Unravelling Homelessness: The Dynamics of Shelter Usage and Implications for Policy Solutions
How frequently do people use homeless shelters? Answering this simple question provides insights into the nature of homelessness, its causes, and its solutions.
The number of beds provided by emergency shelters changes only slowly over time. In Calgary, the shelter system provides approximately 1,800 beds per night, and that number has not changed a great deal over the past 10 years. If it were the case that people stay in shelters for long periods of time, then these beds would be filled by the same people each night and we would conclude that homelessness is something suffered by relatively few people. But if people typically stay in shelters for only short periods of time, then homelessness would be understood to be something experienced by many people. In this case, while the number of shelter beds does not change, the number of people experiencing homelessness must be large with new people cycling into the shelter replacing those who have recently exited.
The appropriate public policy designed to address homelessness depends on which of these descriptions is valid. If the same people use shelters day in and day out, homelessness might be an issue for only about 1,800 people in Calgary and solutions are likely to emphasize issues like mental health and substance abuse. If instead new people cycle into shelters on a continuous basis, homelessness is an issue for far more people than this and it might make sense to look instead for solutions to problems affecting much larger numbers of people, problems such as poverty.
So, which is it? In a recently published paper, Ali Jadidzadeh and I have answered the question of how frequently people use homeless shelters using data identifying who used emergency shelters each day over 6 years in Calgary and in Toronto. We also investigated whether younger people (aged 18-24) might use shelters differently than older people (over 24 years of age). The answer, in both Calgary and Toronto and for both young and old, is that most people (over 80%) use an emergency shelter only rarely and for only short periods. In Calgary, over a period of 6 years, people who use shelters in this way stayed an average of 1.5 times, each time for about 17 days. The same calculation for Toronto shows that over 6 years, more than 80% of shelter users stayed an average of 1.5 times with each stay lasting approximately 45 days.
These results suggest that there is a lot of turnover in homeless shelters. Many people found in a homeless shelter today will not be there tomorrow. This high rate of turnover suggests there must be a large population in Calgary that is at high risk of experiencing homelessness. Identifying the size of this population is currently part of our research agenda.
Our findings are also useful for understanding the role of homeless shelters in addressing homelessness. Shelters are often derided because they appear to be costly ways of dealing with homelessness. At an average cost of roughly $100 per night, it costs $36,500 per year to provide a shelter bed. Critics suggest that we can surely do a better job of dealing with homelessness than spending $36,500 per year providing someone with a bed. But our analysis shows that using a shelter bed is an infrequent occurrence and the typical shelter user does not stay in a shelter every night of the year. A single shelter bed is providing assistance for many people requiring only a temporary respite while they re-establish housing.
Rather than ask what it costs to maintain a bed in a homeless shelter, we can use our calculations to ask what it costs to facilitate someone’s transition to permanent housing by providing them with temporary access to an emergency shelter bed. The answer for over 80% of people using shelters, those whose use is infrequent and short, is that the cost is small. In Calgary, assisting a youth trying to transition toward permanent housing by providing space in an emergency shelter cost less than $1,000 spread over 6 years. For an adult, the cost is estimated to be higher at about $2,000 but again, this a cost spread over 6 years. These appear to be small costs for assisting people during short periods of housing dislocation and for facilitating an individual’s efforts to re-establish housing. It is perhaps particularly small compared to the personal costs borne by those unable to secure even temporary shelter and so are forced to live on the street.
Dr. Ron Kneebone the Scientific Director Social Policy and Health at the University of Calgary.