Meegwetch for the question.
There are not many places in Canada where, when you want your child to attend high school, you have to send that child away to another community. That's a reality for many of the 40-some first nation communities that are in the district known as Kenora. If you want to seek access to primary care or you need to seek medical attention, not many of us have to get into a plane, fly a couple of hours, and then you visit a strange community to access the hospital medical care for that reason. Not many of us are living in a home where we're sharing it with 15 or 20 other members of our family. We're talking about a two-bedroom home that has mould issues and hasn't been invested in. We have many families that are in that situation. We're hearing very often that it is better to be homeless in Kenora or Sioux Lookout than it is to be back home, because of the shortage of housing.
We're very involved in health transformation and getting an all-nations health system in our region. I'm happy to say we're making good progress, working in partnership with ANHP.
Something that is quite disturbing for me and that we hear very often is that our elders are not accessing medical care very often. They're afraid of losing their spot in the home in their community, because there's just not enough homes in that community. We have a situation where families are not choosing to live in an urban setting. Families are forced to move to an urban setting. That has a direct impact on our homeless population. It also has a direct impact on, as I mentioned, the number of people who end up getting stuck in the justice system. From an investment standpoint, it just makes pure economic sense to start investing in homes, and maybe a little less on our judicial systems.
Here's what I mean by that. We did a project in Sioux Lookout, in partnership with the Ontario Aboriginal Housing Services. It was really a one-of-a-kind project in the Ontario context. The goal was to take those who were chronically homeless, provide them with a home, no conditions but all supported. It was housing first through an indigenous lens. We found that the transformation in the 20 individuals who were provided housing was incredible. We're talking about individuals who have lived on the streets for decades, who communities have written off, but are now looking at being enrolled in employment programs and are looking at access to jobs.
On the financial piece, with regard to the return on investment, the project will have broken even in four and a half years. In other words, the capital investment that went into that building will have repaid itself through other savings in four and a half years. Providing culturally appropriate housing for 20 individuals resulted in almost $300,000 in policing savings in the first year.
That's just one project. It's one example I wanted to give to you, but the thing I really want to talk about is that—