While St. Thomas ‘just started doing it,’ Sarnia’s council clings to NIMBY fears

While Sarnia’s council debates safety plans and alternative sites, St. Thomas is proving that the simple, collaborative decision to build housing is the cure for homelessness.

It can be easy to look at the human crisis on our streets and feel like the problem is unsolvable. It’s easy to get cynical when years of talk, task forces, and meetings seem to produce little more than circular debates and political gridlock. 

While that cynicism is understandable, a proven solution is already working just an hour down the road.

In St. Thomas, a city of 46,000, Mayor Joe Preston is optimistic they can reduce their unhoused list from about 100 people to zero in the next year. As he recently told the London Free Press, the issue keeps him up at night, "But it wakes me up a lot less often than it used to."

Their secret? It’s painfully simple.

"We were pretty simplistic, because out here we think that way,” Preston said. “We just said do you know what would cure homelessness? Housing.’”

And for the last seven years, they’ve made it their top priority. The city’s success isn't magic. It’s the direct result of focused, sustained collaboration—a willingness from local government, service providers, developers, and the business community to, as Preston puts it, "all row the boat the same direction."

This is where the lesson for Sarnia becomes sharpest. For years, local community advocates have been pushing for the very solutions St. Thomas is now implementing: supportive housing, coordinated access, and a "Housing First" model. They brought the data, the experts, and the passion.

And for years, they were too often met by a political machine that seemed more interested in managing optics and platforming NIMBY fears than in building solutions. We've all seen the effects of that inaction. We see it every day.

We don't even need to look back years; we saw this dynamic play out this very week. While the Indwell supportive housing project—the exact model so successful in St. Thomas—narrowly survived a 5-4 vote to proceed, four councillors actively tried to kill it by sending staff on a "search for an alternative site."

This is the gap in political will. Where St. Thomas's council "quit trying to find why we couldn’t do things," Sarnia's is still platforming NIMBY fears. Worse, council unanimously passed a motion to develop a special "safety plan" around the building, a bureaucratic hurdle that, as Indwell themselves wrote to council, "assumes that individuals living in supportive and affordable housing are inherently dangerous" and "enforces a perpetuating stereotype."

In St. Thomas, they chose a different path. Their city council meetings average 53 minutes because they trust their staff and focus on governing, not micromanaging. They "quit trying to find why we couldn’t do things and started just doing them."

They made a "by-names list" to know exactly who needed help. They embraced new ideas, like Indwell's supportive housing model, which provides wraparound medical, mental health, and addiction services on-site. When that 16-unit building opened, they placed some of the most difficult-to-house individuals in it. The result? Police interactions and emergency room visits for that group "dwindled to just a fraction of before."

This isn't just compassion; it's pragmatic, fiscally responsible policy.

They didn't stop there. The city helped fund the YWCA’s Project Tiny Hope. They found a developer finishing a 24-unit apartment building and offered to lease the entire thing, becoming the landlord overnight and housing 24 people on their list.

The St. Thomas experience proves that this is possible. It proves what we at The Sarnia Journal and local advocates have been saying for ages: the only thing missing is the political will.

Mayor Preston has simple advice: "Take action. Start something."

His focus is clear: "We want to solve the problem, not fix the blame."

That is the challenge Sarnia faces today. Can we finally move past the blame, the fear, and the endless debate? Can we empower our community agencies, work with developers, and demand our local government finally say "yes" to housing?

The roadmap is right in front of us. It’s time to start building.