Patterns and Intensity of Use of Homeless Shelters in Toronto

Abstract

A large administrative data set allows us to examine shelter use by single adults, youth, and families in Toronto. We find important differences in shelter use by single adults, youth, and families. We introduce an approach that allows us to identify a noticeable increase in the percentage of shelter clients whom we define as chronic users of the shelter system—people for whom each episode of shelter use is typically very long. This should be a concern because chronic users of the system, although they make up only a small fraction of all shelter clients, fill more than 40 percent of shelter capacity. A growing number of chronic shelter users will strain the ability of the shelter system to provide shelter to those seeking temporary relief while they re-establish themselves into housing. Homeless shelters are a response to a serious social problem. They are not the cause of nor are they the solution to that problem. Growing shelter use is an indication of a social order in trouble.

How Do Youth Use Homeless Shelters?

“…Each episodic user cost the shelter system an average of 1,1039 CAD per year while each chronic user cost 5,311 CAD per year. Similar calculations can be made for Toronto by using the results reported by Jadidzadeh and Kneebone (2018). Assuming the same nightly cost of providing a shelter bed, the calculations reported by those authors imply each youth identified as a transitional user of shelters imposed an annual cost of 646 CAD on the system, or 3.3 times the cost imposed on the shelter system in Calgary.…”

“…Examples include Culhane et al (2007), who examine family homelessness in four US cities, and Jadidzadeh and Kneebone ( 2018) who examine the use of family shelters in Toronto. To our knowledge, the only applications of k-mean cluster analysis to describe the patterns and intensity of homeless shelter use by youth is this current study and that of Jadidzadeh and Kneebone (2018) who examine data describing shelter use in Toronto.…”

“…The size and breadth of our dataset allows us to produce a detailed description of emergency shelter use by youth, to break down that response by ethnicity, and show how patterns and intensity of shelter use have changed over time. To our knowledge, this study examining youth homeless in Calgary, and the study by Jadidzadeh and Kneebone (2018) who examine shelter use by youth in Toronto, are the only applications of analyses like these to identify the patterns and intensity of use of emergency shelters by youth.…”