Thanks for the question.
You're right. The “housing first” model is really exciting, and it's just common sense that having a decent, safe place to live is a really significant step in creating stability in someone's life, whether they're mentally ill or not.
The challenge of finding suitable apartments in the various cities—and it is a challenge—is one that we're just starting to tackle. As Mike said, we received the funding about a year ago and really started from nothing. It's taken the last year to develop relationships with the service providers and researchers in each of the five cities. We've worked hard to work collaboratively with the organizations in each city. We didn't want to come in and say, this is how you have to do it, but we wanted to develop coalitions of researchers and service providers to work with us, and we have achieved that in every city.
An RFP was posted at the end of September, and we have now gone through a process where, in each city, we have identified service providers and researchers. The funding has started to flow.
We haven't actually started collecting data. We expect to do that at the end of the summer. The actual research will take place over the next four years; it's early yet. We don't yet have results or anything like that, but we're very excited to be where we are and have started to deal with the challenge of finding suitable housing.
You mentioned Vancouver, and because of the Olympics, of course, Vancouver has some unique challenges. To find an apartment right now, no matter your income, is difficult in Vancouver. But the whole area of providing rent supplements is an important one to focus on, because the kind of housing you can afford when you don't have that kind of supplement is often substandard, and it doesn't provide the kind of safety and stability that people with a mental illness need to get on with getting better. So that's part of what we're looking at.