Dozens of people have already received some form of treatment from the Windsor-Essex Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment Hub, or HART Hub, since it opened four months ago.
Director of Crisis and Addiction Services at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare Kevin Matte told Windsor City Council Monday that 60 to 80 people have started the HART Hub program and worked their way through in some capacity.
"We have approximately four to five individuals who have been permanently housed with supports. Around three individuals in the transitional housing units. All of those people are people that have gone through the whole program, stuck with the whole program, completed the program, transitioned to housing, and are still there successfully," he says.
Another 5 to 6 people are expected to graduate from the program and move into transitional housing in the coming weeks.
Matte says when you're working with these types of issues, homelessness and addiction, they are very complex issues, so that's a success for us.
"We're starting to see at the four-month mark the progression of people going through and getting patient feedback of their experience in the program. People are really finding that this is the program that's been able to help them," he says.
The program has 23 new supportive addictions treatment beds, with 16 at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, two beds at House of Sophrosyne, and five beds at Brentwood Recovery Home, along with 32 transitional housing units.
There are also housing units and rent supplements available to assist up to 108 people once they have completed the HART Hub program.
The idea behind the hub is to address homelessness and addiction by providing centralized access to services such as mental health care, addiction treatment, housing assistance, and employment support to provide people a place to stay during their recovery effort.
Matte says the early data is also giving them an indication about who is using the services.
"We've been open for about four months at this point, but this data was pulled two months in. 71 per cent of our clients identify as male, and the average age is 41. 21 per cent are seeking shelter or are from the county, and the other 80 per cent are from the city," he says.
The Windsor-Essex HART Hub opened in the first week of October 2025 as part of a three-year provincially funded program.
In January 2025, the province approved an application to establish a HART Hub in Windsor, a model the government endorsed over supervised consumption and treatment service sites.
Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare (HDGH) will co-lead Windsor's hub, alongside the House of Sophrosyne and the Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre, with support from the Windsor-Essex Ontario Health Team.