Homeless people face extremely difficult conditions everyday. In places like Canada, where temperatures can go below the freezing point, it is even more deadly. This makes the challenge of staying warm, sheltered & safe an incredibly difficult task for people already dealing with a lot of economical, psychological and physical issues.
Current solutions rolled out by governments are inefficient at best and completely useless at worse. Community shelters are plagued with violence, theft and other issues stemming from close proximity between multiple people experiencing heavy personal issues. They are also severely limited by their physical capacity limitations which cannot usually be augmented easily. They are expensive to run and maintain and are only helping a fraction of everyone who would require help in a given region.
Other alternatives like government-built & subsidized housing are plagued by issues related to the capacity of the buildings, the timeline of the projects and the inherent new-construction market conditions limiting building at scale. A project that creates 50 units ends up costing 8-10 million and takes 6 years to complete. Now if only 1000 person were homeless this would be a challenge but with more than 60 000 homeless people in Canada:
This is mathematically impossible.
In our current situation, yes. Without radically re-inventing the way we provide basic shelter to the homeless we cannot realistically fix this problem. The current cost of the measures put in place is prohibitive and keeps increasing with scale. Cost should go down at scale. Not go up.
Let's look at the numbers:
- There were around 60 000 homeless people classified as homeless in a 2024 study by the Canadian Govt.
- 17 000 are unsheltered. Which means they are not in any kind of accomodation. Sleeping in a tent or on the street.
- Every unsheltered homeless is costing the state between 30 000$ - 100 000$ per year + social costs.
These numbers confirm two things:
1) We need scale. Even at a record breaking 3000 places a year in shelters, it could take a decade to get everyone into unadapted public shelters that are not adressing the core needs of the homeless.
2) The solution must be cheap, reliable, mass-producible and it needs to actually fix the problem, not the symptom.
By creating emergency shelters at a low-price point (<10K one-time price) we would be able to have a cheap alternative to expensive government subsidized housing or community shelters. Whilst the annual spend in homelessness averages around 5000 to 8000 M$ a year, we could give shelter to all 17 000 unsheltered homeless for as low as a one-time 170 M$ payment.
Now the math is making sense.
It transforms the issue into a scaling challenge instead of an impossible ever-growing task.
Now, in theory, this works. But theory doesn't mean much without action & real-life testing. We now need to bring this idea to life and create a working emergency shelter prototype. We currently have our design ready and we truly believe this project can provide a viable & affordable alternative to make sure no one sleeps outside.
This is where we need your help.
This project will take time, resources and capital to complete. And we cannot do it alone.
If you like this project & want to support our work we offer 2 pathways for you to help / get involved:
- Direct-Funding: Fund individual projects directly. This gives you the ability to directly invest in the projects you support.
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