Thank you very much.
I'm appearing here in part because the minister whom I committed to try to get to this meeting unfortunately has a COVID committee meeting and is also helping to initiate and start the new housing council as part of the national housing strategy. Also, with Black History Month, he has multiple bookings. I really do apologize, but I have worked very closely with him to develop this policy and deliver it, and I hope there are no questions you ask me that I won't be able to provide an answer to. Luckily, that very mischievous member from Spadina—Fort York isn't here to cause me trouble, so I'm in good shape on that front.
First of all, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you from the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, who hold the treaty on this land, but it's also the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Huron-Wendat. From across Turtle Island, and now in fact from around the world, it has been a gathering place for many people from many nations for generations.
We are now in to the 11th month of the pandemic, and to understand where rapid housing fits in to our response to homelessness during the pandemic we need to turn the clock back to almost a year ago when we realized the scale and the absolute devastating impact COVID-19 presented, both as a possible risk and, in fact, for too many Canadians, a reality, in terms of loss of life and hardship that have flowed from this unprecedented historic pandemic.
We immediately understood the impact on vulnerable populations. Especially as we watched COVID surface in Europe and in New York City in particular, we saw the impact it was having on homeless populations, people in precarious housing, people sleeping rough, and a whole series of populations that didn't have secure housing. We knew that we were going to have to act quickly because housing was effectively the medicine that was being prescribed to people. It was one thing to be told to stay home, but if you didn't have a home, that was medical advice that you just wouldn't be able to follow. What we immediately did was to work on the existing programs to see where they could be fortified, and this is the groundwork that, as I said, led to the rapid housing initiative.
Immediately, we more than doubled the resources for Reaching Home and removed many of the rules and restrictions and regulations to allow local communities to respond to COVID with as much flexibility and force as possible. We also then set up a stakeholder meeting, which we have been holding on a regular basis since, with our Reaching Home partners. Reaching Home, of course, is the housing program that addresses homelessness in the federal national housing strategy.
On top of that we've also been working on a weekly basis with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness to talk to front-line workers to take a look at the research and the data they've been calling in to make sure that not only are the Reaching Home dollars working hard, but also that for housing solutions that were coming forward and being proposed for isolation, for safety reasons, for medical treatment, for people with addictions in particular who are difficult to isolate, we started marshal resources immediately as the pandemic seemed to project a longer and longer timeline into the future. Work on the rapid housing initiative actually started last March. It took us time to understand what the sector was asking of us, how the sector was responding, how different cities and different communities were responding, and we built the rapid housing initiative around the front-line experience of many of these organizations.
We also know that precarious populations, or populations that live in precarious environments, such as indigenous communities in urban settings, and also racialized communities, which were also going to be impacted differently. In response to this, we made a call to our partners through the Reaching Home network, in the indigenous, northern, rural and the designated community stream, to show us what they would acquire quickly, if they could, to help address COVID in an emergency response, but also not just to flow dollars through these communities to deal with COVID, but if there were a way we could pool those dollars to create permanent solutions to homelessness as we addressed the COVID crisis.
In fact, we got a very strong response from different corners of the country and with that data went back to CMHC and budget in the summertime and working with the FCM, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and in particular the Big City Mayors' Caucus, where homelessness tends to have the highest impact and the largest municipal exposure, as well as our provincial-territorial-indigenous government counterparts, and we came forward with a program to do a couple of things.
One was to bolster and reinvest in Reaching Home, and $236.7 million was announced in the fall as additional dollars for this year. Moreover, in the fall economic statement an additional $299 million was forecast for the next year as a starting point so that the system would know what was coming from the federal government to help them plan and coordinate their communities' response to homelessness.
Second, we could see, certainly in major cities, that renting hotels was becoming extraordinarily expensive, costing up to $3,000 a month in some cases, which could actually buy you a condominium in Toronto or Vancouver. We thought these dollars could be better spent acquiring those properties and acquiring distressed assets and building modular housing, as opposed to simply renting emergency temporary shelter. We formulated a program. We—the minister and I—moved it through cabinet and in September launched the rapid housing initiative. It's a billion-dollar initiative. The funds are forecast to be expended by March 31.
Based on research we had done, we broke it into two streams.
One was the designated community stream, in which there are 15 major centres. CMHC is with me today and they can break down for you some of the formulas that were used.
The second stream was on a project-by-project application basis and is open to all communities right across Canada, including indigenous-led housing programs and indigenous-led programs that are on reserves. There was a wide open throw that included all major housing systems and all major providers to try to get to the rapid housing initiative.
To date, we have closed the application process, but I can tell you that for the major city streams, there are a couple of cities where we are just finalizing details of the transfer agreements, but the properties have been more or less secured. To date, we have executed the city stream. Almost every city now has an agreement in place. In Toronto, for example, their $203.3 million will secure 540 units of housing, some of it modular and some of acquired. Again, the details are for CMHC to share with you.
Even in Montreal and Quebec—
