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The federal government has a goal of reducing chronic homelessness by 50 per cent by the 2027 – 2028 fiscal year — but they don’t know whether they’re making progress. 

There is a severe lack of data on how much progress has been made in achieving that target so far, and how housing-related funding has actually been used, according to Auditor General Karen Hogan. 

Meanwhile, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Infrastructure Canada have separately stated that they are not “directly” nor “solely” accountable for addressing chronic homelessness, which Hogan said demonstrates “minimal federal accountability.” 

“The Government of Canada has data-sharing agreements with individual shelters, which can then be rolled up and aggregated at a federal level,” says Dr Stephen Gaetz, the president and CEO of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, and scientific director at Making the Shift, a research lab dedicated to preventing and ending youth homelessness. He adds that the government has supported shelters in some communities to share data in a Coordinated Access system, which helps people experiencing homelessness access multiple shelters within a community without having to register separately at each one. 

However, he adds, while the support and funding might have been there, shelters and community organizations working with homeless people aren’t always incentivized to collect and coordinate this data. “There are huge challenges with spotty data collection, and community organizations also lack the capacity to do it well,” Dr Gaetz says. “Very few homeless shelters have a [dedicated] data person.”

How can the sector move from tracking homelessness to preventing it?

At Making the Shift, the team of researchers is focusing on practical applications of data and technology to actively prevent homelessness before it happens. However, Dr Gaetz points out, for most organizations, there is little appetite for gathering data that goes beyond a point count of people experiencing homelessness at any given time period. Some organizations will have a Homeless Management Information System in place, which is a database that collects data about a person’s housing situation. But these also aren’t necessarily standardized across organizations. 

There is also an issue with only focusing on the data points that indicate whether or not somebody is housed, Dr Gaetz adds. 

An unintended consequence of this, he says, is that it prevents housing as the end-all solution — but housing doesn’t necessarily come with all of the wraparound support to keep somebody out of the homelessness cycle, be that meaningful employment, social assistance, or health services. “There are also indicators of wellbeing beyond being housed, such as social inclusion, and [exposure to] racism, homophobia and transphobia,” he adds. 

In other words, simply housing a person doesn’t necessarily prevent them from entering homelessness ever again.

“The data systems that we collect are not in any way designed to support prevention,” he adds. For instance, in Making the Shift’s domain of preventing youth homelessness, it’s crucial to collect data about the ages at which someone first experiences homelessness. “The current Coordinated Access system will only allow you to register people at the ages of 16 and older. However, when we asked people how old they were when they first experienced homelessness, it was between 12 and 20 years old that it peaked.” The policy implications of this, he adds, are huge. 

This single statistic has helped Making the Shift design early interventions that specifically prevent young people from entering cycles of homelessness. For example, Youth Reconnect is an example of a school-based intervention that also trains educators to spot and mitigate early signs of young people at risk. 

That also enables the sector to start considering some of the additional social and environmental factors that might be triggering people to enter homelessness in the first instance. 

Tim Richter, founder of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, cites an example in Guelph, Ontario, whereby a lot of young people under the age of 18 were coming into a certain shelter. The shelter, in turn, hired a diversion worker to speak with these young people as they were coming in. “The shelter managed to drop youth homelessness by 70 per cent just through one worker,” Richter summarizes. 

Both Dr Gaetz and Richter cite the importance of gathering data that reveals the reasons that people enter homelessness in the first instance. They also say that this data needs to be shared across multiple sectors in the social impact space, especially with organizations working with veterans, domestic violence survivors, at-risk hospital patients, children and young people in care, and those coming out of the prison system. 

“This shifts each agency from saying ‘This is my client’, to the community saying ‘This is our client,’” Richter adds. 

How can the homelessness sector ensure that clients are fairly included in and informed on data collection activity?

 While the aggregation of shelter data can help in understanding the scale of the problem and where to target policy interventions, this large-scale data also needs to go hand-in-hand with data about individual people’s housing needs. According to Richter, adopting a by-name list – a list of everybody experiencing, or at risk of, homelessness in a community, which is updated in real-time – can “lead a quiet revolution”. 

Some shelters are gathering real-time data on a weekly or monthly basis, including recording how many people are new to homelessness, how many are returning to homelessness, how many are being housed, how many people have become inactive in the community, and how many people return from a period of being inactive. 

“Shelters can also document [a person’s] needs and how they can help them,” Richter says, adding that a by-name list can help someone articulate exactly what type of housing they need, any family they would like to be close to, and if they’re able to access employment. 

The federal government considers housing to be a right in Canada, but “if you’re invisible to the system, you can’t access that right to housing,” Richter adds. 

While by-name lists can mitigate the problem of people having to repeat their stories when they register their data at multiple shelters, these lists can also raise concerns about data privacy and sensitivity. This is particularly important when working with vulnerable groups of people. There should also be special considerations when shelters are working with Indigenous communities experiencing homelessness, Richter adds, understanding the principles of ownership, control, access and possession when it comes to gathering data.  

For both Richter and Dr Gaetz, involving the client actively in the process of gathering data is one of the main ways to mitigate privacy concerns – including co-creating a plan with them present, or simply asking if it’s okay to share their information with other organizations. 

“Typically, people will say yes to sharing data, but might not want to share with one organization where they had a bad experience,” Dr Gaetz suggests. 

Involving and seeking consent from a person in a data collection process is also a critical part of maintaining a person’s dignity during the process of finding a long-term housing solution, rather than suggesting or imposing solutions that might not fit with their needs in the long-run. 

An extremely sophisticated, data-driven system could predict if a person or family is at risk of becoming chronically homeless before they actually do, Dr Gaetz says. But in a sector that isn’t data-savvy, and where data collection might be considered a “distracting” or “unpleasant” task, there is a long way to go. 

Beyond funding, there also needs to be dedicated data support within the homelessness sector, especially when it comes to cleaning and analyzing the data that has already been gathered, he adds. “An outreach worker could start to see patterns or changes in what is happening, but most small organizations don’t have that capacity.” 

According to Dr Gaetz, increasing data literacy across the sector will also require a change management process. Richter echoes this: “If you’re a frontline worker and really busy, the last thing you want to do is fill in a survey. But people should see [data] as an essential element of providing care.” 

He also warns that most shelters won’t get it right from the beginning, but making successes and failures transparent can dispel some of the nervousness. “A fear of accountability can be nerve-wracking.”

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