How many people are experiencing homelessness? How many have experienced homelessness in the past? These are important questions, but they are very difficult to answer. They are difficult to answer in part because there is controversy about how to define homelessness. Most agree that someone who sleeps outdoors or in places not intended for human habitation or “rough sleeping” is experiencing homelessness. The same goes for someone sleeping in an emergency shelter. But what about people who have accommodation that is only temporary?  Or someone that can be evicted in a moment’s notice? Think of someone crashing on a couch with the possibility of losing their accommodation at the whim of the friend or acquaintance. Someone in jail or in hospital without a place to sleep when released may in the same way be considered homeless. What about someone currently housed but falling behind in rent and under threat of eviction? They are at high risk of homelessness and may be pushed over that edge with the next unexpected bill or next loss of hours of work. Are they part of the homelessness problem?

When assessing the scope of homelessness in our city, how large is the size of the population we should be thinking about?

These are important questions. Governments at all levels – federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and First Nations – declare their interest in addressing homelessness. But if we have trouble defining the problem, and defining how many people are experiencing the problem, then governments will struggle coming up with effective solutions.

To this end, many communities undertake what are known as Point-in-Time (PiT) counts. As the name suggests, this involves counting the number of people experiencing homelessness at a point-in-time, that is, on a particular date. The effort involves asking the operators of homeless shelters to report the number of people sleeping in their shelters on that night and asking jails and hospitals for the number of people in their care without a fixed address. It also involves coordinating volunteers to count the number of people found to be sleeping on the street or in other places not intended for human habitation. PiT counts cannot count everyone. They miss people sleeping on someone’s couch and they do not count the number of people at high risk of homelessness. But it is something and it is useful.

In Calgary, a PiT count has been done in 14 of the past 31 years. The last count was conducted the night of September 27, 2022. The next figure reports the results of that and previous counts. However, this does not give us a very good picture of how the number of people in homelessness has changed over time in Calgary because it doesn’t consider the population of Calgary increased dramatically over this period. With population growth, we expect to observe more people experiencing homelessness and we should account for that. Fortunately, that is easy to do.

The second figure measures the number of people experiencing homelessness relative to the city’s population.

The figure shows two distinct periods. From 1992 to 2008, the number of people experiencing homelessness on the night of the count increased very quickly and by 2008 it was over five times what it was in 1992. To put it differently, during a period of very rapid population growth, the number of people experiencing homelessness grew at an even faster rate. Since 2008, the number of people experiencing homelessness, measured per 10,000 Calgarians, has fallen by 46%. That is impressive and we should celebrate the efforts of the Calgary Homeless Foundation and all the agencies with which it works to reduce homelessness.

But let's be careful to properly interpret what we are seeing. One should not look at the first graph and conclude the issue of homelessness currently only involves the 2,782 people identified in the PiT count conducted on September 27, 2022. No. The problem is much larger than that.

Homelessness is dynamic. It is not always the same people experiencing homelessness night after night. If another PiT count were conducted the week after the 2022 count, many of those counted would have been different people. People move in and out of homelessness on a regular basis. Research at the School of Public Policy and elsewhere shows that for the majority of people, the experience of homelessness is a short and rare occurrence. Someone counted on the night of the PiT count may not have been homeless the day before and may not be homeless in the near future. Yes, there are certainly people counted on the night of the PiT count who are homeless day after day after day. But the PiT does not identify who those people are.

To understand the size of the homelessness problem, we need other measures that can supplement the information provided by a PiT count. An important source of information comes from the operators of homeless shelters who provide data on the number of people using their shelters each and every night. This allows researchers to identify who is staying in homeless shelters for long periods of time and who is not. But these measures miss people whose experience with homelessness does not involve the use of emergency shelters, namely, the rough sleepers, the couch surfers, people in jail and hospitals, and all those currently homed but at high risk of homelessness. So, these data also only reveal part of the puzzle.

An interesting way of appreciating the size of the homelessness problem is to observe the size of the movement of people into and out of homelessness. Our research at the School of Public Policy shows that in Calgary, between 300 to 400 people each month enter an emergency homeless shelter who have never been in a shelter before. This suggests that the size of the population in Calgary that is at risk of homelessness must be quite large and that the 2,782 people counted as experiencing homelessness on September 27, 2022 is only the tip of the iceberg defining all those Calgarians either experiencing homelessness or at serious risk of homelessness. Trying to measure the size of that iceberg, and how it changes in size from year to year, is an on-going effort by the research team at the School of Public Policy.