Posted On: December 20, 2025, Posted By: Emmy Kelly, NewmarketToday, Original Article.
For decades in Canada, we’ve talked about the social determinants of health. We’ve published the reports, sat on the panels, and declared housing to be foundational to well-being. But outside a handful of pilot programs, we’ve rarely acted at the scale required, until now.
A quiet but profound truth is emerging across sectors: The most effective health-care intervention in a housing crisis is housing itself.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Toronto’s Dunn House.
Built on land donated by the University Health Network for $1 and operated by a partnership of community, health, and housing organizations, Dunn House pairs deeply affordable homes with an on-site clinic featuring nurse practitioners, psychiatry services, addiction support, community outreach workers, and peer support workers, all under one roof.
The positive results should help us all stop and pay attention:
- 79 per cent reduction in hospital bed days
- 52 per cent drop in emergency department visits
- More than $2 million in avoided health-care costs in its first year alone
- Tenants stabilized, reconnecting with community, employment and wellness.
These outcomes aren’t accidental. They are the logical result of treating housing as a public health intervention instead of a market commodity.
The model reflects an insight dating back nearly 200 years: Dr. René Vermeil’s 1828 study showed poverty, not geography, was the strongest predictor of early death. Today, life expectancy still drops six to 12 years between adjacent Toronto neighbourhoods for the same reasons: unaffordable housing, instability, and income precarity.
Models like Dunn House are not an anomaly. Across Ontario, organizations such as Blue Door are advancing the same integrated approach, pairing affordable housing solutions with wraparound supports that stabilize health, reduce system strain, and restore dignity for people experiencing homelessness.
What Dunn House proves is that when people have a home and the supports that meet them exactly where they are, their health rebounds, their dignity returns, and the entire public system saves money.
This is the direction Canada must now scale.
As Build Canada Homes prepares to deploy $13 billion in capital, and as political will grows around non-market housing, models like Dunn House demonstrate the most powerful innovation isn’t a new financing structure or construction method; it’s deep integration across sectors that have traditionally operated in silos.
Housing and health were never separate problems. The way out will require treating them as one system.
And the question Canada faces is no longer whether we can afford to do this; it is whether we can afford not to.