London Mayor Josh Morgan is ‘ready to partner’ to solve the city’s housing and homelessness crisis. “We know we can solve the country’s most complex problems when we work together,” said Morgan. In the 2026 federal budget released Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney is offering $11.2 billion to tackle homelessness over four years, starting next year, and $17.8 billion over 10 years. “We know what the challenges are on our streets, I can see it out front door in my office every single day,” said Morgan. “People who walk the downtown, people who are suffering on our streets, so, we need to help them.” With a lofty goal of ending homelessness within a decade, Ottawa will invest in mental health and addiction resources, supportive and affordable housing, as well as rent supports and continued support for the Veterans Homelessness Program. “Everyone deserves to be in a home,” said Arielle Kayabaga, deputy house leader of the government and London West MP. “Some people may say, you know, why are we spending all this money? We would be wrong not to do that.” London was the first city in Canada to receive money from the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF). They hope they can be first to receive these funds. They could use it to partner with developers to create more affordable and supportive housing communities.” “Village Soho is a great model and a great example of what Londoners can do and an example of what we can achieve across the country through partnership,” said Peter Fragiskatos, London Centre MP. “You have hundreds of units of housing here that are market based and non-market based and we’ve seen the cost of rent increase. Because of the budget, we’re going to see units for non-market housing go from 8,000 a year to 24,000 a year.” That is great news for charitable developers like Homes Unlimited. “We’re creators, not curators,” said Jim Foote, vice president of Homes Unlimited. “We don’t sit around and watch things get dusty on a shelf. We like to build. We can use it [potential funding] on reimagining some of our existing [properties] and we would look to news sites. There’s potentially surplus municipal lands, federal lands that could be right here in the city that are underutilized, that we could look at development as well.” To make this work the province will have to get on board with wraparound services and municipalities will have to find locations and execute the builds quickly. “Our competitive advantage is we know how to partner,” said Morgan. “We already know how to do it and we have been doing it. We were just waiting for the big the big announcement and now it’s here.”
