Our ground-breaking new report – The State of Homelessness in Canada: 2013 – highlights the current status of homelessness in Canada. And the picture isn’t pretty. Over 200,000 Canadians experience homelessness every year; 50,000 or more are part of the hidden homeless group and are couch-surfing, doubling or tripling up with friends and family, or living in unsafe and insecure housing. Many more Canadians are facing challenges in paying their rent and meeting other basic survival needs, including food.

Produced by the Canadian Homelessness Research Network and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, this report card summarizes current research about how many people (and who) are homeless, trends that could lead to more homelessness if not reversed, how much homelessness is costing Canadians and promising signs of hope. It also provides several recommendations to help end homelessness.

I’ve been working in the homelessness sector for nearly 20 years, and I'm super excited to be part of this research. It's time that we were able to really quantify homelessness in a meaningful way. Yet, even this report is, in a few places, only our best guess. It’s an informed, well-researched best guess, but the lack of a common definition (CHRN released its definition in 2012) around homelessness, varying methodologies for counting homeless people and a lack of funding and support for research and evaluation means we are trying to take different sets of numbers and make them all match up. And those numbers show us that homelessness is affecting more Canadians than we might realize. In fact, approximately 30,000 Canadians are homeless on any given night. This breaks down to:

  • 2,880 unsheltered (outside in cars, parks, on the street)
  • 14,400 staying in Emergency Homelessness Shelters
  • 4,464 provisionally accommodated (homeless but in hospitals, prison or interim housing)
  • 7,350 staying in Violence Against Women Shelters
30000 people are homeless on any given night
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The research also turned up some other interesting facts. We found that for most people, homelessness is a very short, one time experience. In fact, 29% of people spend only one night in a shelter and are able to resolve their homelessness crisis on their own or with minimal supports. At the other end of the spectrum though, 4,000 to 8,000 people are chronically homeless (long term homeless) and 6,000 to 22,000 are episodically homeless (experience repeated episodes of homelessness over a lifetime). While this is less than 15% of the total homeless population in Canada they use about 50% of the emergency shelter spaces and consume the most resources (including emergency services, hospitals etc.).

We were also able to calculate an updated sense of the cost of homelessness. It’s a whopping $7.05 billion per year. When we think about how much cheaper it is to provide rent supplements, supportive and social housing – not to mention the moral issues of warehousing people in shelters – it’s really time that we started focusing on the solutions.

Homelessness cost Canadian 7 billion annually
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And there is progress on this front. Cities across the country are making strides towards reducing, and ending, homelessness. The province of Alberta is leading the way with a provincial 10 year plan to end homelessness that is showing some very promising results. A focus on Housing First – getting people off the streets and out of shelters into housing before focusing on other issues – is helping to reduce the numbers of people who are homeless.

For example:

  • Vancouver has had a 66% reduction in street homelessness since 2008
  • Edmonton saw a 30% reduction in overall homelessness since 2008
  • Toronto reports a 51% decrease in street homelessness since 2006
  • Alberta’s provincial plan has led to a 16% province-wide reduction since 2008

For the full report, including full tables, charts and our recommendations for change download the report.

State of homelessness in Canada cover page
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 Download the Executive Summary. Aussi disponible en français

 Download the Complete Report

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tanya Gulliver is the Project Coordinator for the Canadian Homelessness Research Network (The Homeless Hub) based at York University. She is also a PhD student at York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies looking at community resiliency and recovery after catastrophic disasters. From 2003-2010, Tanya taught the Homelessness in Canadian Society course at Ryerson University. Tanya was on the management team and staff of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. She is co-founder of the Toronto Homeless Memorial.