In London, we are really pleased to be part of a growing movement of building larger community solutions around housing and integrating health care with housing.
If we look at London, the current situation remains particularly difficult. Being able to offer people some hope by introducing quality housing programs—places where people want to live and can actually afford to live—is a values-based approach where you're looking at treating people with some dignity and inviting people into places where they want to live and want to participate. They would prefer to live in a community and are willing to engage in the hard work.
One thing that often isn't talked about is how hard the work is for tenants when they move in and the label of homelessness gets dropped aside or the challenge of addiction becomes something else. It's a lot of work for those individuals to work toward their health and engage. It's not an easy road for any of them.
For the whole London community, I think we've been able to demonstrate that if you link municipal programming with hospital programming and supportive housing, you create a system of care that is able to start teasing apart what is really a complex situation. The challenge that remains before us is the scale.
In London in particular, we know we don't have enough supportive housing. We know we don't have enough affordable housing. There's no easy path to integrating affordable housing with access to services. It really comes down to saying, “Here's a way forward. This can work, but let's figure out how to make it work better.” How do we increase investment in mental health and addiction services and housing?