Stirring the Pot

Conversations about the Homelessness Crisis and Dinner

On Monday morning, waking at six-thirty gave me time to listen to the birds outside my bedroom window and the latest episode of From the Heart of the City (found here on Substack), featuring a dialogue between host The Very Reverend Kevin George and Carepoint Manager Christine Moss. The broadcast offered the clearest framework yet for my understanding of what is happening in London, Ontario today regarding homelessness. Their conversation grounded provincial policy decisions in the daily realities of the sidewalk, where the municipal By-Name List has surged to 2,294 individuals. In municipal housing strategy, a By-Name List is a real-time roster of people experiencing homelessness, updated to track individuals by name and map their health, medical, and housing needs. Because this metric relies on individuals consenting to register with local frontline agencies, community workers emphasize that the number reflects only those visible to the system, leaving the true scope of the crisis even larger.

Later that day, the conversation continued in a different register at a dinner gathering in a beautiful century home in Blackfriars near the Thames River. The evening was hosted by local artist Kevin Bice and his wife Daphne, a respected former educator whose dedication touched the lives of countless local students. For context, Kevin Bice is a well-known London painter, printmaker, and art educator who has spent decades capturing the region’s landscapes and cityscapes while fostering a vibrant local arts community. Kevin and Daphne are both precise in their methods, and they kindly invited my partner, Gary, and me over for an evening of warm hospitality and Kevin’s legendary risotto. Kevin’s artistic talent and legacy run deep. His father was Clare Bice, the celebrated Canadian painter, author, and long-time curator of the London Public Library and Art Museum. I had been a devoted fan of Clare’s work long before I ever met Daphne and Kevin at Blackfriars restaurant, where they were loyal supporters and customers for many years and gave the restaurant a stunning print of the Blackfriars Bridge that now hangs in my house. The Bices are deeply involved in preserving the heritage of the Blackfriars area, and the Blackfriars Bridge is one of Kevin’s muses.

We began the evening with an antipasto board of prosciutto, artichokes, and cheese, paired with flutes of dry prosecco, an opening salvo that reliably smoothed the path for good conversation. The artichokes were a quiet nod to my Substack, Heart of an Artichoke. Our hosts, Kevin and Daphne, are perennial pilgrims to Italy, possessed of an endless cache of interesting Venetian lore; Kevin’s artistic eye has even committed the vivid facades of Venice and Burano to canvas. As they recounted tales of Burano and their preferred Michelin-starred trattoria, Al Gatto Nero, they served an intermezzo inspired by the establishment: a sgroppino. This classic Venetian specialty, traditionally a frothy, refreshing blend of lemon sorbet, vodka, and a splash of prosecco, was given a midsummer twist by the Bices, who substituted lime for a sharp, seasonal finish.

The dialogue drifted naturally toward the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This shared Italophilia struck an intimate chord; Gary and I have haunted Venice independently on numerous occasions, an obsession that once led me to operate a Venetian and Slow Food-inspired restaurant called Murano for a decade, and which still compels me to collect vintage Murano glass.

Kevin’s risotto was an absolute triumph, served all’onda, with a pristine, toothsome bite that ranks among the finest I have encountered. I watched him minister to the pot with the patient, steady devotion of a monk, coaxing the grains to life with ladles of steaming vegetable stock, seasonal yellow zucchini, buffalo mozzarella, and butter. While he summoned the rice into being, Daphne and I tended to the canestrelli, those tiny scallops for which the Venetians maintain a private lexicon. We seared them to quick perfection in a stunning Italian copper pan, using a slip of oil and butter before flaming them with a splash of triple sec. Later, following the salad, Daphne produced a luscious carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, pulled from the pages of a vintage London Art Gallery cookbook. Gary, acting the resident connoisseur, predictably demanded a second slice.

Yet, even amidst the warmth of Italian travel stories, exceptional cooking, and great company, the realities of downtown London, Ontario, remained close at hand. Joining us as fellow guests were Bishop Terry Dance and his wife Diane, an accomplished former teacher who spent her career shaping minds and mentoring generations within the community. Terry and Diane had just returned from a trip to Croatia, and they shared several amusing stories from their travels, including the Croatians’ references to the Venetians. Over the antipasto, Terry, Diane, and I fell into an animated conversation about the current London restaurant scene. The bishop has been a longtime supporter of Blackfriars restaurant, and our shared love for excellent local dining led me to promise that I would pull together and send over some restaurant recommendations for them to explore. While we were talking inside, Gary and Daphne were outside with their neighbour, picking bags full of fresh pears for us to take home. The skin colour of the pears is subtly transitioning from a dark, matte leaf-green to red. We will store them in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks; this cooling period triggers uniform ripening. Then we will poach half of them in red wine. This generous act reminded me of a few years back when Daphane gave me several bushels of quince, which I preserved and served as a beautiful seasonal dish in the restaurant. The evening ended with a smooth pour of grappa, rounding out an atmosphere of profound comfort. Now to find some additional pear recipes.

On the way home from Bice’s house, we encountered rabbits and raccoons moving quietly through the neighbourhood shadows. Earlier in the day in Blackfriars, deer had also been spotted a few blocks from where we live. Speaking with Terry earlier in the evening about his time as the rector of St Paul’s Cathedral in the early 2000s, he noted that homelessness and addiction were already emerging as structural challenges in the core of the city more than twenty years ago. This history shows that the modern emergency is not sudden, but a slow-burning crisis left unaddressed for more than two decades.

Reflecting on the timeline, it is not lost on me that I sit in a warm home and describe this dinner against the bleak background of the homelessness emergency right outside the door. While the urban wildlife we witnessed on our journey exists in harmony with the neighbourhood, human beings are left unsheltered on these same streets. The stark contrast between a multi-course meal and individuals struggling to survive on downtown sidewalks is a jarring reminder of societal inequality. By examining these frontline and historical perspectives alongside Ontario’s wider systemic shortcomings, the complex dynamic between inadequate provincial safety nets and the localized burden of care becomes clear. Homelessness is not an isolated individual failure, but rather the visible symptom of a deeply broken housing and social support framework.

A central element of the dialogue between Reverend Kevin and Moss focuses on public safety in this downtown core. They challenge the political and commercial narrative that views safety strictly through policing, private security, or property protection. Instead, they define safety as a shared human necessity that cannot be achieved through exclusion or banishment. Reverend Kevin addresses the tension felt by business owners and residents who report feeling unsafe because of visible poverty, open substance use, and encampments. He argues that the mainstream response misidentifies the true threat. To Reverend Kevin, the primary danger downtown is the vulnerability of the unhoused population itself, left exposed to a toxic drug supply, severe winter weather, and street-level violence. He asserts that true safety is an inclusive right and that a community cannot call itself safe when its solutions push vulnerable people out of sight to protect economic interests.

Moss brings frontline operational context to this philosophy, explaining how punitive measures meant to clean up downtown actually worsen public safety for everyone. She points out that increased security enforcement in municipal parking lots and downtown streets does not resolve the crisis; it merely disperses high acuity individuals into surrounding neighbourhoods and church properties. Moss highlights that when city council debates policies like good neighbour clauses, which penalize social service agencies based on neighbourhood complaints or perimeter visibility, they threaten the infrastructure keeping the streets stable. Together, Reverend Kevin and Moss advocate for a collaborative approach. They argue that safety for merchants, visitors, and the unhoused population depends on expanding low-barrier stabilization hubs, permanent supportive housing, and lifesaving healthcare infrastructure like the York Street Carepoint consumption and treatment service site, rather than hiring more security guards or clearing sidewalks.

Through his public platform, Reverend Kevin uses conversations with leaders like Moss to expose the volatile, exhausting nature of modern crisis intervention. A primary example analyzed on the show is London’s House of Hope, a twenty-four-hour supportive housing facility built to stabilize forty-five high-acuity residents dealing with complex medical and psychological trauma. While the facility proved that comprehensive, wraparound care works, it faced immediate closure when its provincial funding dried up. While a one-point-three-million-dollar emergency lifeline from private donors via the London Community Foundation temporarily saved the site, Reverend Kevin emphasizes the failure of forcing vital healthcare infrastructure to rely on short-term charitable donations rather than permanent, systemic provincial backing.

Furthermore, these dialogues show that homelessness cannot be separated from a collapsing public health system. Moss utilized her time on the podcast to share insights regarding an increasingly toxic illicit drug supply in downtown London, which triggers high rates of street overdoses. Reverend Kevin argues that treating this purely as a housing supply problem ignores the deep psychological trauma that frontline workers must manage on the sidewalk. Because the province lacks low-barrier institutional mental health and addiction care, outreach staff are forced to act as emergency trauma responders, dealing with acute psychiatric and medical crises directly on the pavement.

This frontline friction in the mid-sized city of London offers a clear look at how a broader provincial breakdown impacts local municipalities. According to the City of London’s Housing Stability Action Plan, local housing infrastructure is under immense strain. The average market rent for a one-bedroom unit reached $1,529, while the vacancy rate for low-income residents plummeted to an impossible 1.2 percent. Over seven thousand Londoners remain stuck on municipal supportive housing waitlists, completely stalled by a lack of available units. The human cost of this crisis in London is staggering, as the city recorded one hundred and seventy-four preventable deaths among its unhoused population over a recent two-year period. Local service data reveals that approximately six hundred individuals are considered high acuity, suffering from overlapping, severe medical and psychological trauma that emergency shelter beds alone cannot address.

At the provincial level, homelessness is driven by a profound mismatch between the supply of affordable housing and the growing population that needs it. Data from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario indicates that nearly eighty-five thousand Ontarians are unhoused, marking a severe fifty percent spike since 2021. Decades of underinvestment in deeply affordable community housing have left over three hundred thousand households stranded on municipal waitlists, where average wait times routinely stretch past five years. Consequently, low-income individuals are forced into an unforgiving private rental market characterized by historic low vacancy rates and soaring costs.

A failure in provincial safety nets compounds this housing deficit. Financial benefits provided by Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program have remained largely stagnant, failing to keep pace with inflation or skyrocketing rent. Unable to afford basic shelter, thousands fall through the cracks. Crucially, Ontario remains the only province in Canada where the fiscal and administrative responsibility for social housing is downloaded onto municipal governments. Local property tax bases are forced to fund emergency services, sheltering networks, and encampment management, which is an unsustainable burden that has prompted municipal groups to call for a massive eleven billion dollar provincial housing investment. Furthermore, severe gaps in community-based mental health and addiction treatments mean that vulnerable individuals frequently cycle through emergency rooms, shelters, and the correctional system without receiving stable, supportive care. This lack of provincial intervention led to the proliferation of nearly two thousand public encampments province-wide, changing the visible landscape of Ontario’s communities.

In response to the emergency, London has become a pioneer in localized crisis intervention through its Whole-of-Community System Response. Rather than relying on traditional, high-barrier shelters, the city collaborated with frontline organizations to establish twenty-four-hour low-barrier hubs, such as Atlohsa Family Healing Services Wiigiwaaminaan Lodge and the Youth Opportunities Unlimited Community Youth Hub. These purpose-built hubs provide immediate basic needs alongside integrated access to primary healthcare, caseworkers, and transitional housing beds. Early evaluations indicate that highly supportive housing works. Residents in dedicated spaces like the House of Hope have achieved long-term stability and significantly reduced their reliance on emergency hospital services. Remarkably, despite a growing unhoused population, London’s targeted interventions helped secure a twenty percent reduction in preventable street deaths over two years. However, local agencies warn of severe frontline worker burnout and emphasize that these municipal strategies are merely temporary life support measures. Without long-term provincial funding to build permanent, supportive community housing, local efforts will remain stretched beyond their limits.

The homelessness crisis in Ontario is a structural failure requiring a structural solution. The macro-level issues, including stagnant income supports, a vast affordable housing deficit, and downloaded municipal burdens, manifest directly in communities like London, resulting in crowded shelter systems, public encampments, and preventable loss of life. While London’s innovative community-led responses prove that integrated, highly supportive care can save lives, municipalities cannot solve a systemic provincial crisis on their own. Resolving homelessness in Ontario ultimately depends on senior levels of government matching the resilience of local communities with permanent funding, comprehensive mental health support, and a commitment to housing as a fundamental human right.

The urgency of this commitment becomes even more critical when looking at the wider economic threats on the horizon. The delicate local safety nets managed by Canadian municipalities face severe pressure following Trump’s recent announcement of sweeping 50% tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Canadian exports. These newly targeted duties under Section 338 of the Tariff Act represent a dramatic escalation, specifically built as retaliatory measures against Canada’s domestic trade rules. Washington officials explicitly cited long-running disputes over Canadian restrictions on American alcoholic beverages, alongside Canada’s protectionist dairy supply management system, as key drivers behind the trade penalty. With import taxes now set to hit cross-border sales of everything from Canadian wine and whisky to cheese and milk products, economists warn of immediate ripples across local agriculture and manufacturing sectors. If these trade barriers go into effect next month, the resulting price shocks risk introducing a precarious wave of economic anxiety, threatening jobs and heightening housing stability pressures across the province. With the cross-border climate growing increasingly volatile, the need to build robust, permanent community infrastructure within our borders is no longer just a social obligation, but a matter of local economic survival. BL