Police monitor a homeless encampment in Edmonton. Photo by Bradley Lafortune/X.

In December, I moved to Edmonton from Madison, Wisconsin to begin my life as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Alberta. I arrived in the middle of a cold snap, with temperatures plunging well below zero and snow blowing sideways in biting winds, turning the city white. One morning, I called my wife and remarked half-jokingly, “We moved to the dang Arctic tundra!”

As I began using Edmonton’s public transit system, I noticed that buses and train stations provided much-needed warmth and shelter to unhoused people during the punishing winter. I also saw many of them in tense conversations with police or “peace” officers. On a particularly frosty morning, I entered the Corona LRT stop and noticed an unhoused man with a scarred stump where his hand used to be.

He was sitting against a wall, hugging his knees to his chest, his head turned away from the pedway. I paused, did a double take, and pulled out my wallet to give him a few dollars. He noticed, turned toward me, and asked, “Do you have any change?” His face was scarred like a burn victim. As I handed him the cash, I said, “Here you go, brother,” and he reached out with a second amputated hand, pinching the bill between his arms. The stump had several open wounds in various stages of healing.

As I went about my day, I kept thinking about that man. How much suffering had he endured living on the streets as an amputee? Why wasn’t the city stepping in to help him in the dead of winter? It wasn’t until later that I realized his disfigurement was likely the result of the cold itself.

Edmonton is considered the frostbite capital of the world. In 2024, the city reported a record-breaking 110 amputations from frostbite, with 58 percent of those cases affecting unhoused people. The rise in frostbite amputations has been attributed to Edmonton’s aggressive encampment eviction policy and insufficient frostbite treatment protocol. Hypothermia and accidental fires started in makeshift attempts to get warm are common causes of death for unhoused Edmontonians.

Unfortunately, the extreme cold is only a minor facet of the city’s larger homelessness epidemic.

More than 300 unhoused Edmontonians died in 2023, more than eight times as many as in 2019. This is a mortality rate of roughly 11 percent compared to under one percent for the general population. Alongside the extreme cold, drug overdoses and aggravated health issues are leading causes of death for our neighbours living on the streets.

Indeed, homelessness in Edmonton is extremely deadly. How did we get here? And what—or who—is responsible for this humanitarian crisis?

Roughly 4,000 Edmontonians are currently unhoused after a staggering 200 percent increase in homelessness since 2020. Homelessness reached an all-time high in 2024 after nearly 2,000 people became homeless over a single year. The leading reason for this spike is housing unaffordability.

From 2020-2024, Edmonton saw some of the steepest rent hikes in Canada, with average rent rising by nearly 20 percent. Wage growth has not kept pace with these added expenses, causing rental affordability to plummet. The rent increases are a byproduct of post-pandemic inflation and Edmonton’s rapid population growth, which has reduced vacancy rates. Yet these factors alone do not explain the precipitous rise, as rent hikes have outpaced inflation and continued through years when vacancy rates actually increased.

Housing financialization—the process by which corporate landlords buy up homes to serve as profit-generating assets—has played a major role, too. Over the last few decades, as more of Edmonton’s housing has become financialized, average rent has climbed even when vacancy rates increased and inflation was low.

Recent inflation and low vacancy rates have provided cover for corporate landlords to put their thumbs on the scale to jack up the rents. Demovictions and renovictions have ejected people from their homes to make way for higher-paying clientele. Corporate landlords like Boardwalk and Avenue Living collectively own about half of Edmonton’s rental market, and they have implemented aggressive rent hikes to maximize profits. Last year, corporate landlord ARH Holdings imposed a 200 percent rent hike at the Annamoe Mansion in central Wîhkwêntôwin, one of Edmonton’s oldest residential neighbourhoods. “It’s basically, ‘Read between the lines. Get out. We’re going to force you out by rent increase rather than just a flat eviction,’” said one resident.

While Edmonton does not track tenant evictions, a 2024 survey found that 46 percent of unhoused respondents lost their most recent housing due to eviction. Conflicts with landlords, discrimination or abuse, noise or damage complaints, building sales or renovations, and owners moving in were the........

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