Toronto

Features of the Homeless Population

Toronto has a comprehensive registration system that provides reliable information on people using shelters (also known as “hostels” in Canada), excluding shelters reserved for abused women. As of 2003, about 4,000 individuals stayed in more than fifty homeless shelters each night. Statistics on a recent eleven-year time span are revealing. Between 1988 and 1999, the annual number of individuals using shelters increased from 22,000 to 30,000. Shelter users included adults not accompanied by children (60 percent), youth aged fifteen to twenty-four (23 percent), and parents with children (17 percent). Toronto is one of the few Canadian cities with a significant number of homeless families; the number of children using the shelter system rose from 2,700 in 6,200 in those same eleven years.

Many shelter users are newly homeless: 57 percent of people entering shelters in 1999 had never stayed in one before. However, recurrent homelessness is increasingly common; those logging more than five shelter stays in one year rose from 10 to 16 percent. About 18 percent of shelter users during that period were long-term residents with stays of one year or more; most of these were single men. Single-parent [Page 564]families remain in shelters for an average of one to two months.

Many shelter residents come from outside Toronto, and 14 percent are immigrants to Canada. Among homeless youth and adults without children, the racial distribution is approximately 73 percent white, 15 percent black, 5 percent Aboriginal (referring to the indigenous population), and 7 percent other races. The number of non–shelter residents living on Toronto's streets at any one time has not been accurately determined, but probably ranges in the hundreds.