I spent four days examining Chris Alexander’s shelter plan. Then he dropped out of the mayoral race

A part of me feels like Chris Alexander is sitting somewhere in the GTA, grinning from ear to ear as he thinks about the many hours journalists wasted perusing his recently released platform before he abruptly dropped out just days later. When Alexander announced A New Way Home, I was hopeful because at least one of Toronto's mayoral candidates was attempting to advance conversations about the homelessness crisis, rather than reverting to familiar speech about property tax rates. No one in my circle worries about property taxes. But they are one missed paycheque away from skulking into the meandering lines at Allan Garden Food Bank, shoulders slumped, wondering how their forage led them to the corner of Sherbourne and Carlton Street.

So I spent four days combing through his plan — line-by-line — and speaking with housing advocates to gain insight as to the feasibility of such a bold proposal.

"Is this realistic?" I'd ask. "He wants to secure 1,000 private apartment placements to move unhoused people out of shelters by 2027. Can it work? Would corporate landlords oblige?"

Long story short, they said "nah".

So I gathered my intel and scurried to my dimly lit room, eager to inform fellow Torontonians of my findings. I wrote...and wrote...then woke up the next morning to discover that none of it mattered. Alexander had left the building.

But f*ck it. We're still going to talk about it...

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Alexander introduced a shelter plan that aims to reduce nightly shelter use to 5,000 by August 2027, as well as create a new central structure for the city’s homelessness response, with one lead reporting directly to the mayor and the various agencies involved brought under a single coalition. He pledged to overhaul the city’s response to homelessness, promising to move thousands of people out of shelters and encampments and into permanent housing while closing Toronto’s 10 largest encampments by 2027.

“It’s really about dignity and housing stability for these thousands of fellow citizens of ours,” Alexander said at Wednesday's press conference in front of Allan Garden.

While the number of people occupying shelters and visible encampments on city property has been on the decline, Alexander argued that the numbers “aren’t going down fast enough," declaring that the current shelter system can be improved if resources are more efficiently utilized by leadership.

“Our central approach is to take the shelter system that we have…and introduce a shift in thinking, a shift in emphasis that takes a larger number of people who are in shelters every night and offers them a housing-first type option with the services they need built into that housing option,” he said.

His proposal set a target of providing 1,000 units to individuals experiencing homelessness by summer 2027. The aim was to move people out of the shelter and encampment system and into permanent housing rather than continuing to cycle them through temporary accommodations.

Toronto’s shelter division has a $786 million budget this year, while a hotel shelter space can cost more than $200 a night.

By comparison, Alexander’s plan put the cost of a rent benefit with a support worker at about $80. A figure I'd heard from critics of the city's shelter plan in the past. The figures form a central part of his argument that the city can spend less by moving people into permanent housing rather than continuing to rely on emergency shelter beds.

But affordable housing advocate Mark Richardson, who called the housing plan “aspirational”, highlighted that Alexander’s plan is contingent on the city being able to reduce shelter capacity as people move into permanent housing.

“Even if he gets people out of the shelters and into housing, there are still people in parks and tents who would absorb that capacity,” Richardson said, noting that the city would not immediately realize the full savings imagined in the plan.

During a press conference at his campaign office the day after introducing A New Way Home, Alexander addressed criticisms that the plan depends on shelter demand continuing to fall, arguing that the evidence points in that direction.

“We can't predict the future, and things could reverse direction, but the main determinant of what our unhoused population is, according to all the studies, is the price of rental housing. And that has been, not dramatically, but gradually coming down. And most of the projections say that it will come down further.”

Alexander said his plan is therefore based on the expectation that the trend will continue, freeing up funds that will be redirected to permanent housing.

His claims are supported in part by the city’s budget documents, which show gross spending on shelter and housing-first services falling by about $126 million from the 2025 budget, citing, among other factors, changes in shelter demand and the planned closure of temporary hotel sites.

In August, the city’s shelter system accommodated 7,640 people, a 12.8 per cent decline from the same month last year.

Still, questions remain as to whether the plan has budgeted enough to keep people housed once they leave the shelter system.

The first year of Alexander’s plan is budgeted at $17 million for 1,000 units. But that figure includes only six months of rent benefits, costing $6 million assuming each benefit is $1,000 a month. The cost of the remaining six months of the first year, as well as any ongoing costs beyond that, is not included in the estimate.

Richardson argues the rent benefits alone could cost the city upwards of $18 million in the first year, assuming a monthly benefit of about $1,500 — a figure he described as “modest” but necessary to transition people from homelessness into a market apartment.

“I don’t think he’s going to find 1,000 landlords who are willing to do that,” Richardson said.

Richardson suggested that Alexander’s plan reflected an analysis conducted “without ever actually being up close with the day-to-day operations of shelters” or fully acknowledging the “unmet demand.” Still, he praised the candidate for putting forward a detailed proposal.

“The Chris Alexander campaign needs to be praised because they are the only campaign right now that is putting specific housing policy platforms up on their website,” said Richardson.

Olivia Chow’s campaign didn't release a plan, but scrutinized Alexander’s homelessness strategy, saying it “would set us back” and arguing that it does not adequately address the city’s need for shelter and housing.

“Chris Alexander’s plan shows that he doesn’t understand the challenges we face,” a spokesperson from Chow’s campaign said.

His plan, the spokesperson said, would take Toronto off the course that is getting results under her leadership.

For Chow, the approach to homelessness focuses on expanding shelter and supportive housing while moving people into permanent housing.

“This approach is working,” the campaign said, citing an 8.2 per cent decline in homelessness in Toronto over the past two years, and the 11 approved shelter sites that will add 1,057 beds to the city's portfolio. “Just like Brad Bradford, who voted against building shelters while saying the opposite, Alexander’s plan isn’t serious about giving people the help they need,” said Chow’s campaign.

Alexander the Outsider

Alexander's plan may have been flawed, but the more revealing failure was that he hadn't yet learned Toronto well enough to design a municipal solution. Alexander could stand outside a shelter and propose a better system. Chow has to figure out how to build one. She likely understands that his plan to bring all agencies under one command to make the shelter response more efficient is a sound idea on paper, but almost impossible to accomplish in the real world.

Chow has had to deal with the agencies, the councillors, the province, the neighbourhoods, the encampments, the shelter operators and the people who show up at city hall demanding answers. She knows that Alexander overestimates the power of the mayor, who has just one vote on council, to rid the city of the bureaucracy that has it in a vice grip.

While Richardson acknowledged that Alexander had identified one of the problems with the current shelter system, he noted that the city “is not a nimble organization for change.”

"Some of that rework stuff will take two years of a four-year election period," Richardson said. "Sometimes you're better trying to fix the imperfect system as is now without trying to do a rework rather than getting distracted by the reorganization process, which at city hall will take a couple years."

The creation of the Housing Development Office (HDO) in 2024 offers a useful example. Creating an office is one thing. Getting projects through municipal approvals, coordinating funding from different levels of government and navigating competing political and neighbourhood interests is another. An outsider can promise to sweep away the bureaucracy. But governing means learning where authority actually lies, which obstacles can be removed and which require negotiation.

That distinction matters.

And it brings me to the stranger part of all this post campaign autopsy. Alexander's campaign may have failed, but his political career doesn't necessarily have to.

Toronto has a funny relationship with political familiarity. We often pretend elections are about ideas. They are, in part. But they are also about whether voters know who the f*ck you are.

Look at Brad Bradford.

His last mayoral campaign was hardly a triumph. He finished well behind the eventual winner and did little to suggest he had cracked the city's political code. Yet here we are. Bradford is now a major player during these elections. His campaign has benefited from something Alexander never really had municipally--recognition.

People know Bradford.

They have seen him on television. They've watched him spar with other councillors. They've seen him brandish jamaican patties in an attempt to connect with Scarborough voters, and wield a baseball bat in an effort to convince people that Toronto is one carjacking away from being Gotham. They've heard his positions, and ridiculed his political U-turns. But through all the jokes and scrutiny, Bradford understood that only one thing mattered. People know his face.

His platform might not have been as progressive as Alexander's, leaning more towards austerity than the progressive rhetoric that got him elected, but people know him. He's our Brad. Voters don't have to spend much energy figuring out who he is.

And that is an enormous advantage in politics.

A candidate can lose an election and emerge more powerful simply because the campaign introduced them to hundreds of thousands of people. That may ultimately be Alexander's most interesting lesson. He came to Toronto politics with an impressive résumé and the confidence of someone who had spent years operating at the national and international level.

"I'm overqualified," he boasted.

But Toronto didn't know him. And worse, Toronto hadn't yet decided what to make of him. Was he a Conservative federal minister parachuting into municipal politics? An outsider with fresh ideas? A typical politician? There wasn't enough time to settle the question. But after he put out his shelter plan and received a public lashing from a mayor who knows far too well that a $1,000 monthly rent benefit is laughable in a city as expensive and complex as Toronto, people ultimately decided he was the new guy who didn't understand Toronto.

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