Since the 1990s, homelessness has gone up in Canada. The government’s plans and public health helpers have tried to manage it, but it hasn’t worked well. Researchers also noticed that people who are homeless weren’t included in research. This study includes homeless people from different backgrounds to understand the problem better.
The goal of this study was to understand homelessness from the views of homeless people. Data came from open-ended chats with 15 homeless individuals. After looking at the chats, some key ideas appeared. These included lack of money, home, privacy, and help; discrimination, especially against First Nations people and African descent; mental illness and addiction; and the need for better housing rules about rent, mortgage rules, and house tax. It also showed the need to tell people about government support and services.
Canada’s Homelessness Policy
Canada’s Homelessness Policy is a program that helps stop and reduce homelessness in Canada. It gives money to urban, Indigenous, rural, and remote communities to help them with their homelessness problems.
Reaching Home helps the National Housing Strategy. It aims to support vulnerable Canadians in having safe, stable, and affordable housing. The goal is to reduce chronic homelessness by 50% by 2027-2028.
Homelessness affects every community in Canada. It impacts individuals, families, women escaping violence, youth, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities. In 2016, about 129,000 people were homeless and stayed in emergency shelters. That’s why when Reaching Home started in 2019, we promised $2.2 billion to fight homelessness across the country. Since then, we have increased our commitment to nearly $4 billion over 9 years. This includes over $1.1 billion in new investments through Budgets 2021 and 2022 to help more communities.
Goals-Based Approach
We work with communities to create and deliver plans with clear goals. To support this approach, all Housing First investment targets have been removed to give communities more flexibility to meet local needs.
Coordinated Access System
With a Coordinated Access system, communities help those most in need and match them with the right housing and services. This system ensures fairness and easier access to housing and services.
Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS)
The Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS) is a tool that helps service providers in the same community share real-time data and coordinate services better. HIFIS supports daily operations, data collection, and creates a national picture of homelessness.
The Political Economy of Homelessness
While there isn’t one single path to homelessness, understanding power systems and processes offers the best explanation. This is because broader issues cause individual problems like low income, lack of education, illnesses, and disabilities to lead to homelessness. If there was a public policy to house everyone, these personal issues wouldn’t cause homelessness as much.
Homelessness is also linked to a history of colonialism and racism mixed with capitalism. This kind of racism still exists in Canada.
Gender-based Homelessness
In family shelters, about 90% of users are women-led families. On Indigenous reserves, 42% of women face housing insecurity. LGBTQ2+ individuals are twice as likely to be homeless or insecure in housing compared to non-LGBTQ2+ people. They are also three times more likely to live on the streets or in emergency shelters, and twice as likely to couch surf or face abuse leading to homelessness.
Reasons for homelessness among women, girls, and gender-diverse groups include family violence, intimate partner violence, exclusion, poverty, and financial insecurity. Gender-based homelessness is tied to sexism in societies like Canada. Showing the different causes of homelessness helps create better public policies to address housing insecurity and its health impacts.
Canada’s Housing Crisis
The housing crisis is a big concern for Canadians, especially those with low or unstable incomes.
Key Points:
- Housing affordability has worsened over the past 20 years (Bank of Canada’s Housing Affordability Index).
- About 2.6 million people, or 1 in 10 households, need core housing.
- Canada has only 3.5% of community housing in the total housing market, which is low compared to other G7 countries.
- Most community housing was built between the 1960s and 1980s.
- Renters are almost four times more likely to need core housing compared to homeowners.
Factors Contributing to the Housing Crisis
Demand Factors Increasing Housing Prices:
- Higher disposable incomes
- Population growth
- Low mortgage rates
- Expectation of rising house prices
- Changes in the housing market liquidity
- Low policy rates by the Bank of Canada encouraging mortgage debt
- Investors buying more houses
Supply Factors
Long approval times, construction delays, land availability, land-use rules, material costs, and a worker shortage make it hard to increase housing quickly. To make housing affordable like it was in 2003 and 2004, Canada needs 3.5 million more homes by 2030.
To restore affordability, governments and the housing sector must create more housing for all income levels. Investments in housing are still below what they were in the 1980s, which isn’t enough to increase community housing stock significantly.
