When Rev. Ray McCleary founded WoodGreen Community Services in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood in 1937, he did more than establish a charity.
During the Depression, Riverdale’s lower east end was characterized by poverty. Six in ten residents depended on municipal relief and families had few supports. With volunteers and borrowed space, McCleary offered games, crafts, and child care guided by a simple but expansive creed: “To serve the whole community from the cradle to the sunset hour of life.” Nearly nine decades later, that idea, grounded in dignity rather than charity alone, continues to shape WoodGreen. Under the current leadership of Anne Babcock, WoodGreen now serves tens of thousands of people every year through affordable housing, child care, employment programs, and community services.
The organization’s influence extends beyond service delivery. It has become a key player in Ontario’s housing discussion, advocating for affordable housing equity funds, access to surplus public land, and long-term, low-rate borrowing tools that allow non-profit developers to move projects forward.
In a conversation just before Christmas 2025, Babcock expressed an idea stemming from WoodGreen’s history: housing must be understood as foundational infrastructure. Programs such as Homeward Bound and WoodGreen’s supportive housing partnerships in Toronto reflect this belief. This history of care establishes the organization as a voice in the housing policy conversation.
Homelessness is often framed as a housing problem, but in practice, it is equally a health crisis, one that unfolds all year long in emergency departments, psychiatric wards, and hospital corridors. People cycle in and out of these spaces not because they require acute care alone, but because the systems meant to support them operate in isolation, as silos of specialization.
Our governing polices and procurement methods to date have separated housing from health. Housing is governed through municipal and provincial ministries. Health care flows through hospitals, Ontario Health Teams, and community clinics. Funding, delivery, and analysis remain siloed.
The results are unfortunate and predictable. Hospitals become default shelters, while housing providers are asked to support tenants with complex medical and mental health needs without the resources to do so.
WoodGreen operates in the space between these silos. Its work demonstrates that housing stability and health outcomes are inseparable, and that aligning them is not only humane, but economically rational.
Across Toronto, hospital beds are occupied by patients who no longer require acute care but cannot be discharged safely because they lack appropriate housing.
These high-level-of-care patients represent one of the most expensive inefficiencies in the health system. Supportive and transitional housing, when paired with embedded (in-house) care, can function as step-down environments that alleviate hospital demand while improving individual outcomes.
The barrier isn’t financial alone. While difficult, funding to build housing can be assembled. The true obstacle lies in operating dollars.
Nurses, case managers, outreach workers, and peer supports sit awkwardly between ministries. Housing budgets are not designed in conjunction with health care, and health budgets are rarely permitted to flow into housing.
Through partnerships health care organizations, WoodGreen has helped create integrated pathways that move people directly from hospital or crisis care into housing with supports already in place.
These arrangements are often fragile, dependent on pilot funding or philanthropic bridges, but their impact is clear: fewer emergency visits, shorter hospital stays, and greater housing stability.
What emerges is a reframing of homelessness itself. It is not a failure of individual behaviour, nor simply a shortage of units. It is a systems failure rooted in fragmentation.
The most promising responses today treat housing as health enabling infrastructure, relying on shared intake, co-ordinated care plans, and accountability across sectors. Clustered housing models concentrate supports without institutionalizing residents, improving efficiency while preserving dignity and autonomy.
These are not merely buildings, but service ecosystems.
WoodGreen’s influence extends beyond the projects it directly operates. Its strength lies in translation: helping partners understand how governance models, care pathways, and funding frameworks can be replicated without duplicating physical infrastructure.
Scaling, in this context, is relational.
Pulling back, the housing crisis across Canada is immense and deeply entrenched, but it is solvable. Not through a single solution or a benevolent fix, but through sustained policy change and public pressure applied across all levels of government.
High rents, displacement, and rising homelessness are not healthy economic outcomes. They are the result of deliberate policy choices. While escalating housing values benefit some, they burden many, weaken productivity, and obstruct progress on poverty reduction, climate action, affordability, and child care.
What we can learn from WoodGreen?
In the last issue of Grapevine, I reviewed the film “HOME” by Linda Schuyler and Will Bowes. This documentary looks closely at the displacement of a small group of homeless folks, living on a provincial land encampment in downtown Cobourg.
By the end of the film, they were essentially given the boot, after the provincial land was sold, and despite grass-root support, were abandoned. Attempts to create a tiny home enclave, for their transition from street to home, was ultimately defeated by council.
WoodGreen, in contrast, shows us that we can connect healthcare/wellbeing with housing. They are not separate concerns, and there are established solutions. Not one silver-bullet fix (housing alone) but an integrated multi-disciplinary coordinated effort.
These collective experiences show the three areas of action are fundamental to achieve better outcomes: government, at all levels, must dramatically expand non-market housing; overall housing supply should reflect demographics and the health needs of citizens, not merely respond to volatile market fluctuations; and finally, (perhaps the subject of a separate article) cities must dismantle exclusionary zoning codes that restrict infill housing across most residential land.
The housing health crisis is not a market failure alone. It is a public policy failure. WoodGreen’s journey from Riverdale’s modest community spaces to the heart of Ontario’s policy conversations reminds us of something essential. Housing is not merely infrastructure. It is the foundation of health, stability, and community life. We can do better.
Dimitri Papatheodorou
