What Calgary’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness Taught Us (and What Comes Next)

If you had walked into a downtown-Calgary shelter in the early 2000s, you would have seen a crisis peaking. Overcrowded facilities, long waitlists and growing encampments told a story of a city grappling with a sharp rise in homelessness.

In 1992, Calgary’s first-ever “point-in-time count” — an estimate of people experiencing homelessness in a community done through a single night’s count — recorded almost 450 people experiencing homelessness. By 2006, that number had ballooned past 3,000. It was a trajectory that alarmed business leaders, social service providers and the public, alike.

Out of that crisis, a bold idea was born: what if, instead of managing homelessness, Calgary tried to end it?

Until then, the city had been “managing” homelessness by adding shelter beds. While that strategy kept people off the streets for a few nights, it wasn’t really doing anything to address the root causes of homelessness itself — or to stop it from continuing.

In January 2008, Calgary launched Canada’s first official 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, led by the then 10-year-old Calgary Homeless Foundation (CHF). This wasn’t just a policy document. It was a community-wide rallying cry that galvanized non-profits, governments, philanthropists and citizens.

“We were trying to do something radically different,” says Tim Richter, who was a key architect of the plan and later CEO of the CHF during most of the plan’s tenure. “It was a 180-degree shift from responding to homelessness to actually solving it.”

A Vision Takes Shape

The Calgary Committee to End Homelessness, formed in the lead up to the plan, included prominent leaders from government, the corporate world, non-profits, and faith and Indigenous communities. Steve Snyder, then CEO of TransAlta, chaired the group. Other members included Richter, representatives from the United Way, Mayor Dave Bronconnier, and Fred Henry, then the Catholic Bishop of Calgary. Prominent philanthropist and oil and gas executive Jim Gray helped with setting up the committee, but didn’t serve on it himself.

The committee aimed to create a solution-focused road map, rather than a patchwork of emergency responses. Every part of the plan’s rollout reflected the spirit of collaboration that sparked the committee’s formation.

The plan’s backbone was “Housing First,” a philosophy that emphasizes putting people into stable housing before tackling other challenges, like addiction or mental illness. The logic was simple, but at the time revolutionary: it’s hard to recover or hold down a job if you don’t know where you’re sleeping each night. A shelter might keep you warm, but it isn’t really an environment that is conducive to getting your life back in order.

But even more transformative was the level of coordination across the city that came with the plan. Dozens of agencies began operating as an interconnected system, instead of separately or in competition. This approach came to be known as Calgary’s Homeless-Serving System of Care. It’s a network of agencies and people working together to this day to ensure those who are experiencing homelessness (and those at risk of experiencing it) have timely access to the right housing and the right resources.

“The idea wasn’t just to build more shelters,” says Richter. “It was to build a coordinated response, where services and data and goals were shared.”

That shared infrastructure also included another system still in place today: the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). HMIS helps agencies track housing placements, measure success and avoid duplication of services, and it is key to coordination across agencies that now have more tools to work in the same direction.

The Resolve Campaign

Launched in 2012, four years into the 10 Year Plan, The Resolve Campaign emerged as a direct response to a key insight of the plan: that solving homelessness required not just better coordination and service delivery, but also a dramatic increase in affordable housing stock.

While the campaign was not officially part of Calgary’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, the plan’s momentum and the structure it created definitely shaped Resolve.

The campaign brought together nine housing-focused agencies, many of which were deeply involved in implementing the 10 Year Plan, and united them under a single fundraising umbrella. This level of coordination mirrored the systemic thinking embedded in the plan.

Resolve’s goal was to raise $80 million and build affordable rental housing for 3,000 vulnerable and homeless Calgarians. By the time it wrapped in 2018, the campaign had raised $74 million, which provided 1,850 Calgarians with a place to call home.

Resolve’s projects included two new properties for the Calgary Homeless Foundation — a 23-unit apartment building with wraparound support services named Murray’s House, and Hope Heights, a four-storey apartment building with 35 one-bedroom units for young parents, children and seniors.

David McElhanney, now board chair of the Calgary Affordable Housing Foundation, was deeply involved. “What we learned through Resolve is that the philanthropic community wanted one voice and one ask. We became that conduit between donors and housing providers,” he says.

The campaign was not just a funding drive; it was a cultural moment for the city. Each participating agency had its own fundraising goal, and the shared strategy and communications plan guided their efforts. Major corporate and individual donors stepped forward, including high-profile Calgary philanthropists. The campaign also showed that building housing could be a unifying civic project that connected business executives and outreach workers, housing providers and social workers around a common goal.

McElhanney and his peers saw that the campaign’s collaborative model worked — and they weren’t ready to let that momentum fizzle out when Resolve wrapped up. In 2025, five of the nine Resolve agencies officially launched the Calgary Affordable Housing Foundation to sustain the flow of private dollars into housing projects.

“There’s still a massive need,” says McElhanney. “We’re talking about 15,000 to 20,000 units of affordable housing that are needed in Calgary. Government can’t do it alone.”

The 10 Year Plan Results

The plan clearly didn’t end homelessness. The most current point-in-time count, completed in 2024, found 3,121 people experiencing homelessness in Calgary. However, by many metrics, the 10 Year Plan was a success.

Between 2008 and 2018, nearly 10,000 individuals were housed — an achievement that underscored the effectiveness of the City’s Housing First approach. In addition to securing housing for thousands, the efforts made as a result of the plan had developed almost 600 units — including multi-family — of permanent supportive housing, offering stable, long-term options for many facing homelessness.

These efforts didn’t go unnoticed. Calgary became a national, and even international, model for coordinated homelessness response. Cities across North America looked to mirror Calgary’s successful plan, particularly the Homeless-Serving System of Care and its use of real-time data.

Perhaps most notably, the plan stopped the growth in homelessness, despite an overall growth in population. This is significant considering Calgary’s population grew by more than 220,000 people from 2008 to 2018 — and has increased by more than that since 2018.

“We were the first in the country to see province-wide reductions in homelessness,” says Richter. “Medicine Hat ended chronic homelessness. Edmonton cut it in half. Calgary made major progress.”

And yet — the 10 Year Plan did not end homelessness.

So, the organizations involved reframed their vision. Rather than focusing on the aspirational goal of “absolute zero” homelessness, Calgary embraced the concept of Functional Zero, where homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring, and, most importantly, doesn’t exceed the city’s available housing.

Functional Zero requires real-time data, consistent housing capacity and seamless transitions of people facing homelessness back into the public systems where prevention is most effective.

The 10 Year Plan found that part of the challenge in eliminating homelessness is structural. Issues outside the reach of shelters or housing programs — addiction, mental health, domestic violence, poverty and racism — impact homelessness deeply. Housing First is a powerful philosophy that reframes how to address the roots of homelessness, but “Housing First does not equal housing only,” as one of the plan’s final reports reminded readers.

The Housing First model is based on the principle that stable housing is a foundational step in addressing homelessness. People are first given a place to live, without preconditions like sobriety or treatment. Then they’re connected to support services, as needed.

However, putting the plan into action revealed that housing-focused non-profits could only do so much alone. Even if they offered support programming, they needed other public systems, in the areas of justice, health and children, to help address the needs of clients experiencing homelessness.

“The biggest shift was not in housing itself, but in how we work together,” says Richter.

“Agencies coordinated, data was shared, and we could measure real-time results.”

But, even with these changes, systemic gaps in health care, child welfare and justice continued to push people into homelessness faster than the system could house them. Indigenous people living in Calgary, for instance, remain dramatically overrepresented in homeless populations.

That’s why the final strategic shift of the plan focused on Functional Zero; not ending homelessness absolutely, but ensuring that anyone who became homeless could be rehoused quickly and didn’t return to homelessness. It was a sobering recalibration of goals, but also a more realistic one.

As Calgary’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness came to a close in 2018, the city faced a new question: what came next? The answer was “Together to Zero,” a final report built on the collective wisdom of more than 200 interested parties, including frontline workers, Indigenous leaders, government representatives and people with lived experience of homelessness. From these consultations emerged six strategic directives designed to carry the work forward. While all six are important, several stand out as foundational pillars for Calgary’s next chapter.

One of the most urgent priorities is better support for the frontline staff working in the homelessness sector. Throughout the feedback sessions, workers described the personal toll of working with limited resources and training while interacting with people who had highly complex needs.

A 2016 study commissioned by the Calgary Homeless Foundation found nearly 25 per cent of frontline workers reported symptoms consistent with burnout, and more than a third showed signs of PTSD. The report called for more investment in peer-to-peer support, leadership development and safer feedback channels within organizations to ensure those delivering care are also cared for.

Another key focus was the right of Indigenous communities to shape their own housing solutions. This means moving away from designing programs first and then trying to “Indigenize” them later. Instead, the report recommended building services in partnership with Indigenous governments, Elders, Knowledge Keepers and communities from the outset.

A third important priority was to get the homeless-serving organizations aligned with other public systems, such as health care, justice and child welfare. The Homeless-Serving System of Care often functions as a “catch-all” for people failed by these systems, but true prevention has to happen earlier. The report suggests the need for a neutral organization (one without its own service agenda) to lead planning and help everyone — housing agencies, health care, justice and others — work better together.

Finally, the report highlighted the need to consider peoples’ real, lived experiences in every level of decision making, from program design to policy advocacy. Groups like the Client Action Committee and Youth Advisory Table were called out as crucial voices. The final report called for deeper, more consistent involvement of people who have actually experienced homelessness, ensuring solutions are rooted in real-world understanding.

The Post-2018 Reality

Today, Calgary is dealing with a very different landscape when it comes to addressing homelessness. The remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid crisis and a record-breaking surge in population have further strained the housing system. The affordability crisis has pushed more people into housing insecurity — those numbers are increasingly difficult to track.

“People think of homelessness as folks living in shelters or tents,” says Jolene Livingston, founder and CEO of Partners for Affordable Housing, a charity focused on national housing philanthropy. “But housing insecurity is more common than people think. It’s your neighbour who might have lost their job through the pandemic, or a young couple trying to raise a child on one income.”

Housing insecurity is essentially not having stable, safe, affordable housing for any reason, including, but not limited to living in housing that is too expensive — anything more than 30 per cent of household income.

“We’ve had brilliant campaigns — Resolve, the 10 Year Plan — but then there’s often a pause. We need continuous, long-term commitment to housing, just like we have for cancer research or education,” says Livingston, who wasn’t involved in the original 10 Year Plan.

“Philanthropy had long been missing from the affordable housing conversation at a national level,” she says. “Government isn’t set up to do this alone. Neither are non-profits. We need investors. We need business leaders. We need community members who see housing as a fundamental part of a healthy society.”

The infrastructure built by the 10 Year Plan still exists, and Calgary’s Homeless-Serving System of Care remains one of the most coordinated in the country. But, the complexity of today’s challenges demands a new kind of resilience.

“Homelessness is a housing problem. But housing is also an economic problem, a political problem, a human rights problem,” says Richter.

McElhanney echoes that sentiment: “We’re still playing catch-up on supply. The need has grown faster than our response.”

A Living Legacy

Ultimately, the 10 Year Plan didn’t end homelessness. But it critically changed how Calgary tackles it — and who takes responsibility for doing so.

It launched a network of leaders, ideas, organizations and citizens who still believe that housing is a human right. It created the foundation upon which today’s efforts are built and tomorrow’s must be.

“We proved we could move the needle,” says Richter. “Now, the challenge is moving it again — and faster.”

As Calgary looks to the future, it does so with a decade of insight and infrastructure behind it. The question isn’t whether the city can reduce homelessness. It’s whether it can sustain the courage and collaboration it once showed, in even more complicated times.

Case Study: Trellis and the 10 Year Plan

Trellis Society, a family and youth support services non-profit, was one of the organizations involved in the 10 Year Plan and saw its approach to homelessness shift over the years. At the start of the plan, Trellis Society was the only organization that could deliver services to all of the groups the 10 Year Plan supported — youth, families and adults. When it came to homelessness, it was focused on providing shelter to young people at a building called Avenue 15.

“We would track how long that young person stayed. We’d track how full the building was, and all of those were badges of honour,” says Jeff Dyer, CEO of Trellis Society.

Now, what used to be about housing young people short-term has become a mission to rapidly reconnect them to community and family.

“We know that once you’re in the homeless system of care, your likelihood of remaining there is extremely high,” Dyer says. “But if we can rapidly restore these family and natural supports in your life, your experience of homelessness would be super short, we’ll consider it a great success and you’ll probably forget that you were ever at a place called Avenue 15.”

The organization now finds pride in shorter stays, and considers it a success that the city now only has to have one youth emergency shelter — Avenue 15. Dyer says one drawback of the 10 Year Plan was the way it was presented, which caused a gap between public expectation and realistic outcomes. It has created a perception that the agencies involved failed rather than highlighting successes.

“There’s a downside to branding it a 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness,” he says. “It was never funded to actually end it, just to radically reduce it.”

Overall, Dyer says the outcomes of the plan were “dramatic” in a good way, and strengthened non-profit connections in the city. “Fifteen years ago, it was a fractured system,” he says. “Now we know who to turn to when someone’s needs are bigger than what we can handle.” During the time the plan ran, Trellis was also able to get funding for two promising housing programs that are still running today — Home Fire for Indigenous youth and Aura, a housing-first program for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth.

Today, Trellis continues to make a big impact in the community. The non-profit’s 2022-23 report to the community states that it helped prevent 2,058 people from experiencing homelessness and supported 437 young people out of homelessness in the 2022-23 year, alone. — D.L.

Learn more at growwithtrellis.ca.

This story was created with the support of the Avenue Community Story Development Fund. The Fund supports the creation of local reporting on issues such as intimate-partner violence, mental health and addiction, the housing crisis, and more. Thank you to our partners, including The Calgary Foundation. To find out more, or contribute, visit AvenueCalgary.com/StoryFund.

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