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 second leading cause of recent homelessness in 2024. Other personal circumstances—substance use, mental or physical health issues, domestic problems, and incarceration—were also cited, but the underlying issue is that social safety nets are not robust enough to secure housing for vulnerable people. Without sufficient protections, renters are at the mercy of landlords, and mercy is rarely part of their modus operandi. With evictions and rent hikes leading to so much displacement, it is clear that Edmonton’s homelessness epidemic is fuelled by unchecked landlord power.

Landlords certainly face their own financial pressures, but it is renters who are the most vulnerable. Inflation, matching the “market value,” and missing one month’s rent are not acceptable excuses for throwing people out of their homes, especially in a country that recognizes housing as a human right.

The lack of tenant protections and housing safety nets in Edmonton is no accident—the homelessness epidemic reflects the deep entrenchment of the landlord lobby in Alberta politics.

One of the many homeless encampments along a street in Edmonton’s downtown. Photo by Paula E. Kirman.

The landlord legislature

One-fifth of the Alberta legislature (18 of 87 MLAs) and nearly half of Alberta MPs (15 of 37 MPs) are private landlords. In 2023, 36 percent of Alberta MLAs and 48 percent of MPs were invested in the real estate industry. Conflicts of interest are also created by the re-introduction of corporate campaign donations into Alberta politics and the revolving door between political and lobbying careers. Even Edmonton’s local elections are influenced by developers who want multi-million dollar subsidies to expand the housing market.

For politicians who resist conflicts of interest, their political parties exert pressure on them to fall in line with the dominating agenda. Rather than enacting desperately needed renter protections during a homelessness crisis, the landlord legislature is content with the status quo of enriching itself and its big business allies at renters’ expense.

When we look at the policies being used to combat homelessness at the provincial and municipal levels, it becomes clear that politicians are not only benefiting from the homelessness crisis—they are making a deliberate choice to perpetuate it.

Regulatory tools like rent control and inclusionary zoning are designed to check landlords’ power to raise rents, but mandates from the landlord legislature have taken both of these options off the table. Landlords have taken full advantage of the deregulated market by raising rents to their current degree of unaffordability, raking in massive profits while thousands of renters lose their homes. On top of their unbridled power to raise rents, landlords also have overwhelming leverage to evict tenants.

Alberta offers limited tenants’ rights and provides little in the way of recourse to renters facing eviction. Landlords have unilateral power to raise rents to the point that tenants must self-evict due to unaffordability. Landlords can also decide to not renew fixed-term leases, allowing them to evict with no cause and without filing for eviction. When evictions are filed, tenants face a disadvantage: tight deadlines to contest them and far fewer legal and financial resources than landlords.

In 2023, 44 percent of landlord-tenant disputes in Alberta were filed in Edmonton, and 77 percent were submitted by landlords for eviction. The province’s Residential Tenancy Dispute Resolution Service (RTDRS) did not report how many of those disputes were ruled in the landlords’ favour (in more transparent provinces like Saskatchewan, landlords win about 90 percent of eviction disputes). Alberta’s rental housing regulations (or lack thereof) are clearly skewed to favour landlords over renters, and one major consequence is widespread homelessness during periods of economic instability.

Edmonton needs public housing, not homeless shelters or rental subsidies

To deal with the exploding homelessness problem, the Alberta government invests roughly $10 million into Edmonton’s homeless shelters every year. The city and federal governments also pour millions into these shelters. While homeless shelters might provide necessary shelter during emergencies, they are not designed to actually solve homelessness. Unhoused people cannot live in shelters—they can only stay for a period of time before being sent back out onto the streets.

Edmonton’s shelters suffer from outbreaks of violence, theft, drug use, poor cleanliness, and a lack of dignified sleeping space. People cannot bring many belongings into the shelters, but items can get stolen if they are left outside. Shelters are also hotspots for contagious infections like lice, shigella, and tuberculosis. With many unhoused people avoiding shelters or being traumatized within them, it’s clear these facilities are failing to protect residents. The city’s large-scale deployment of temporary shelters is a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent on proven, evidence-based solutions like Housing First.

Housing First treats housing as a human right. Under this model, unhoused individuals are provided permanent housing with no strings attached, alongside voluntary services like health care, drug rehabilitation, and case management. Many struggle to escape cycles of addiction or unemployment without housing stability; unlike programs that condition housing on sobriety or work, Housing First flips the approach—and often achieves convincing results.

This strategy has been successfully implemented in several cities across the world, including Houston, Milwaukee, and even Edmonton. Alberta’s capital cut its homeless population in half over a decade using Housing First policies before the pandemic. Despite this success, investment in Housing First and other public housing supports has not kept pace with growing need.

Social housing or community housing—where rent is adjusted to 30 percent of household income or below—is a form of public housing used to achieve Housing First principles and shield struggling renters from the unregulated private market. Regrettably, Alberta politicians have been underfunding and cutting funding for public and social housing, which many argue is causing Edmonton’s current homelessness crisis. Renters who are on the waitlist for social housing in Edmonton now face a 10,000-person backlog.

Legislators’ insistence on defunding public housing reflects their desire to keep the vast majority of rental units under private control. Expanding public housing has also been shown to exert a price-dampening effect on the private rental market, which works against the financial interests of landlords and investors. In this hyper-privatized housing economy, most renters have no choice but to pay “market value” rent regardless of their income and despite the toll it takes on their lives. Today, one in four renters in Edmonton pay more than they can afford for housing, while 75 percent of Canadian renters sacrifice basic needs such as food, clothing, living essentials, and education to afford a place to live.

With reduced capacity for public housing, governments have instead been shifting towards investments in rental subsidies like rent assistance and privately-owned “affordable” housing that is priced at slightly below “market value” (which is still too expensive for many low-income households). While rental subsidies might keep people housed in the short term, they do so by enriching landlords with public tax dollars. Rental subsidies ultimately empower landlords, allowing them to exert greater political influence, raise rents further, and evict more tenants.

Keeping renters housed while challenging landlord power is difficult but essential. Expanding renter protections and public housing are low-hanging fruit, but they will only be achieved by ousting Alberta’s current political vanguard. Organizing tenant unions is a powerful way to bring landlords to the bargaining table while building community-based safety nets through mutual support.

Some of these changes may affect landlords’ ability to sustain their businesses—but that is precisely the point. Landlords should not have the power to deny people housing, nor should they be allowed to profit by extracting rents from struggling workers. Housing should not be a hyper-privatized commodity, but a human right upheld by public responsibility.

Demonstrators gather to protest police sweeps of homeless encampments in downtown Edmonton, 2023. Photo by Bradley Lafortune/X.

Reframing the ‘housing crisis’

Edmonton has more than enough capacity to permanently house all of its homeless residents through Housing First. The most recent census data reported that 32,453 dwellings were unoccupied in Edmonton in 2021. As of 2025, there are over 3,400 vacant apartments and around 2,000 shelter spaces that would be more useful as permanent housing. About one-fifth of Edmonton’s office spaces sat empty in 2025, a reduction from previous years after many offices were converted to residential buildings. The tens of millions of dollars spent on shelters could instead be dedicated to acquiring these empty spaces for Housing First—or the government could expropriate them to address the homeless emergency.

With all this empty space, “low housing supply” is clearly not a fundamental reason why people go unhoused. In other words, there is no “housing crisis.” More accurately, there is an anti-housing crisis, with landlords preventing the poor from accessing available housing for their own financial gain.

Although supply contributes to housing prices, the two are not actually correlated, suggesting that other factors like financialization are more important in determining price. Housing financialization is a fundamental system that is forcing people to live and die on the streets. This system does not only incentivize landlords to jack up rents for profit, but subjects housing affordability to the rules of supply and demand in the first place.

As Alberta obsesses over expanding housing supply, the primary beneficiaries are not renters, but developers—who receive huge subsidies to build more units—and landlords, who add more profitable assets to their portfolios.

The homelessness crisis can also be understood in the context of colonialism. Homelessness itself is a colonial construct. According to Dr. Emily Faries, a professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Sudbury:

Traditionally, in the pre-contact era before the influence of Europeans, no Cree person was ever homeless. All members of the community had a home because our society was based on large extended families in which everyone was cared for and included. The traditional society was egalitarian in the sense that everything was shared. But because of what has happened with colonization, we, as a race of people, have become homeless. This is mainly because our traditional homelands, which are now known as Canada, have all been taken away from us. We don’t even have legal access to any of our traditional homelands. So, a race of people, on a macro level, has been left homeless.

The effects of colonial land dispossession and oppression are still evident, as Indigenous people make up at least 52 percent of Edmonton’s unhoused population despite representing only six percent of the total city population. The revolving door between prison and homelessness traps many—especially Indigenous people—in cycles of destitution. Although they comprise just five percent of Canada’s population, 32 percent of the country’s inmates are Indigenous, including an astounding 50 percent of women inmates. The city’s criminalization of homelessness through encampment crackdowns and transit trespassing tickets reinforces this cycle and magnifies its impact.

Rents in Alberta have begun to fall after years of steep increases, but the damage is already done. Thousands were pushed from their homes during the pandemic, and many will feel the consequences for years, even generations. Edmonton now faces a humanitarian disaster: hundreds of unhoused people are dying on the streets while homes and buildings sit empty. Renters struggle to get by as landlords collect record profits. Without structural change to the housing system, this crisis will persist—and the next wave of rent hikes will once again fall hardest on the city’s most vulnerable.

Edmonton’s deadly homelessness epidemic is not only preventable, it is manufactured. Evidence-based Housing First solutions, stronger renter protections, and public housing investments could drastically reduce homelessness, possibly without raising taxes. Instead, current political leaders oppose these measures to safeguard their own and their corporate allies’ profits.

Millions are wasted shuffling unhoused people through temporary shelters rather than providing permanent housing. Governments build housing supply that primarily benefits landlords and developers while cutting public housing to keep units under private control, using rental subsidies to enrich landlords further. Meanwhile, the legislature refuses to regulate landlords, letting rent hikes and evictions drive unprecedented homelessness.

Blaming homelessness on an apolitical “housing crisis” is misleading. Homelessness is a political choice, and the message is clear: if you can’t pay rent, you don’t deserve a home. The intentionality and lethality of this epidemic constitute political violence—or even social murder—by landlords and politicians.

Despite this cruelty, we must preserve empathy for our neighbours—housed or not. We must fight for our own dignity and the dignity of all Edmontonians. We must challenge the unchecked power of landlords, corporate elites, and corrupt politicians. It is up to us to defend housing as a human right.

The Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH) will host a memorial on June 4, 2026 at noon at the Homeless Memorial Plaza (103A Avenue, just north of City Hall, between 99 and 100 Streets) to honour unhoused community members who have passed away. ECOHH is also building a broad coalition of advocates, mutual aid providers, writers, and grassroots organizers to fight for housing justice in Edmonton. To get involved, visit ecohh.ca.

David Rivera-Kohr is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta.

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