‘Just staggering’: city’s homelessness crisis worsening, new data reveals By: Scott Billeck Posted: 12:18 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 13, 2026 Last Modified: 8:35 AM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2026 Updates

Winnipeg’s homelessness crisis is accelerating, not easing, as new data released Monday shows more people are falling into homelessness than are finding a way out.

End Homelessness Winnipeg says the number of people living without stable housing reached 8,248 in March, an increase of 104 from February.

More than half of them — 4,463 — are experiencing chronic homelessness, defined by EHW as someone who has been homeless for at least six months in the past year or has experienced repeated episodes over several years.

EHW executive director Jennifer Rattray said the latest data underscores the growing scale and urgency of the city’s humanitarian crisis and highlights sustained, increasing pressure on Winnipeg’s homelessness response system.

“The main takeaway for me is the desperate need for deeply affordable housing and supportive housing,” Rattray told the Free Press Monday. “We can get really good at other types of interventions, at trying to prevent additional homelessness, etc., but what we’re doing is not keeping up with the crisis.

“To have, month over month, 104 more human beings — more relatives — who are now chronically homeless is just staggering, and we all need to be alarmed.”

EHW’s data comes from the By-Name List, a real-time count of people experiencing homelessness who have either used services or made contact with a homeless-serving agency in the last 90 days. The report is generated from the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System.

“To have, month over month, 104 more human beings… more relatives… who are now chronically homeless is just staggering, and we all need to be alarmed.”

The organization publishes HIFIS data monthly on its website, consistently showing inflows into homelessness far outpacing outflows. It says the imbalance is leading to longer periods of homelessness and a growing number of people becoming chronically homeless.

The latest figures also point to a profound need for deeply affordable housing — also known as rent-geared-to-income housing — where rent is set at 30 per cent of household income in Manitoba.

Since November 2022, there have been 4,051 housing units approved with city support. Of those, 1,640 are considered affordable and an additional 962 are rent-geared-to-income.

A spokesperson for Mayor Scott Gillingham said Monday that as more homes and thousands of market units come online, they’ll free up space across the system.

“We’re taking a closer look at these numbers to understand what they represent and how they line up with other data,” the spokesperson said. “But what’s important is that the city is continuing to work closely with the province and other partners to get people out of encampments and into safe housing with the supports they need.”

Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith touted more than 2,100 units she says her government has built.

“We are going to continue to work with all of our partners to ensure that we are getting as much housing online, but also ensuring that we are working towards making sure that people are getting in programs so that they can move and exit into the market rental,” Smith said, sidestepping questions on whether the province will end chronic homelessness by its self-imposed 2031 deadline in its Your Way Home strategy.

Smith said 214 people have been moved from encampments into housing.

The provincial plan, unveiled in January 2025, aims to move about 700 people from encampments into housing by 2031. EHW reported 949 active people experiencing chronic homelessness in March.

That plan focuses on those actively living in encampments and does not include the broader homeless population, such as people in shelters or those without permanent housing — for example, someone staying on a couch or in a spare room where tenancy is not guaranteed.

Progressive Conservative Leader Obby Khan said the situation is “concerning.”

“It’s really sad to see that under this NDP government, it has grown more than three times what the homelessness numbers were prior to them taking office,” Khan said, pointing to a chronic homelessness figure of 1,256 in November 2022 compared to the present figure — an increase of 3,207.

“That is not progress, that is going in the wrong direction. That is not moving the pendulum in the right direction. This NDP government is completely wrong, and they’re only reporting the stats and facts that they want.”

“That is not progress, that is going in the wrong direction.”

Tessa Blaikie Whitecloud, CEO of the Collaborative Housing Alliance and a former senior adviser on homelessness to Premier Wab Kinew, said the data underscores the need for greater collaboration to build housing across the city and province.

“We want to be a partner to non-profits, First Nations and other groups who are ensuring more affordable housing comes online,” she said.

“While the primary focus of our work at the Collaborative Housing Alliance is building out the missing middle, we know that solving homelessness takes supportive and deeply affordable units.”

The alliance was created to partner with the private sector to address the shortage of safe, low-cost housing and includes a real estate investment trust to help fund projects.

The first two are slated to be announced in May, and Blaikie Whitecloud said they will be “directly linked to reducing inflow into homelessness and increasing space to move out of homelessness.”

Meantime, sector partners will meet next month to develop a unified set of requests for all levels of government, Rattray said.

“We need to crystallize those requests to governments — those respectful requests — and work with our government partners to make those things happen,” she said.

“We need to look at the investments, and if governments are going to look at costs — and I think the human cost is what’s important — but if governments are going to look at the cost, then rent-geared-to-income, deeply affordable, supportive housing is a great investment because it’s actually going to save money.”

scott.billeck@freepress.mb.ca