Supported housing manager to develop social medicine housing model
LOS ANGELES: A supported housing manager is to continue to evolve its specialist social medicine housing model.
Building on what’s now being touted as a rare policy win in Toronto’s fight against homelessness and hospital overcrowding, the city is getting a second Dunn House.
The first Dunn House opened in Parkdale in October of 2024, becoming Canada’s first social medicine housing project. The idea—championed by Andrew Boozary, a physician and the founding executive director of the University Health Network’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine—was both simple and radical: provide secure accommodations for unhoused people, who are frequent users of emergency rooms and hospital beds, and the health care system will spend less money treating them in crisis.
The 51-unit building, run by UHN in partnership with the social agency Fred Victor, offers rent-geared-to-income housing alongside on-site access to doctors, nurses, social workers and other supports designed to keep residents healthy and off the streets.
The first year of Dunn House was not without turbulence, according to the Toronto Star, which recently reported that there were instances of tenants being hospitalized against their will and that some staff nearly quit under the strain of the work. But, despite those challenges, the model appears to be delivering on its promise.
An analysis of health care utilization among Dunn House tenants found that emergency room visits fell by 52 per cent and time spent in hospital beds dropped by 79 per cent, translating to an estimated $2.1 million in annual savings.
On the strength of those results, the federal government announced Dunn House Phase 2 earlier this week. It will be constructed near the first Dunn House, on hospital-owned land close to King and Dufferin. The new modular building will include 54 supportive housing units earmarked for at-risk seniors, a group that is increasingly overrepresented among people experiencing homelessness.
Many of those seniors are managing serious illnesses, including heart failure and diabetes, while sleeping in rough conditions, with the stress of homelessness exacerbating their conditions. The new Dunn House aims to intervene before those seniors become permanent fixtures in emergency rooms and hospital wards.
Phase 2 will receive $21.6 million in federal funding, a significant increase from the $14 million spent on the first Dunn House. Proponents argue that the higher upfront cost is still a bargain and that more social-medicine housing is desperately needed: as of the third quarter of 2025, there were nearly 105,000 people on Toronto’s social housing wait list.