Peterborough was one of 27 communities in Ontario to be approved for HART Hub funding in January 2025.
HART Hub funding is flowing into Peterborough and the work of building up the region’s response to treating mental health and addictions while addressing homelessness is well underway, says the executive director of Four Counties Addictions Services Team (Fourcast).
Donna Rogers explained the work is “a focused approach based on consolidating some of the planning and some of the decisions that city council made,” specifically around the decisions to fund One City’s Trinity Shelter and the Modular Bridge Housing Community on Wolfe Street.
Peterborough was one of 27 communities in Ontario to be approved for Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hub funding in January 2025 and is set to receive more than $18 million from the province over a three-year period to support the project.
“When you opened up the modular community, you moved 50 people instantaneously out of encampments,” she explained, while underscoring that the goal of the HART Hub network is to open and manage the movement of people from spaces like Wolfe Street through to transitional housing, treatment, and then hopefully into affordable permanent housing.
Rogers refers to the movement of people within this system as “shifts”, illustrating movement between varying levels of care and support.
Under the existing HART Hub model, there are 40 units of transitional housing available across the city with an additional six units, run through the CMHA, reserved for people exiting Wolfe Street with acquired brain injuries or dual diagnoses, which present challenges to securing and maintaining housing. Those six units are staffed 24/7 and are rent supplemented.
“There won’t be 40 people exiting there at the same time,” Rogers explained, noting the difference between the opening of Wolfe Street and the model established under the HART Hub.
“As people are ready, and as we can find units, it’ll be a bit of a slower trickle off Wolfe Street, but every time we move someone off the site, someone can move on the site.”
Through the HART Hub model, one individual has been moved from Wolfe Street, Rogers said, but hopefully that will speed up as hiring continues and the services are established.
Meanwhile, another six units are reserved for individuals who are entering housing out of homelessness following their choice to enter [bed-based] addictions treatment. These units are meant as a form of aftercare, lasting six months post-treatment, and allow individuals to be fast-tracked into available transitional housing, Rogers explained.
Fourcast is working as part of a larger team of health-focused organizations and community partners on the implementation of the HART Hub locally. The partners involved include PRHC, One City, CMHA, Elizabeth Fry Society, Peterborough City-County Paramedics, and the Community Health Centre.
“All of those partners have different parts to play in implementation of the HART Hub, so we have been doing a lot of work around planning and designing the four different structures or components of the HART Hub as we implement them,” Rogers said.
A small portion of HART Hub funding was earmarked for capital projects, which includes renovations to the main building located at the Wolfe Street Project which will house a health team consisting of nurse practitioners, psychiatrists, addictions case managers, and Ontario Works social services staff.
The nurse practitioner positions are being actively recruited through PRHC while Fourcast is working toward hiring two intensive case manager positions and housing support workers who will operate with a caseload of between 15-20 people. The roles entail helping to identify and work with individuals living at Wolfe Street or making use of Trinity’s overnight program who are ready to move into transitional housing.
Wolfe Street, Rogers explains, targets the more complex cases of people looking for homes, meaning that the work of the HART Hub is specialized and targeted while also flexible enough to operate between different levels.
It also goes some way to explain why, as councillors asked last week, an organization like Redpath — which the city just granted $150,000 to support planning for a transitional housing project — had not been involved in the planning and therefore not eligible for the provincial funding.
The differences also extend to the point that the only part of the HART Hub model dependent upon complete abstinence from substances being required is the six units for post-treatment housing.
There’s a specific reason for that, Rogers said: “Wolfe Street, and the folks that Fourcast admits into our existing transitional housing programs under the city, is a population for whom abstinence at point of admission into housing is a barrier to housing.”
“We’re talking about the population that’s signing on to getting off the street and getting into housing as a starting point,” she added.
The focus on building transitional housing, including HART Hubs, Redpath, and a planned development by the Brock Mission too, means that within a few years there will be an issue in terms of where people who are living there will go. Under provincial legislation, transitional housing is specifically time-limited, allowing residents to stay up to four years, and includes exemptions under the residential tenancies act.
This point, Rogers says, means that there needs to be increased investment in the creation of permanent affordable housing in the region to avoid bottlenecks which are only just beginning to ease at Wolfe Street as a result of the HART Hub investments.
“If transitional housing is time-limited, there’s probably a formula that says for every transitional housing unit you have, every 10 years you’re probably going to need three to four affordable housing units,” Rogers said. “If we robustly support transitional housing, we have to be thinking we’re creating a problem three to four years down the road.”
Locally, two “shovel ready” projects supported by Peterborough Housing Corporation (PHC) have been stalled since 2024 due to a lack of available funds from the province and the federal government.
Both Rogers and MPP Dave Smith told the Examiner that it’s too soon to know exactly what future rounds of HART Hub funding would look like at this time, and what, if any, changes might be made to the expectations.
Rogers noted, however, that the information gathered over the next two years would help inform how the programs will be utilized.
By Sebastian Johnston-Lindsay, Reporter
February 9, 2026