Open this photo in gallery:
Dr. Andrew Boozary in an examination room at Toronto’s Dunn House on Sept. 30.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
If you ask Dr. Andrew Boozary about design, he has a simple formula: “Good design is rooted in human dignity,” he says. The doctor, who treats unhoused people through University Health Network, has helped deliver new buildings that provide dignified conditions to an underserved population.
At Spring House, a new supportive and transitional housing building in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, the hospital and three governments will bring that ideal home. The roughly 40,000-square-foot building will include 54 apartments along with supportive services. It sets an important example of how to serve a marginalized population while attending to the details that make a good home.
The building, designed by Toronto’s Montgomery Sisam Architects, builds on the precedent of nearby Dunn House, which opened in 2024. Both rely on a simple insight: The best way to treat homelessness is with housing.
Last Thursday, Build Canada Homes, the City of Toronto and the UHN Foundation announced a total of $64-million to expand the program over three more sites, providing about 200 more homes.
The model works well. Dunn House serves unhoused people who were frequent UHN emergency-department patients. After one year, residents saw emergency visits drop by 52 per cent and their days in hospital drop 79 per cent, for reported savings of more than $2-million.
Rising cost of low-end rental units driving increase in homelessness, report shows
Dr. Boozary, who treats Dunn House residents, has seen results that can’t be captured on a spreadsheet. “The community that’s emerged there is one of the most powerful and beautiful things that I’ve witnessed,” he says. “There’ll be someone in their 20s knocking on my clinic door, saying, ‘You know, I’m worried about Miss So-and-So, who’s in her 70s. I went to get her groceries, and she’s not her usual self. I think you might want to check in on her.’
“This person – someone that we would stigmatize and push away – is here banging on my door to look out for an older adult.”
That is medicine.
Spring House is designed in two parts. The main eight-storey block is compact and repetitive, suited to the mass-timber construction systems being encouraged by Build Canada Homes. Wood panels and beams provide a rational structural grid. Down at the ground, a two-storey triangular wing reaches its arm out to meet the street.
The architects have also paid close attention to Parkdale itself. The building takes its material cues from the area’s Victorian brick and sandstone. Proposed hand-laid brick surrounds large arched windows. At the entrance, green glazed brick provides a flash of colour.
Ottawa urged to fund intensive housing for homeless Canadians with cognitive impairments
At Dunn House, some benches proved less useful than expected, while a covered porch seat became a popular place to stop and talk. At Spring House that experience has informed a more informal public edge, with opportunities for what Dr. Boozary calls “micro-interactions.”
Inside, the front desk is tucked around a corner, allowing staff to see what is happening without making the entrance feel like a checkpoint.
The second floor offers a lounge and terrace at the level of the surrounding trees. “People who have experienced homelessness often feel very scrutinized,” says Kevin Hutchinson, the partner at Montgomery Sisam who is leading the design. A resident can use the front porch to interact with people on the street, he explained, or go upstairs for a private moment.
For Dr. Boozary, such intentional design marks a contrast to the punishing conditions of the shelter system. “I just refuse to call shelters housing,” he told me. The uncertainty, instability and lack of privacy are “not a way to live.”
Spring House provides an answer, but also a puzzle of governance and fundraising. The building is supported by the federal government through Build Canada Homes, the province and the City of Toronto – municipal real estate agency CreateTO acts as development manager.
Discovery of baby in homeless camp highlights Quebec’s housing crisis ahead of election
This means many mandates and many cooks in the kitchen.
The growth of the program suggests that UHN, and Dr. Boozary’s team, have been canny in designing and managing the place. They have taken input from their housing fellows program; one fellow, the British social-housing architect Paul Karakusevic, provided feedback on the Spring House design.
And Montgomery Sisam are being hired by the clients directly, rather than through the complicated lawyerly alliances that define most health care buildings in Canada today.
That, Mr. Hutchinson says, has made it easier to protect the little things that might be seen as dispensable but which in fact give a place soul: a porch, a garden, a better street edge, an extra window, a room where people can gather to simply exist, in dignity.