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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2004 plan to cut homelessness in the Big Apple by two-thirds produced an almost immediate decline in the number of people in homeless shelters. But the latest numbers show a sharp upward spike to the highest number of homeless families in two decades. All the details are available from the NYC Department of Homeless Services and you can read more details from the New York City Coalition for the Homeless.

Mayor Bloomberg's campaign was prompted, in part, by the Blueprint to End Homelessness in New York City (available in the Housing and Homelessness section of the Wellesley Institute web site). The NYC Blueprint was, in turn, a major inspiration for the Wellesley institute's Blueprint to End Homelessness in Toronto (released last fall).

Campaign 2000, the group working to end child poverty, released a comprehensive poverty reduction plan for Ontario at Queen's Park today.

The plan has four key elements:

• indicators for measuring poverty
• measurable targets and timelines
• a co-ordinated plan of action across all ministries and departments
• monitoring and evaluation to ensure accountability.

It focuses of some critical sectors including:

• good jobs at living wages
• strong safety net of income support programs
• access to early learning and child care
• affordable housing
• accessible education and training.

Dying For A Home is a dynamic new book by Toronto street nurse Cathy Crowe and ten experts on homelessness: Women and men who have lived on Toronto's streets. You can read compelling stories and learn about homelessness from the street level up. Highly recommended.

- Michael Shapcott

The Greater Toronto Urban Observatory monitors and evaluates urban issues. Bookmark this site and visit regularly as it has great info on Toronto and the surrounding area. The GTUO is part of the global network of urban observatories under the umbrella of the United Nation's Centre for Human Settlements.

- Michael Shapcott

The Los Angeles Times recently devoted five days to a debate on housing and homelessness between two policy experts. Prof. Peter Dreier is recognized as one of the leading housing experts in the world. His detailed analysis of the LA situation has a lot of practical observations about housing and homelessness issues in other metropolitan areas, including those in Canada.

Los Angeles is often called the homeless capital of the United States. With 90,000 or more people on the streets and in shelters, the homelessness crisis there has been growing worse in recent years. A blue-ribbon panel of homeless experts, advocates, academics, service providers and politicians recently produced a comprehensive ten-year strategic plan called Bring LA Home.

Ontario's $185 million housing allowance plan, announced in the 2007 provincial budget on March 22 and funded entirely with federal affordable housing trust fund dollars, violates the operating principles tabled by federal finance minister Jim Flaherty in the House of Commons in May of 2006. The federal housing dollars were authorized by Parliament in Bill C-48 in June of 2005. The money was intended to increase the supply of affordable housing, including off-reserve Aboriginal housing.

Three governmental budgets have been delivered over the past seven days, and the hundreds of thousands of low, moderate and middle-income Torontonians seeking affordable housing have been left out of all three. The federal budget of March 19 was entirely silent on new affordable housing spending; the provincial budget of March 22 merely re-announced previously allocated federal housing dollars; and the municipal budget of March 26 proposes cuts to local housing and homelessness spending.

Ontario's 2007 provincial budget has plenty of strong language about poverty and affordable housing. But the dollars are missing. Not a single new penny has been devoted to affordable housing, and the dollars devoted to eradicating poverty are limited and stretch over a number of years.

Wellesley Institute backgrounder: A first look at the 2007 federal budget

The 2007 federal budget entirely ignores Canada's nation-wide affordable housing crisis and homelessness disaster, and is light when it comes to other social determinants of health.

More detailed analysis will follow in the coming days as experts and analysts dig through the 477-page federal budget. Here is a first look and a few overall comments.

First, on housing: