Toronto’s University Health Network will double its permanent housing program for homeless people who frequently use emergency departments, building 54 new apartments modelled on Dunn House, where residents cut their emergency room visits by 52 per cent in their first year.
Housing as medicine
Dunn House, which opened in 2024 on a parking lot UHN owns in Toronto’s west end, is Canada’s first social medicine housing project: permanent homes for people experiencing homelessness, built next door to the hospital and paired with direct access to doctors, nurses and other health professionals. The expansion will see UHN build a near replica beside it, again with all three levels of government involved.
Preliminary data shared by the network show why the model is being scaled. The 48 residents studied had made nearly 2,000 visits to emergency departments in the year before moving in. A year later, those same residents visited emergency rooms 52 per cent fewer times, and their hospital stays, when admitted, were 79 per cent shorter.
“These are patients with advanced chronic disease, mental illness and substance use disorders,” said Dr. Andrew Boozary, executive director of UHN’s Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine, who conceived the project more than seven years ago. “They cycle through emergency departments because our care has failed and because we’ve discharged them back into instability. And if you don’t have a home, you can’t store medications, you can’t recover from surgery, and you can’t stabilize mental health.”
“Housing is health,” he said. Residents say their new homes have transformed their lives and given them hope again.
Who pays, and who builds
The federal government’s Build Canada Homes will spend $21 million to build the new project. Ontario will spend $2.6 million a year to operate it, and the City of Toronto will invest $10 million and lead delivery of the homes.
Federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said the Dunn House model needs to be scaled up across the country. “We need to make it simpler, faster to get these projects off the ground,” he said. “We need to help thousands and thousands of people across Canada find safe, affordable homes.”
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow was equally blunt. “This is the model that breaks the cycle of homelessness, sickness, and despair,” she said. “This is where hope lives.”
A growing crisis behind the project
The expansion was announced against a worsening backdrop. Ontario’s 444 municipalities reported nearly 85,000 people homeless across the province in 2025, the vast majority living in emergency shelters — about 6,000 more than in 2024, and nearly 50 per cent more than in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project also produced a measurable financial return. Build Canada Homes later calculated that Dunn House’s reductions in emergency visits and hospital stays generated approximately $2.1 million in hospital savings in less than two years.
Phase 2 takes shape
The expansion has since been formalized as Dunn House Phase 2, called Spring House. Delivered by CreateTO, the City of Toronto’s real estate agency, with nearly $22 million invested by Build Canada Homes, it will create 54 new supportive homes for seniors experiencing homelessness, with integrated health and community supports, and is expected to break ground in late 2026.
It is one step in a broader plan: the partners’ Social Medicine Housing Initiative is now aimed at more than 300 homes overall — a long way from a single converted parking lot, and the clearest sign yet that the hospital-led model is being treated as policy, not experiment.
