As one of North America’s largest homeless shelters faces overwhelming pressures, the Calgary Drop-In Centre (DI) is considering major changes.
The DI has stood in Calgary’s East Village for a quarter of a century, and it’s signed on to remain there until at least 2050.
But in a shelter sometimes used by more than 900 people per night, CEO Sandra Clarkson said the site is assessing how to evolve to meet the growing scale and complexity of its clients’ needs. Clarkson said the shelter is considering a variety of options around providing shelter services, pathways into housing, and affordable and supportive housing.
“Our priority remains delivering housing-focused essential services today while doing the thoughtful work required to shape what comes next,” said Clarkson in a statement to CBC News.
Decentralization on the table
The DI has not committed yet to what changes it wants to make, but one suggestion, which the province has endorsed, is decentralization.
That idea means opening more small shelters with specialized focuses for specific groups of clients, dispersed around Calgary. Michelle James, Vibrant Communities Calgary’s director of policy, said she thinks the approach could build stronger relationship-based supports for some of the DI’s clients.
LISTEN | Pressures the Drop-In Centre faces as it considers potential changes:
“They could offer more specialized services for high-risk groups like women, 2SLGBTQ individuals, youth,” said James.
“It could also help having those services in communities where they’re actually living.”
She said the plan could be a safer option than large shelters, too. Earlier this year, CBC News spoke with around a dozen unhoused Calgarians about their experiences at the DI and heard from some clients they were concerned about violence, theft and substance abuse at the site.
Calgary isn’t the only city exploring decentralization. Last fall, Edmonton city council passed a motion to explore relocating some beds from two large emergency shelters that sometimes altogether house 1,000 occupants in a night.
If Calgary’s DI goes down a similar road, University of Calgary associate professor Francisco Alaniz Uribe, who focuses on urban design, said it should ensure new sites are accessible by people without the means to easily travel around the city. He pointed to the CTrain’s free fare zone as a service that currently helps people across downtown get to the DI.
But Uribe said he’s worried some Calgarians may push for new shelters to open where they’re not as visible, in less populated areas that are harder to reach.
“As a planner, ideally, you want to integrate the different levels of people struggling with housing … instead of centralizing them in one or two large centres,” said Uribe.
WATCH | DI exploring changes as it faces pressures to leave East Village:
Cainin Alliman, a Victoria resident who stayed at the DI in 2014 and 2022, said the shelter should be a safe haven for people trying to rebuild their lives. To accomplish that, he’d like to see it dedicate more of its space solely to clients who are sober or recovering from addiction.
“A lot of people have actually gone through some rough situations in their life,” Alliman said. “And they believe that going to a shelter is a place where they can recuperate, get better, get healthier, have the help that they need to be rehoused somewhere else.”
He’d support the DI pursuing more sites, away from its main location, designed specifically to support people who are using drugs or alcohol (similar to the shelter that Alpha House Society offers) to relieve pressure on the DI and its clients.
Focus on housing still needed most
Tim Richter, president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said he’d like the DI to decentralize, with smaller shelters more efficiently moving clients into hundreds of new housing units. He believes the result would set an ambitious standard for the rest of the country to follow.
In 2024, Statistics Canada found nearly 60,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a given night across the country, a total that had nearly doubled since 2018.
Richter, who used to serve as president of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, believes Calgary has weathered this national increase well.
He said sites like the DI should focus on how they can transition people into housing quickly.
“It’s really rethinking shelter from being a place where people stay while they’re experiencing homelessness, to being part of a system that moves people out really quickly,” said Richter.
“Ultimately, housing’s the only known solution to homelessness.”
Since shifting its focus in 2017 to helping more people secure housing, the DI has moved 3,100 people into a new home, according to its 2024-25 Report to Community.
Michelle James, director of policy for Vibrant Communities Calgary, argues more affordable, transitional and supportive housing is needed most of all to help the city support a rising number of people experiencing homelessness. (Alka Merlin)
James wants to see the DI continue to prioritize helping its clients secure housing, adding that Calgary needs more supportive, transitional and affordable units, including transitional housing for people being discharged from hospitals back into homelessness. She said that could “really reduce the burden on our emergency shelter system.”
She pointed to Safe Havens, a low-barrier transitional housing program in New York City, as a model Calgary could emulate. It offers overnight beds in small settings with more hands-on case management.
Aside from looking to other cities for guidance, James said Calgary just needs to follow its own strategy more closely. She said Calgary’s current Home Is Here strategy is effective, and the city should continue to invest in it to hit the strategy’s goal of 3,000 non-market housing units per year.
Closing the DI
Clarkson has said the DI is feeling some pressure to move out of its longtime East Village home. One source of pressure is in city hall, where Ward 12 Coun. Dan McLean has argued the shelter should leave the East Village, so the neighbourhood can attract more investment. He’s even recently suggested converting the shelter into a police station.
Other members of council, including Mayor Jeromy Farkas, have cautioned that moving the DI won’t eliminate homelessness in the area and pushed back against the idea of its closure before the same level of service is available elsewhere in Calgary.
Ken Peach agrees. He’s lived in the area for a decade and said he knows some of his neighbours would like to see the shelter leave. But he argued the DI shouldn’t close before its services are made redundant.
Calgary’s East Village community has developed significantly around the Drop-In Centre since the shelter first opened in 2001. (Robson Fletcher/CBC)
“We have been saying the need is across the city, so a dispersed model would be more effective,” said Peach, the president of the East Village Neighbourhood Association.
“But we’ve also said the concentration of people at the Drop-In Centre is probably not sustainable.”
Peach said the DI’s biggest challenge to opening more sites will be the “rampant Nimbyism” in Calgary, and work will be needed to show people that safety concerns around shelters can often be based more on perception than reality.
Tim Richter, president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said he’d like to see the Calgary Drop-In Centre explore opening more shelters, closely integrated with hundreds of new housing units. (CBC News)
Richter supports the idea of a move. He said if the DI’s property was sold, the city could put that money toward funding more dispersed shelters and affordable housing units.
“If you look at the building itself, it’s really not set up to be anything but a shelter. And if you want to functionally support people in a different way, it would have to be a different facility,” said Richter.
Still, there’s some risk to closing the DI, Uribe said.
Maintaining and staffing more buildings could be more expensive than the current setup, he argued, and he’s doubtful that governments right now are willing to spend more on supports for people experiencing homelessness.
“This is where it becomes problematic. It needs to be a solution that comes from the federal, provincial and municipal governments,” said Uribe.
“If we want to lower the homeless population, then we have to build affordable housing, transitional housing. We need to have much more support on mental health and physical health and addiction support. Many of those things are out of the budget for a city.”