Let's Starty Counting Those On The Brink Of Homelessness

Don't count on it

“Numbers add up to nothing.” Neil Young sang that line a long time ago in a song about existential inevitability and accepting responsibility. If you happen to be really pessimistic, the line could also serve as the slogan for the city’s second Street Needs Assessment (a.k.a. the homeless count), which went down last Wednesday night. I happen to like the poetry of the line, and Mr. Young has long been something of a hometown hero to me. And also, I pretty much agree with its sentiment as far as the Street Needs Assessment goes.

It’s no secret that the program was criticized from many sides when it was first proposed back in 2006. Both the Wellesley Institute and Canada’s academic poverty guru David Hulchanski argued that there is no reliable way to count homeless people, with the latter stating, “There are too many who do not want to be counted, too many places where the houseless can find a place to stay for the night … and attempts to count are never provided enough resources to produce a somewhat defensible number.” And the fact that this year’s count pretty much ignores the objections, relying on the same methods in order to ensure a consistency of results, means such opinions aren’t likely to change.

Shelter Support and Housing, the city division orchestrating the count, admits that the number isn’t exact, but says that’s part of the methodology: what they are doing is capturing a point-in-time snapshot of the homeless population in order to provide an insight into their needs.

Even if counting the homeless provided an accurate representation of the state of poverty in Toronto, why should quantifying the problem make for a more effective way of dealing with it? I mean, we know approximately how few sharks are left in the ocean and that doesn’t impel us to ban shark-fishing the world over. And when was the last time climate-change statistics made any real impact on truly effective environmental policy in even the most forward-thinking nation?

So then, what’s the point? The assessment is actually more than just a head count; approximately 1,600 volunteers spread out across the city, on streets and in shelters and hospitals, screening everyone they meet to find out if they are homeless and then asking a series of questions about why they don’t have housing and what would help them to get housed. In this way, the assessment serves the city’s most back-patted poverty-battling initiative: Streets to Homes. After the last count, the results showed that nine out of 10 people said they wanted housing, which, paired with the purported almost 90 per cent of Streets to Homes participants remaining successfully housed seems to indicate that the city is on the right track and that their solution is working.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Streets to Homes’ housing-first approach to homelessness is one of the better options — although the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) remains highly critical of the city acting as if the program could replace all other forms of social service. What’s more troubling however, according to the Wellesley Institute and Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, is that the street-count numbers seem to be used to justify closing shelters even when the word on the street, so to speak, is that the homeless and under-housed population is as big as ever.

But there is a danger here of turning this whole exercise into something closer to New York where certain funding is dependent on their Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) street count. Any time these numbers are used to calculate or prove the usefulness of anything, all we are doing is kidding ourselves about the impact we are having on poverty. The numbers divert attention from the circumstances, the causes and the real solutions.

In the end, the Street Needs Assessment count cost around $150,000 ($7,000 of that being paid to volunteers working as homeless decoys in order to ensure some semblance of quality control in the study) and employed at least 3,600 collective hours of volunteer service. Taking part in the count in order to get a first-hand look into the process, I couldn’t help but feel like my time would have been better spent doing something other than searching for street people in the wealthy neighbourhoods near Bathurst and Wilson. Surely there are drop-in centres that could use the money and people power to effectively assist the homeless who come in looking for help.

I mean if we want a better “point-in-time” representation of poverty in Toronto, why not design a more extensive survey that outreach, intake shelter or social service workers could administer at times when participants are more comfortable and willing to open up about their needs? Instead of getting a vague idea about the number of homeless, let’s focus our energies on the complex task of creating comprehensive supportive housing programs. Why should we rely on a snapshot for a situation that resembles a mixed-media collage?