Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear in front of you today.
The Harmony House shelter is a second-stage shelter in Ottawa that supports women and their children fleeing gender-based violence and abuse.
In 2020, the City of Ottawa declared a “housing and homelessness emergency”, and the pressure continues to grow. The centralized wait-list for subsidized housing has reached more than 15,000 households, and recent data shows the average wait can stretch to seven years or more, with family-sized units especially hard to find.
For survivors of violence, this is not just a housing issue; it is a safety issue. When affordable housing is unavailable, women face impossible choices: remain in an abusive situation or move from place to place, couch surfing, without stability. If they are lucky enough to find a shelter space, they stay much longer than shelters are ever intended to support.
At Harmony House, we see this every day. Survivors who should be moving to permanent housing are instead staying with us for 18 months to two years, or longer. Families of three or more children stay for two to four years, and this is not unusual, because there's simply no suitable affordable housing available for larger families.
If you follow the journey of a typical family—no family is really typical—the mother flees with her children and ends up couch surfing with family and friends, moves to an emergency shelter for three to six months and then moves on to the second-stage shelter for two to four years. Along the way, the children are leaving friends, moving and changing schools. Their grades suffer, and so does their mental health. If they make new friends in their temporary school, they can't invite their friends to their birthday parties or to their house to play, because they live in a shelter.
A generation of children are growing up in shelters.
At Harmony House, we have 16 transitional housing units, with 11 one-bedroom, three two-bedroom and two studio units, including one that's accessible.
Our wait-list currently exceeds 130 families. Over 50 of these families have four or more members, of which 21 have six or more members. There are 18 with children under the age of two and 23 with children aged two to four.
Each bedroom has a bunk bed that sleeps three. There's a double on the bottom and a single on the top. However, this configuration does not work for families with toddlers and infants. It's also difficult for families with older children and teenagers of opposite genders to share a one-bedroom unit with their mother. Our limited number of two-bedroom units are housing families of four to seven children. Our units are not designed for the families we are now serving.
We are currently planning to expand. However, the experience of a shelter being built in Embrun, Ontario, is concerning to us. Their original plan was for the shelter to have 24 units that included several three-bedroom units. Working with CMHC, they had to change this to 35 units, cutting down the three-bedroom units to one-bedroom and studio units, which don't work for the larger families. In addition, they had to cut out the planned child care and the communal kitchen, as well as downsizing office space and consulting rooms.
Our units are rent-geared-to-income. However, many women arrive at Harmony House with no income. They've been forced to leave jobs and their communities to survive. They are ready to rebuild but face systemic barriers, including a lack of affordable child care, gaps in before- and after-school care and immigration and work permit challenges. We've seen women with professional certifications from their countries of origin who cannot afford to take equivalency tests in Canada in order to work. When women are ready to move forward, the system is not ready for them.
Every day, we turn away women and children who have already done the hardest thing: They have chosen to leave violence. They should not face a second barrier—a system that cannot meet them where they're at. Right now, too many women and children are left waiting in unsafe situations, not because we don't know what works, but because we have not funded or built it.
Thank you.