Omar Gandhi in Halifax on June 13.Riley Smith/The Globe and Mail
Dr. Andrew Boozary has a parable about life and death.
“Imagine that there was a disease that siphoned off half of people’s life expectancy,” the physician said. From a health care perspective, there would be nothing more important. It would be all hands on deck.”
There is one such social condition: homelessness. Research shows that chronically unhoused people live half as long as the general population. But if housing is not always considered as part of health care, Toronto’s University Health Network aims to change that.
This week, UHN’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine announces its housing fellowship, whose first recipients are Canadian lawyer and advocate Leilani Farha of The Shift, a housing initiative; British architect Paul Karakusevic of the firm, Karakusevic Carson Architects, or KCA; and Canadian architect Omar Gandhi. The fellows will address the hospital’s own facilities and policies as well as making broader policy recommendations.
“Homelessness is a health issue,” said Dr. Boozary, the executive director of the Gattuso Centre. He added that, “in medicine, we’ve been addressing this with Band-Aid solutions. We need to find a different way to respond.”
That is where the housing experts come in. They will collaborate with medical and research staff, as well as UHN’s lived experience advisory council, to advocate for more housing options and explore specific building projects.
“We know that housing is one of the biggest determinants of health, well-being and opportunity,” said Mr. Karakusevic, whose highly regarded firm, KCA, focuses on social housing and community buildings in London.
“You might as well build it well. I think you can design beautiful places on a budget and deliver well-made housing that can really improve people’s experience.”
KCA is also working on two projects with Toronto Community Housing. He imagines that UHN – which has extensive real-estate holdings – could expand its housing offerings. This theme dovetails with the federal government’s stated intention to repurpose federal public land for housing.
The fellowship forms part of a larger housing strategy by UHN. This summer, it will open its Social Medicine Housing Initiative, providing supportive housing for 51 people on a hospital site in the Parkdale neighbourhood. Residents will receive access to primary and secondary medical care as well as supportive services. Dr. Boozary co-authored a recent Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) editorial on the topic.
Mr. Gandhi hopes to lend his technical skills and construction experience to building supportive housing.Riley Smith/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Farha, the former UN special rapporteur on the right to housing, said her focus will be on responses to homeless encampments.
“I hope to use the interdisciplinary nature of the fellowship to help address the needs of people living in homeless encampments across the country. It’s an issue confronting pretty much every city in Canada and will only be solved with an all-in approach.”
Mr. Gandhi hopes to lend his technical skills and construction experience to building supportive housing.
“The complexity of construction and rising costs are making any kind of build difficult,” he said.
“There are certainly solutions that involve prefabrication, modular housing and other processes, and if I don’t have the answers, we can draw on the larger Canadian architectural community to find them.”
Such changes require expertise in the technology and economics of construction. At the same time, Mr. Gandhi said, beauty is important.
“Architecture has a role on the practical side, but also in encouraging people to dream.”