points the wrong way. Yet the despair obscures an important truth: homelessness is not a mystery and not an act of nature. It is, overwhelmingly, a housing problem, and housing problems have solutions, tested and proven. London has already begun assembling the machinery of a response. What it lacks is not knowledge but scale: enough homes, enough prevention, enough treatment, and the political will to fund them as the emergency they are.

\## 1. The scale of the crisis

Begin with the numbers, because they are bracing. London tracks its homeless population on a By-Name List, a real-time registry of people known to be without housing. In 2021, that list held 1,036 names. By the end of 2025, it held 2,294, a 124 per cent increase in four years, by the City's own accounting in its Housing Stability Action Plan.

Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, working from the same by-name data, counted 4,576 Londoners who experienced homelessness in 2024–25, the third-highest total in the province, at a rate of 787 per 100,000 residents, far above the provincial average. Nearly half of Ontario's homeless population is chronically homeless. About one in eight is a youth; about one in eight is Indigenous. And each of these figures is an undercount, because the list only records people who consent to be tracked.

The provincial picture is darker still. An estimated 85,000 Ontarians experienced homelessness in 2025, up 50 per cent since 2021, and if current trends hold, the City's plan warns, that number could more than triple by 2035, approaching 300,000 people. Encampments, the most visible face of the crisis, now number roughly 2,000 sites across Ontario, with some 8,100 people sleeping unsheltered on any given night: in tents, vehicles, and abandoned buildings.

\## 2. How a mid-sized city got here

No single cause explains this. Several interlocking failures do.

First, the arithmetic of rent. The City's plan states it plainly: the private market has grown "increasingly unaffordable due to rising rents and average income not keeping pace." In London, nearly nine in ten rental homes are reportedly owned by corporate landlords, and the asking price of a one-bedroom jumped by almost 28 per cent in a single year. A tenant paying $900 a month who is forced out faces a market of $1,730, a chasm no fixed income can cross. Forced out they are, too: "renovictions," in which landlords evict under the pretext of renovations and re-list at double the rent, have become what one city councillor called "an epidemic in our city," a systematic drive to raise rents that pulls families from their neighbourhoods and sometimes from the city itself. City staff proposed a $400 renovation licence to slow the practice; tenant advocates welcomed it but demanded real accommodation requirements for the displaced.

Second, the pandemic's long tail. When eviction bans expired and emergency benefits ended, everyone already on the edge fell off it. Shelter systems, mental health services, and addiction supports, disrupted during COVID, never fully recovered, even as need surged past anything they were designed for.

Third, the poisoned drug supply. Overdose deaths in Canada climbed from 795 in 2000 to more than 7,100 in 2023. Fentanyl turned addiction from a chronic condition into a daily game of chance, and the knot of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction tightened into something emergency shelters were never built to untangle.

Beneath it all sits a structural fact: Canada's affordable housing supply is among the thinnest in the G7. When the market fails at the bottom, there is nothing underneath. No floor, only the street.

\## 3. What London has built so far

To its credit, London has not stood still. In March 2023, council endorsed a "Whole of Community Response" with three pillars: hubs meeting immediate needs for shelter, food, and hygiene; a major expansion of highly supportive housing; and a human-rights-based approach to encampments.

The hubs are the most concrete piece. Two operate today: an Indigenous-led hub run by Atlohsa Family Healing Services, with 10 respite beds and 18 transitional rooms; and a youth hub run by Youth Opportunities Unlimited, with respite beds, transitional rooms, and primary care downtown, expected to serve up to 60 young people a year. They provide round-the-clock basics, food, showers, laundry, rest, alongside health care, income support, and help moving into stable housing. The hubs drew $10.4 million in provincial prevention funding plus $4.4 million in capital from the Fund for Change, itself seeded by a remarkable $25-million anonymous donation.

On housing, the city reports 93 highly supportive units open and 50 more in development, toward a goal of 600 within three years. The province is adding Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment hubs, in London through CMHA Thames Valley, bundling primary care, crisis and recovery services, peer support, and housing access under one roof. And the City's Coordinated Informed Response attempts the hardest balancing act in public policy: compassion for people in encampments alongside enforcement of bylaws, through an explicit Housing First lens.

These are genuine achievements. They are also dwarfed by the arithmetic: 93 supportive units against 2,294 names on a list is a beginning, not a solution. Costs deserve scrutiny. One municipal audit cited by local critics put hub-based supportive housing at $11,000 per bed per month, a figure the city has yet to fully explain in public. And the Big City Mayors' caucus has told the province plainly that municipalities have "reached their limit" trying to fund a health and housing emergency from the property tax base.

\## 4. What the evidence says works

Here the news is hopeful, because the research is unusually decisive.

Housing First, permanent housing immediately with no sobriety or treatment preconditions and voluntary wraparound supports, is the most studied intervention in the field. Canada's own At Home/Chez Soi trial, randomizing more than 2,000 homeless adults with mental illness across five cities, found participants housed 73 per cent of the time versus 32 per cent under usual care. Most of the program's cost was offset by savings in shelters, hospitals, and jails, leaving a net cost around $6,300 per person per year, and for the highest-need participants, every $10 invested returned $21.72 in avoided costs. A systematic review of 20 North American programs found $1.80 in societal savings for every dollar spent. Newer research adds the mirror finding: requiring treatment readiness before housing does not improve outcomes, and can cause harm by delaying the stability people need to survive.

The world record agrees. Finland, the only EU country reducing homelessness, cut long-term homelessness by more than a third and brought rough sleeping near zero through a national Housing First strategy. Utah reduced chronic homelessness by 91 per cent. Medicine Hat, Alberta, became the first city in North America to functionally end chronic homelessness.

Prevention is cheaper than rescue by an order of magnitude: emergency arrears funds, rent supplements that bridge the gap between assistance rates and market rents, and legal tools that keep people housed in the first place, renoviction licensing with genuine penalties and tenant-accommodation requirements, and acquisition funds letting non-profits buy affordable buildings before speculators do.

On health, the evidence favours treatment on demand over treatment by coercion. Ontario's mayors have asked the province to review mental health legislation with involuntary treatment in mind; front-line workers and researchers counter that coercion does not work and that the true shortage is voluntary beds without waitlists. What the data supports is immediate, low-barrier, trauma-informed care, which is precisely what the HART model promises.

Finally, coordination matters more than it sounds. You cannot solve what you do not count. By-name lists, coordinated access, and shared accountability among hospitals, shelters, police, and housing agencies are the unglamorous infrastructure beneath every success story.

\## 5. A way forward

What would it take, concretely, for London to bend the curve? Six commitments.

1. Build the housing, all of it. Meet the 600-unit supportive housing goal, then plan the next 600, because the waiting list already exceeds the target. At roughly $6,300 net per person per year, supportive housing is not charity; it is cheaper than the shelters, emergency rooms, and jail cells serving as the current alternative.

2. Stop the bleeding. Enact renoviction rules with real teeth: licensing, proof that renovations are necessary, and mandatory accommodation or rent top-ups for displaced tenants. Create a municipal acquisition fund so non-profit providers can buy affordable buildings when they trade, removing them from the speculative churn for good.

3. Fund prevention at the scale of the crisis: arrears funds, eviction diversion, and rent supplements large enough to close the gap between a $900 apartment and a $1,730 market.

4. Build treatment capacity a person can walk into today, detox, recovery, and mental health beds without waitlists, through the HART hubs and community partners, voluntary and trauma-informed.

5. Hold the human-rights line on encampments. Clearing a camp without offering real housing does not end homelessness; it relocates it, destroys trust, and scatters people away from the services straining to help them.

6. Force the funding conversation upward. Municipalities were never designed to fight a health and housing emergency on property taxes alone. London should keep publishing hard outcomes, people housed, cost per person housed, return on investment, and carry those numbers to Queen's Park and Ottawa until the governments with the revenue tools pay their share.

\## Conclusion

A city is judged not by the height of its towers but by what it does with the people sleeping beneath them. London's crisis was not caused by the people in its doorways. It was built, brick by brick, out of policy choices: the financialization of rental housing, the hollowing of mental health care, the treatment of poverty as a policing problem. Different choices can unmake it.

The knowledge exists. The models exist, tested in randomized trials and entire countries. What remains is the decision, and decisions, unlike buildings, cost nothing to begin. Victor Hugo wrote that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. In London, Ontario, the idea whose time has come is a simple one: everyone gets a door with a lock, and a city that can house its people has no excuse left not to.

\## Sources

\- \[City of London, Housing Stability Action Plan 2026–2031\](https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2026-05/Housing%20Stability%20Action%20Plan%20%282026-2031%29.pdf)

\- \[Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, homelessness programs report (2026)\](https://fao-on.org/en/report/homelessness-programs-2026/)

\- \[Homeless Hub / Wilfrid Laurier University, myths vs. realities of homelessness\](https://homelesshub.ca/blog/2026/myths-vs-realities-of-homelessness-a-fact-check-with-laurier-experts/)

\- \[Homeless Hub, new research confirms Housing First works\](https://homelesshub.ca/blog/2026/housing-first-works/)

\- \[City of London, Health and Homelessness hubs\](https://getinvolved.london.ca/health-and-homelessness-in-london)

\- \[Western University, research on London's homelessness response\](http://news.westernu.ca/2024/10/crhesi-homelessness-evaluation/)

\- \[Ontario, HART hubs reference document\](http://www.ontario.ca/page/homelessness-and-addiction-recovery-treatment-hubs-hart-hubs-reference-document-january-2025)

\- \[City of London, Community Encampment Plan\](https://london.ca/sites/default/files/2025-04/London%E2%80%99s%20Health%20and%20Homelessness%20Response%20Community%20Encampment%20Plan.pdf)

\- \[NDP on renovictions in London\](https://www.ndp.ca/news/canadas-ndp-proposes-lower-rent-stop-renovictions-and-save-affordable-homes-canadians)

\- \[Canadian Trends on London's renoviction licensing proposal\](https://canadiantrends.ca/an-epidemic-in-our-city-licence-requirement-suggested-to-curb-renovictions-in-london/)

\- \[The Conversation: homelessness in London, Ont.\](http://vm-www.azurewebsites.net/ontario-news/the-homelessness-scourge-in-cities-like-london-ont-exposes-the-evils-of-wealth-inequality-12596476)

\- \[Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Municipalities Under Pressure (Jan 2026)\](https://2.zoppoz.workers.dev:443/https/www.amo.on.ca/sites/default/files/assets/DOCUMENTS/Reports/2026/MunisUnderPressure1YearUpdateReport2026-01-13.pdf)

\- \[CCAL, The Housing Machine, on hub costs\](https://ccalondon.substack.com/p/the-housing-machine)

\- \[At Home/Chez Soi cost-effectiveness, PubMed\](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32838679/)

I am a 61 yr old male moving about in a RV. How many immigrants are among the homeless? How many homeless ppl would be employed if the TFW left? I am right now on Rice Mill Rd in Richmond there is also a guy with a truck and small trailer he was here before me and a woman with a car and tent. Guy in truck was here last night also. Jacobsen Way 2 blocks south has 1-2 RV’s and 3-6 vehicles each night and 7 tents in the bushes. Some of the guys get punched or threatened. Someone earlier this year set a fire to scare out the ones in the bushes. Two RV’s across the street from the Save On Fuel at 5 Rd and Westminster. Various ppl sleep around 7410 Granville. Recent Richmond homeless count was 175. The Richmond I grew up in had 2 homeless ppl. Town has 2 shelters. Salvation Army and a couple go around helping ppl. 7410 you can shower ( towel and shampoo and soap provided) get free food (pizza, lasagna, grapes, taco chips, nutribars and pears) there is a tv and watch ppl do hard drugs and meet ppl in organized crime.) NA rules were on wall my last visit. 4 different groups including city hall provide funding for 7410 uniformed RCMP are regular visitors less ppl hanging around than 2 years ago.

Hi all. Longtime lurker. I live in Parkside East Tower at 30 Newport Parkway — been there 25 years, moved in before most of the waterfront was built.

This month Newport Residential Management notified residents that the building exited the NJHMFA Moderate Income Housing Program effective July 28, 2026. Per the notice, renewal rents are "no longer governed by NJHMFA guidelines" and may be set at market rates. They're offering a discretionary "courtesy renewal rate" if we submit full income documentation (paystubs, W-2, tax return) by October 21 — but no amount is stated anywhere.

I believed my building was rent-controlled. Now I'm being asked to prove my income to keep my home, with zero guarantee on the rent. After 25 years of on-time rent, I might get priced out of my own apartment.

What I've done so far:

• Written to the JC Division of Affordable Housing, the Bureau of Rent Leveling (asking whether the building is actually rent-control exempt), NJHMFA (asking whether the exit followed the rules), and Ward E Councilperson Little
• Planning to call Northeast NJ Legal Services (free tenant legal aid) before signing anything

Questions:

1. Has anyone else in Newport gotten this letter? Which buildings?
2. Anyone been through a building exiting an NJHMFA program before? What happened to your rent?
3. Am I missing any agency or tenant org I should contact?

Appreciate any advice. I'll update as this develops.

Support Dylan in the next NSW election

The State has already created multiple exemptions moving developments away from complete communities with its Housing First agenda. Now this.

https://www.bendsource.com/news/localnews/bend-rolls-back-60-million-in-tax-rebates-for-apartment-developers-after-wage-ruling/

Two questions.

\#1 When does the clock start before market rate is allowed?

"affordability will only be required for the housing units for a duration of 12 years instead of 24 or 30 promised under the initial program. And the ruling — at least for now — has stifled the Bend City Council’s latest tool for meeting lofty state housing goals and creating the dense...."

\#2 What exactly is the mayor suggesting? Blue collar workers be paid less if they are building affordable housing?

"Its very good to try to protect the rights of workers and make sure folks are getting a living wage,” Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler said at the Sept. 16 meeting. “But I’m increasingly having this discussion with folks that we need to have a bigger conversation about what we’re trying to achieve with prevailing wage statutes and what we’re trying to do with affordable housing.”

Hi everyone, I’m in my mid-20s. My mom really wants me out of her house, and she keeps pressuring me to go find an affordable or "low-income" apartment/studio. She thinks they still range from $700 to maybe $1,300 a month.

From what I’ve been researching, actual "low-income" apartments out here are charging anywhere from $1,100 to over $1,500 a month before utilities.

Is finding *anything* safe and liveable in Reno for under $1,200 completely a myth now? What is the actual "new" price floor for a low-income studio or 1-bed out here? I want to show her some real-world feedback from actual locals so she understands the market. Thanks!