They've been used quite effectively in some situations. I could point you to situations in Toronto in which, for instance, homeless people have been taken literally from the street and put into vacant private rental housing. Literally overnight, they've moved from being homeless to being housed. In the case of one pilot project, 98% of them or something along that line—I may be wrong on the exact number—remained housed three years afterwards. So this actually works.
One of the questions from a public policy perspective is that when you look at it over the long term, the dollars could begin to add up. Studies have been done comparing rent supplements over a 10- or a 20-year period, let's say. Of course, by their nature, rent supplements increase because rents go up, so rent supplements typically tend to go up. Studies show that over a period of time they cost more than, for instance, investment in bricks-and-mortar social housing.
There's the other issue that has been identified in the United States, which relies very heavily on a particular kind of rent supplement called a section 8 subsidy. There have been economic studies on this. One of the main studies, which I'd be happy to share with the committee, looked at 93 cities in the United States and found that in fact these rent supplements inflated the rents not just of the units for which the landlord was receiving the supplement, but for all the units. In fact, when you added up the overall increase in rents and then subtracted the amount of subsidy, tenants were still paying more money. They in fact had a negative impact on rents.
We have to look at a number of those issues to make sure when we're designing rent supplements that they don't actually have the perverse effect of inflating rents for everybody and making the situation worse for all tenants. But those are issues that can be addressed in very specific ways through looking at the various kinds of mechanisms and not expecting that rent supplements can be a long-term solution. They aren't; they're a short-term solution.
They certainly won't work in communities in Canada where there's a low vacancy rate. In the city of Toronto, there are about 5,000 vacant units; if I remember correctly, Statistics Canada reports that. If we were to provide enough rent supplements to fill every one of those vacant units, that would still just barely empty the shelters, let alone deal with the other 67,000 households on the waiting list in Toronto.
So clearly, rent supplements are not a single solution that's going to solve every problem, but they have their role as part of a comprehensive plan.