Between January 1st and June 30th this year, 79 people in St. Thomas-Elgin moved from homelessness into housing. In the same six months, 69 people became homeless. The City says that is the first time here that more people found housing than lost it. The community’s By-Name List, a tracked roster of everyone locally known to be experiencing homelessness, has dropped to 86, a 34 percent drop from the same time last year.
“This is proof that when a community comes together with a shared plan and shared compassion, we can change the course of something as difficult as homelessness,” said Mayor Joe Preston. “We still have work ahead of us, but this shows we are on the right track, and a functional end to homelessness in our community is within reach.”
“These numbers represent real people whose lives have changed because of a coordinated, front-line response,” said Danielle Neilson, Acting Director of St. Thomas-Elgin Social Services, the agency that manages social housing across St. Thomas and Elgin County and coordinates the local response to homelessness, including the By-Name List.
The region’s 10-Year Housing & Homelessness Plan, finalized this spring and submitted to the province, lays out what has to happen next to keep that trend going. St. Thomas and Elgin County combined already have more than 100,000 residents. The plan forecasts the region will reach roughly 130,000 people by 2036.
To house that growth, the plan estimates the region needs about 10,250 new households over the next decade. It says roughly 22 percent of that growth will need some form of affordable housing: about 652 more affordable rental units and about 1,500 more affordable ownership units. Its own targets are more specific. Create at least 140 more supportive housing units in St. Thomas in the near term. Add at least 326 non-market and 326 private-market affordable rental units region-wide over the next ten years. The plan also states that a household needs a before-tax income of about $70,000 to afford the average rent here now. That is a bar many people on fixed or minimum-wage incomes cannot clear.
The plan, written this spring, aims for a “functional end” to homelessness, meaning nobody who becomes homeless stays homeless for long, within the next two years. The City’s August announcement puts the same goal at 2027.
The longer trend is more mixed than this year’s numbers alone suggest. The plan itself says the average number of people on the By-Name List had crept slightly upward over the past four years. The most recent numbers have turned the other way. Whether this year’s shift holds is the real test ahead.
St. Thomas-Elgin has done this kind of work before. It joined the national Built for Zero Canada effort in 2021 and began tracking a formal By-Name List that same year. Since then, the community has housed more than 65 percent of everyone referred to the list, 745 people, at an average of about 178 people a year. In February 2023, it became the second community in Canada to reach “Functional Zero” on veteran homelessness. That is the community’s own standard: any veteran’s homelessness here should be rare, brief, and not happen again.
New housing is coming online alongside these numbers. Project Tiny Hope, a tiny-homes development led by YWCA St. Thomas-Elgin, began move-ins in October 2025 and is delivering 40 affordable and supportive units. The plan points to a further 78 affordable and supportive units planned for 2026 and 2027, on former City-owned land, through a new non-profit partnership. The plan says those units will directly reduce the number of people on the By-Name List.
None of this is finished business. The plan itself is not yet formally approved. It has been submitted to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Council approval is still expected sometime before the end of 2026, according to the City’s own housing services page. The milestone numbers only run through June. Whether the second half of 2026 kept moving the same direction is not yet public.
Sources: City of St. Thomas, “St. Thomas-Elgin Reaches Major Milestone in Efforts to End Homelessness”, St. Thomas-Elgin 10-Year Housing & Homelessness Plan 2026-2036 (PDF), City of St. Thomas, Housing and Homelessness Services
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