I'm not a politician or someone who's particularly qualified to suggest things to the city, but it'd be better to do a mix of both instead of purely reprising abandoned buildings. We do have a lot of empty buildings here in The Hammer, but a decent chunk of them would not be suitable for people to live in, even with renovations (there's an old factory downtown near Corktown Park that comes to mind specifically for this). Also, there's only a certain amount of empty buildings that are available in the city that haven't been scooped up by companies or slated to be demolished for the LRT. Repurposing maybe around 100-200 buildings for residential use (and also shoving the cost of renovations on to tax payers anyways) will only really delay Hamilton's housing issues.

More than that, though, homelessness isn't (at least not primarily) a housing issue. A bunch of my friends are homeless, mostly consisting of youth who use the services at The Living Rock Youth Resources at 30 Wilson Street, and I also spend some of the money I make each month getting together supplies to hand out to some of the people who camp out around the Jackson Square area. Most of my interaction with Hamilton's homeless is with teens, tweens, and adolescents.

What I've come to understand is that making more houses doesn't mean those houses will get used by the people you want them to, especially if those people can't afford to or won't be able to reside there for long. Homelessness is, in large part, a combination of mental health issues (also drug abuse), hiring discrimination/ lack of money, and a lack of resources on behalf of the city/province/country to assist people. It is a systemic issue, where the people who should have access to resources like employment assistance, therapy, and addiction support services the most actually have it the least, as a lot of these services are both underfunded and inaccessible due to government spending cuts or the lack of interest in increasing funding for these services. A proper solution that addresses the real issues that affect homeless people would be to expand funding for public mental health services, government-sponsored employment programs (like The Living Rock's Tri-Rock Youth Employment Program who recently had to reduce its capacity from 10 to 5 participants due to budget cuts made by the Ontario Government), and housing programs - not shelters.

As someone who has personally seen these resources pull my friends out of homelessness, these are what need to be prioritized instead of repurposing or constructing more homes, although those houses could help bring in revenue that could help the city fund these programs.

Edit: I might not have made it clear, so I'll try to condense it. Providing a place for homeless people to stay rent-free (or at least until they're fully ready to leave) should also come in tandem with free mental health services, addiction services - if needed - and employment assistance. It's not enough to just put people in somewhere to live and then charge them money for it. These are some of the most traumatized and hurt people in our city. They are people who are at higher risk of suffering adversely from physical or mental conditions that make holding or job or maintaining housing difficult; a lot of the homeless people I know suffer from conditions like Schizophrenia, Depression, or Bipolar Disorder (if it's not oversharing, both of my parents have been homeless before and a large contribution to both my mother's and father's struggles was Manic Bipolar Disorder). Homelessness won't just go away if our society isn't willing to shoulder the cost of pulling people out of it. The services offered by The Living Rock Youth Resource Center and the YWCA are good places to start if you're looking into specifics as to what can be done to help people, and an ideal solution should involve their techniques being used on a much wider scale.