What Does It Take to Exit Homelessness?

Tegan: Welcome to Eh Sayers, a podcast from Statistics Canada, where we meet the people behind the data and explore the stories behind the numbers. I'm your host, Tegan Bridge. We make a promise every episode: to meet the people behind the data and explore the stories behind the numbers. Often that means meeting the people at Statistics Canada who produce and analyze numbers, but it also means going beyond that, trying to see and understand the person behind every data point so that they are more than a statistic. Peter: So many people don't realize that the people who are homeless, the people who are here at the Ottawa Mission or at the Shepherds of Good Hope or Salvation Army or Cornerstone, one of those services, those people are at a point in time in their life. They didn't grow up homeless. They weren't in high school saying, “Boy, I hope when I graduate, I become homeless.” There are people who often suffer from mental health or addiction issues, but also people who have just had one event after another that didn't go well in their lives, and suddenly at age 25, 35, 45, they're faced with no other option, where they can't pay the rent, or maybe they're in a poor mental health state or addiction state that they just can't survive otherwise. And for them, we become the last house on the block, the last stop where they can go to get help, to have shelter and to have the basic necessities. But hopefully, they get the help they need to turn around their lives and move on, back onto the road of success and back onto a better journey in life. I'm Peter Tilley, the CEO at the Ottawa Mission. Tegan: Can you tell us about the Ottawa Mission? There are some listeners who won't be familiar with it. What kind of work do you do? Peter: So it's an amazing engine, an amazing hub for anybody who wants to come down and walk inside our blue doors. So, many people know that the Ottawa Mission is a downtown homeless shelter, and with that they expect, basically, our main role is the 250 beds that we have here at night, and our main role would be to provide the meals for the homeless, the over 3,000 meals that we provide every day for people who are homeless, Tegan: But the Ottawa Mission goes beyond providing beds and meals: mental health supports, addiction and trauma services, a primary care clinic, hospice care, a dental clinic, an education program, an employment program. Peter: we have job training here, the Chef Ric’s food services training program, a maintenance services training program, a new program we just started where people can learn to become superintendents. So it's a whole range of facilities here at the Ottawa Mission for people who come in. The whole idea being that we address the issues that brought them to a state of homelessness and then move them on into housing, the biggest piece of which is we also have a very active and engaged housing department. People don't realize that we placed 260 people into housing last year, moved them out from under our roof thanks to our work with landlords. Tegan: In your experience, when someone exits homelessness, what helps them the most to make that transition? Peter: So, believe it or not, and it sounds corny, but hope and dignity and self-worth, if they leave here after we've worked with them on their addictions, mental health issues, if we just give them that hope that you are worthy of this, and most of the trauma of the people who come in under our roof have happened in those formative years. And many of the people here I've talked to, so many who have come in my office, and we've had those conversations. Our stats show that closer to 80% of the people who are here under our roof suffered some form of childhood trauma, often in the form of abuse, sexual abuse, or verbal abuse, many other issues. To try and peel back the layers and give them that dignity, self-worth, that hope that they are worthy of treatment, that they are worthy of mental health supports, that they are worthy of living a life free of that baggage that was put on them is so important as they leave our roof to move into independent living, that they have that confidence now, that value in their life, that they deserve more than to be stuck under a bridge somewhere, perhaps addicted to a substance and not moving on from there. Tegan: What is it that helps someone transition from homeless to housed? StatCan just released new research based on data from the Canadian Housing Survey exploring exactly that, asking which specific factors most often led to regaining and maintaining housing. Jeff: And what we wanted to bring forward in the analysis is understanding the factors that people accessed when they were regaining housing after having experienced a homelessness episode. Tegan: So welcome. Could you please introduce yourself? Jeff: Yeah. Hi. My name is Jeff Randle. I've been working at StatCan since 2006. And right now, I'm the chief of the Housing Need Project section. And among the data programs that we administer in our section are the Canadian housing survey. And we do some cost recovery, or pilot projects, on homelessness. Tegan: Homelessness. That word actually encompasses a pretty diverse set of experiences. Could you talk about that and the different ways a person might experience homelessness? Jeff: Yeah, so when we're talking about homelessness, I think two big factors to consider are where it happens and for how long it happens. Jeff: So when we look at homelessness two ways of, of considering it are homelessness that happens in unsheltered or sheltered settings. Tegan: While you might be most familiar with unsheltered homelessness, the most visible type, where people find or make shelters in places not intended for them, like parks or alleys, but this isn't the only kind of homelessness. Less visible is sheltered homeless, where people are able to find refuge in emergency shelters, like a men's shelter or a temporary shelter set up for extreme weather. The last category is called hidden homelessness, and this refers to people who are homeless but who have temporarily found a place to live, like a motel or with family or friends.Jeff: On the flip side, you've got a duration aspect to it, and so chronic homelessness, it refers to longer durations or frequency of being in and out of homelessness over a period of time. And then you have non chronic homelessness, which has been referred to as episodic, and this is more short or infrequent, uh, episodes of homelessness. Tegan: What are some of the challenges involved in trying to get an accurate picture of Canada's homeless population? Jeff: Yeah, so I think the first big thing when you're thinking about how to count the homeless population or how to measure aspects of it or do statistical analysis is it's a hard to reach population. So one not always visible to typical data programs. And that's not to say that homelessness isn't visible when you're walking down the street or to people experiencing it. But from a survey or administrative data perspective, it's difficult or often not possible to identify the person who is experiencing homelessness. And then based on that, being able to produce analysis for these people with the suite of data that we may have at StatCan becomes more challenging if we don't get that signal. Jeff: And so when we think about the tools that we have for producing analysis, you have survey data, which is typically done, at least at StatCan, in dwellings. And the data that we presented in this article uses Canadian Housing Survey data. Now these are going to be retrospective accounts, so lifetime experiences of homelessness, where individuals are asked to recall what it was like at the time, right? But that's also a study on people who are no longer homeless, okay? Jeff: There's also point in time counts, and these are done kind of like a snapshot at one specific period. But this may miss segments of the population who might be homeless at different times throughout the year. It's kind of that one point in time snapshot. There's also the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System that HICC administers. Last thing I want to maybe mention about challenges with producing a count or a picture of homelessness is what's the picture that you're trying to actually capture, right? Because homelessness can be a fluid state for people. We may be homeless at one period, but not the next. So it's important to think of it like, am I going to be looking at how many people have been homeless for a year or at a specific point in time or what type of homelessness? It's going to have different demands, from your data collection perspective. And just that one size does not fit all from a data program, right? Shelter data is going to be useful for some things. Survey is going to be useful for others. Tegan: Challenging portrait to paint. Jeff: It can be, yeah. If you want to have a broad and, and, and in-depth understanding of it, yeah, it's going to require, uh, many different perspectives. Tegan: You mentioned counting people who are not currently homeless, but who have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. How big is that population? Jeff: So, about one in eight people have experienced some form of homelessness in their life. Tegan: That's a lot. Jeff: It's not a small number, but this is the people who have regained housing, right, and the Canadian Housing Survey also only goes to the ten provinces for the reference period in question. And so, people who are still experiencing homelessness, or are experiencing a more entrenched form of homelessness, they may not have the same experiences as the people that are in the sample for the Canadian Housing Survey. Like I said, about 1 in 8 have experienced some form of homelessness in their life. Now, it's far more likely for people to have experienced hidden homelessness, where they've been couch surfing or staying with friends or family than it is for people to have experienced a sheltered or unsheltered episode of homelessness. Tegan: The number of people experiencing homelessness is notable, according to Peter. Peter: We're seeing people in encampments. We're seeing people with nowhere else to go. Here at the Ottawa Mission we've seen this huge influx in the past two years of newcomers, of refugees and asylum seekers coming in to stay under our roof. So it's been a challenge, but it's one that's hit right across the country in the last two years. All the cities, our major Canadian cities, are having to deal with the number of people who are on the streets, the overcrowded shelters. I mean, 10 years ago, everybody was talking about Housing First. We're going to move all the people out of the shelters and into housing. We're going to have wraparound mental health and addiction supports. We're going to solve homelessness. Our lineups to get in for a night are longer than they've ever been. We have more people waiting for a bed, more people having to be fed for meals during the day. It's a crisis, and it's out of control, and it's not getting any better. Tegan: In terms of demographics, what do we know about who's experiencing homelessness? What populations are overrepresented? Jeff: So, Housing Infrastructure and Communities Canada has from their HIFIS, shelter program highlighted—and the coordinated point in time counts program—they've highlighted Indigenous homelessness as a group of individuals who are overrepresented. And we see that mirrored in the Canadian Housing Survey results too. So, just for homelessness experiences in general, Indigenous people in our sample were almost three times more likely to have had a lifetime experience with it, and when you consider sheltered or unsheltered experiences, they were almost four times as likely as the total population to have that type of homeless experience. 2SLGBTQ+ individuals were also more likely and people who were veterans also were a little bit more likely to have experienced some form of homelessness. Tegan: The 2022 Canadian Housing Survey asked households with homelessness experience which factors helped them regain and maintain housing. What did we learn? Jeff: So I mentioned that there's no one size fits all data program for understanding homelessness, and there's no one size fits all solution to it either. Tegan: There’s a range of ways that someone can regain housing: getting a new job or finding affordable housing, maybe with help from a housing agency, or maybe you get support from your social networks. It’s also often the case that it’s not a single factor, but rather a combination of factors that helps somebody find a home. Jeff: Financial-related factors were most common, alright? And so when I talk about financial related factors, I'm referring to increasing your employment income. There's also securing or increasing social assistance or welfare income, and you could also receive financial support from family or friends or from other sources. And so when we're considering financial factors, about 7 out of 10 sheltered or unsheltered people had access to some form of financial support. And for hidden homelessness, it was about two thirds of people. Tegan: Another important factor for some was subsidized housing. Jeff: So, subsidized housing is non-market rental housing. An example of this could be rent that’s geared to your income, ok? So depending on the source of information that you use, whether it’s Census or the Canadian Housing Survey, the total stock of subsidized housing in Canada is about 4 or 5% of the stock. But for people in our sample who had experienced sheltered or unsheltered homelessness, about 1 in 7 of them accessed subsidized housing on their way out of their last homeless episode. But almost a quarter of women accessed subsidized housing when exiting their last episode of homelessness. This could partly be owing to the role of Housing First programs and these are specific housing programs that are intended to take people from homelessness and put them in secure long-term housing. Tegan: Homeownership. Homeownership is the dream for a lot of Canadians. Among those who were formerly homeless, how did they fare in terms of achieving homeownership? And what factors might influence this? Jeff: Yeah, so, you know, if you think about homeownership and what it takes to become a homeowner, it requires savings, and in many cases we've seen other research come out of the agency, StatCan, which has talked about intergenerational impacts of homeownership or the bank of mom and dad. But if on the way to homelessness, as some research to get suggests, specifically out of Calgary and the University of Calgary, individuals will deplete their savings and their incomes before entering an episode of homelessness. So, in Canada, while two thirds of households in the country are owner occupied or homeowner households, people who have experienced some form of homelessness or sheltered or unsheltered episodes, less than one third of them go on to become or have gone on to become homeowners by the time we did the 2022 Canadian Housing Survey. For hidden homelessness, it's a little bit closer to half, but still below half, of households to experience that. And then if you think, “Okay, well if it takes time to save up to buy a home...” We also looked at these, uh, these groups 10 years later. So, so for the group that had had their last homeless episode occurring 10 years or farther ago, the rates are only marginally different. For hidden homeless individuals, it bumps up to a little above half, but still both groups are well below the two thirds for all Canadian households. Tegan: And after regaining housing, were people likely to continue to face housing challenges? Jeff: Yes, in a word, yes. They were. One indicator we chose to bring forward in the analysis, was acceptable housing. And so, acceptable housing is a combination of three indicators. So, if your housing is unaffordable or crowded or it's in a condition that requires major repairs, the housing is considered to be not acceptable, okay? Those without homeless experiences in the past, only three in 10 face one or more of these issues. Okay. But for those who had a sheltered or unsheltered homelessness experience, more than half of them were living in housing that was either unaffordable, crowded, or in need of—the dwelling was in need of major repairs. It could be all three. For hidden homelessness, it was also more than four in ten. So these rates of housing need from that perspective are higher for people who had those experiences. Tegan: Could you talk about the quality of life and the well-being of people who were formerly homeless? Jeff: Yeah, for sure. So, one of the ways that we looked at it in this article was asking about the life satisfaction of individuals. This is a typical quality of life indicator, measures subjective well-being, and so people who had no experience of homelessness in the past, about six out of ten reported a high level of life satisfaction. At the same time, for people who had experienced sheltered or unsheltered episodes, only one quarter reported having a high level of life satisfaction, and a little more than a third of people who had hidden homeless experiences reported a high level of life satisfaction. Tegan: Peter, In what ways does homelessness leave a lasting impact on those who experience it? Peter: Well, unfortunately, many are homeless now because of lack of income to pay the rent, lack of income to buy few food. So, there are long-term effects for people who suffer from homelessness, even after they've gone through one of our programs, even after they've worked with our health clinic to address their needs. So it could be diabetes. It could be a number of issues, perhaps heart disease. Most of our population smokes. So now you're looking at heart disease, cancer, lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver from those who have battled alcoholism. It's really difficult. They will often suffer the long term effects of years of the challenges that they face, whether drug addiction, alcoholism, mental health issues. I was just reading a report recently from one of our sister shelters on the head trauma and the brain trauma that's happening from people who are overdosing on fentanyl and having to be brought back to life through Narcan. That has a severe effect on the brain and, 2, 3, 4, let alone 10, 12, 14 times can have quite an effect on somebody's cognitive abilities and is leading to long term damage, brain damage, where now people who were ready to be housed have high acuity, high mental health issues and are no longer ready to be housed because they need to be in a congregate setting. So certainly there are a lot of long-term effects and long-term damage that, even with the proper supports in place, you unfortunately carry that with you. Even after you've turned your life around and gotten back on your feet. Tegan: Jeff, if someone would like to learn more about your work, Where should they go? Jeff: There's a housing portal on the StatCan website that provides access to a suite of different housing data programs and insights. Maybe I'll just mention that the analysis that we're bringing forward with this article is one piece of a very large puzzle, right? Or one piece of a large system of data and insight providers in Canada. Housing Infrastructure and Communities Canada is responsible for Reaching H they have a series of reports, from point in time counts and their shelter data that are useful and informative as well. StatCan also has other surveys that report on homelessness, like the General Social Survey, Canadian Safety. There's the Survey of Residential Facilities for Victims of Abuse that provides insights as well. And the fourth cycle of the Canadian Housing Survey is in collection through March 2025, with new data being released in 2026. Tegan: Perfect. Thank you very much for your time. Jeff: Thank you. Tegan: And, Peter, for people who are listening and who want to help, but they're not sure how. What are some of the ways that they can make a difference in their communities? Peter: So the best way… we always invite people is to get engaged. Give us a shout here at the Ottawa Mission. Say, I want to come down for a tour. I want to see what you do. It's amazing how many people have come in our doors and had no idea how clean we are, the quality of service we provide, the quality of meals, the dignity, the hope, the education programs, the job training programs. All these services we provide to help break stigma, to help people get out of homelessness. So, we encourage people to come down here for a tour and see what we do. There's no better way for them then to want to get engaged, whether as a volunteer, as a supporter, perhaps financially. People have a hard time turning their back on the services we provide once they've come down and seen the difference we're making in the lives of the homeless. Tegan: And where can they find you? Peter: Yeah, they can please, uh, reach out to learn more at our website, OttawaMission.com. They can call in at 613-234-1155 and say, I want to get engaged or they can just show up at our door. Hopefully they'll book an appointment, but certainly they can reach out to me, Peter, and just say, hey, I want to follow up on that conversation you had and learn more. Tegan: Well, Peter, thank you so much. We really, really appreciate the insight that you bring to this issue. Peter: thank you for your time. Tegan: You've been listening to Eh Sayers. Thank you to our guests, Peter Tilley and Jeff Randle. If you’d like to learn more, there’s a link to the StatCan release on homelessness in the show notes. Tegan: You can subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts. There, you can also find the French version of our show, called Hé-coutez bien! If you liked this show, please rate, review, and subscribe. And thanks for listening!