Editor's note: Before this story was published, The Trillium twice requested further information on these statistics from the housing minister’s spokespeople and received no response. After it was published, a spokesperson issued a statement saying the "unofficial estimate" of homeless Ontarians is inaccurate but has declined to say how that figure was reached or provide a more accurate, comparable figure. To read more about the scale of homelessness in Ontario, click here.
The government of Ontario estimates nearly a quarter of a million people — roughly three of every 200 residents — are homeless, according to information contained in a housing ministry document.
The number is about nine times higher than the auditor general’s most recent estimate, and still likely drastically undercounts the true number of people experiencing homelessness in the province, experts say.
Ontario’s “unofficial estimate” of “approximately 234,000 individuals” experiencing homelessness is referred to in the transition binder created by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing for Associate Housing Minister Vijay Thanigasalam after he was appointed to the cabinet role in June.
The Trillium obtained the transition binder in response to a freedom-of-information request.
The binder doesn’t fully explain how the estimate was calculated. Spokespeople for the municipal affairs and housing minister didn’t respond to a media request that included questions about how this estimate was reached.
However, the binder notes that 59,100 people receiving Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) payments were homeless as of April 2024 — about six per cent of the total number of OW and ODSP recipients.
OW provides income support to people who have lost their jobs and are looking for work, while ODSP supports people with a disability that restricts their ability to work.
In the same month, the province’s shelter space was 97 per cent occupied, according to the transition binder.
With shelters essentially full, housing supports have massive waitlists, the documents show.
As of December 2022, 176,804 households were waiting to access “subsidized housing” across the province. There were 2.6 people in the average Ontario household in 2021.
As of about a year ago, 72,700 “supportive housing” spaces in the province were in use, with about 30,000 more “needed across Ontario,” the binder states.
Taken together, the until-now unreleased figures provide a look at an acute and rapidly deteriorating crisis that experts say the provincial government, like many before it, has shrunk from.
Jesse Rosenberg, the director of policy at the Wellesley Institute, said he wasn’t surprised by the numbers.
“This is what we've been saying. This is what other experts have been saying for a long time,” Rosenberg said. “We knew this was bad.”
Asked about the worsening state of homelessness last week, Premier Doug Ford stuck to his “getting it done” theme.
“Well, we’re going to continue building homes. We’re putting record investments in homeless and in shelter, unlike any government has ever contributed towards that, and we’re going to continue building,” he said.
“But the best way to get people an upper hand is basically to get them good paying jobs. There’s still over 230,000 jobs available. So, if they’re healthy, they should be working. If they’re unhealthy, we will take care of them. I’ve always had that philosophy.”
But the type of housing the Ford government is focused on won’t help the people who are homeless and on ODSP, Rosenberg said.
“Is this trickle-down all over again, only with housing?” he said, referring to the Reaganomics principle in which wealth for top earners “trickles down” to everyone else.
Rosenberg noted that the recommendation to build 30,000 supportive housing units is from an eight-year-old committee report.
“So we presume this is outdated,” he said.
Supportive housing spaces support people with addictions, mental illness or disabilities, and include units supported by long-term housing assistance — like rent supplements and housing allowances — that also offer services like counselling and skills training.
“You're not going to get a market-based solution to that,” Rosenberg said.
“Mental health and addictions issues are prevalent” among homeless people, the transition binder notes, with more than half experiencing a mental health issue (63 per cent) and a substance use issue (58 per cent).
Wait times for supportive housing are up to seven years long, with about 27,000 adults with a developmental disability waiting for residential supports and services in the province, the document adds.
In Toronto alone, 15,000 people are waiting to access mental health- or addictions-supportive housing.
“I'm terrible at math in the morning,” said John Bell of Raising the Roof, but adding only 30,000 units to deal with 42,000 people on waitlists — before even accounting for others — “just doesn’t make sense.”
As a rough estimate, 60,000–100,000 units is likely more in line with what’s needed, he said.
There are 301,000 households in community housing in the province (including 240,000 in social housing and 61,000 in affordable rentals), according to the binder.
A murky and worsening crisis
Although there are various challenges to accurately tracking homelessness, the data compiled by the Housing Ministry suggests the issue has reached an alarming place.
In a 2021 report, the province’s auditor general said the province has “only a patchwork of data, making it difficult to systemically understand the state of homelessness in Ontario.”
In 2018, municipalities counted 21,000 people experiencing homelessness across the province, the auditor noted. While acknowledging data gaps, the report and its December 2023 followup each determined “for every 10,000 people in Ontario, 16 people were homeless.”
According to the data given to the new associate housing minister, the problem is now much worse.
The new “unofficial estimate” of 234,000 homeless people is almost 1.5 per cent of Ontario’s population of about 16 million. If accurate, it would mean that for every 10,000 people in Ontario, nearly 150 are homeless — nine times more than the auditor general calculated.
The associate housing minister’s transition binder also notes that between two-in-five to two-in-three people (41 per cent to 65 per cent) who experience homelessness in Ontario are “chronically homeless,” meaning they’re unhoused for half of the year or more.
The auditor general found in 2023 that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing had begun working toward collecting better homelessness data — as was recommended in its 2021 audit — but still hadn’t taken action on 12 of the 30 actions it recommended.
One approach the ministry has taken is having 47 service managers — those who deliver programs — develop “by-name lists” of people experiencing homelessness. They reported last October that 2,500 people lived in encampments across the province, the associate minister’s transition binder said, noting “these numbers will likely have changed since (then).”
A survey of cities and towns by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), released last month, found at least 1,400 encampments across the province — a far higher estimate, unless an encampment can be defined as one or two people.
Last week, big city mayors came to Queen’s Park to demand the Ford government appoint a single ministry responsible for homelessness and addictions.
In the binder, the ministry admitted that wrangling multiple parts of the government is a problem.
Supportive housing programs, for example, which are spread out over the Ministries of Housing, Health and Social Services “are generally unco-ordinated, have multiple access points, are difficult for people to navigate and people with complex needs are often not well-served by individual programs that target specific needs,” it said.
Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe said there’s a “significant underreporting” of homelessness in Ontario, “particularly for women.”
Estimates often come from shelter numbers, but many women fleeing violence feel unsafe and so don’t go to shelters, she said.
“There's a lot of women who stay in abusive relationships, or who are couchsurfing. It's hidden,” she said.
“We typically assume that there's about twice as many of those people as there are officially registered,” Bell said.
Bell said he’d like to see an “integrated, provincewide approach” that includes building affordable housing directly, “as opposed to leaving it to Fort Frances and Toronto and Barrie and London and Sudbury or Sarnia etc., to figure out what their little piece of the pie is.”
He noted that many people who are out of work leave small communities for larger ones before finally settling in Toronto, where more jobs and services are available. Cheap housing would allow them time to hunt around, instead of leaving loved ones in those communities and straining services in larger ones, Bell said.
Bell also suggested the province streamline its requirements for anti-homelessness programs with the feds and municipalities.
“What I need to do to qualify for federal seed capital through, say, CMHC or Reaching Home funds can be very different from what I need to do to qualify for provincial funding, can be very different from what I need to do to qualify for municipal support,” he said.
COVID, refugees added pressure
The associate housing minister’s transition binder highlighted various “current issues” affecting the province’s homelessness problem, including impacts from the pandemic and asylum claimants.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the province’s 400-plus emergency shelters added new temporary facilities to allow distancing and isolation, or bought PPE and other safety supplies. Demand for supports or services within shelters also increased, according to the binder.
Since pandemic health measures and restrictions have lifted, and $1.2-billion in short-term funding the province provided to improve housing and homeless shelters has gone dry, shelters have had to adapt, including by delivering services in new ways, and responding to a homeless population with more complex needs.
A fast and steep increase in asylum seekers to Ontario has also “created significant pressures” on many local shelters, the associate housing minister’s transition binder said.
Migrants to Canada can claim asylum at ports of entry to the country. The process is meant to offer individuals fleeing their home country over fear of persecution an opportunity to reside safely in Canada, including a pathway to becoming a permanent resident.
Two years ago marked a then-record year for asylum claims in Canada, with almost 26,500 processed in Ontario.
In 2023, that number had shot up to 63,135 in the province.
Toronto’s shelter system has capacity for around 10,000 people. This February, more than 4,300 asylum claimants were using the system. Three years ago, in September 2021, 537 asylum claimants were in city shelters.
Governments love to boast about funding numbers — “we’d start from the other direction,” Rosenberg said.
“So start with a vision of an Ontario where homelessness has been ended … then provide the public with the targets for how many people you're going to help each year until the problem is ended,” he said.
Studies have shown for decades that spending on supportive, stable housing saves lots of money downstream, Bell said.
A supportive housing spot is about $500/month, while a hospital bed is around $12,000, he said. The cost to house a prisoner is more than $9,000/month, per the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer.
“You’re paying either way,” Bell said.
