Here are three ways Edmonton's housing task force is trying to tackle city's supply issue

UPDATE: On April 8, 2025, council voted to approve $3.5 million in seed money to go toward three recommendations to tackle homelessness put forward by the Community Mobilization Task Force on Housing and Houselessness. 

The city's Community Mobilization Task Force on Housing and Houselessness has released recommendations to council to find faster ways to build more housing in Edmonton.

Edmonton's task force wants council to put forward $3.5 million toward community-led solutions to tackle homelessness in the city. The funding is meant to go toward retrofits, development of a bridge housing platform and the creation of a new peer support service for vulnerable tenants.

"This was a really cross-jurisdictional group of individuals from housing service agencies, academia, business community, that all came together to really address what we could be doing to address housing and houselessness," Coun. Erin Rutherford said at city hall. She is part of the task force.

Tina Thomas, CEO of Edmonton Community Foundation, said housing in general is a major issue, as it affects everyone.

"It spans everything from shelter spaces to near market housing. It targets people that are individuals and families and newcomers. It targets people that have mental health crisis is to students," Thomas said. 

"So we really tried to focus on community mobilization, how we could get community to act and to operate. We also tried to look at things that could be preventative, but also intervention. So we could prevent people from becoming houseless, but also working with people that are currently at that state." 

The task force's report on their progress and investments was also released on Monday. 

Edmonton has more than 394,000 homes, but fewer than 15,000 homes are social and affordable housing, according to data referenced in the report from August 2023. 

Close to one in eight Edmonton households, or 46,155 Edmontonians, cannot afford to live in the city and spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing.

This number is expected to increase to 56,337 households by 2031.

Data from Homeward Trust found 2,980 Edmontonians had instable housing with 775 reported they accessed shelters and 1,283 reported being unsheltered as of February 2025. 

Nick Lilley — CEO of HomeEd, the City of Edmonton's non-profit housing corporation — said there are a variety of underutilized properties that may be retrofitted to house vulnerable Edmontonians.

"This fund would effectively [incentivize] some of those property owners to consider new use cases and really support some of the costs for pre-development or feasibility studies to try and make that a new reality," Lilley said.

The peer support program would be tailored toward renters having to navigate the complexities of support systems. 

"The idea here being that vulnerable tenants within current housing could use some additional support from those who have lived experience and those who have been provided appropriate training to be able to assist them with navigating some of these very complex system challenges," Lilley said.

The third major proposed initiative to be funded would involve a bridge platform to connect tenants with social agencies and landlords. 

"There'll be good, strong relationships and trust and transparency within the course of placing and supporting these individuals into long term housing," Lilley said.

The recommendations will be presented to city council on April 8.