A staggering new report from The City of Toronto shows the amount of unhoused people doubling in the city in just three years, leading advocates to call on more intergovernmental work to solve the crisis.
The city’s 2024 Street Needs Assessment (SNA) shows the number of unhoused people in the city growing between 2021 and 2024.
According to the report, there were an estimated 7,347 unhoused people in Toronto in 2021, that number dramatically increased to 15,418 by 2024.
The report says multiple factors have contributed to the growth in homelessness, including insufficient affordable and supportive housing supply, increased cost of living, and inadequate wage and income supports.
The report goes on to say that demand for shelter will continue beyond this year if these systemic factors are not addressed.
When detailing the leading factor driving homelessness, the SNA points to a lack of income for housing taking place at a time when rent in the city continues to climb at a high rate.
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A bachelor unit in Toronto has risen by 62 per cent over the past decade, but according to the report, the Ontario Works shelter allowance has only increased by four per cent.
The findings come as no surprise to Director of Toronto Alliance To End Homelessness, Savhanna Wilson, who says the current systems set in place are failing those who can’t afford rent in the city.
“The government isn’t willing to invest what it takes to solve this crisis…Homelessness is driven by decades of disinvestments in affordable and social housing and with a chronic underfunding of things like income supports,” they said to Now Toronto on Tuesday.
Wilson went on to say the income supports such as OW and ODSP are significantly smaller compared to what it costs to live in the city. Currently, a single person on OW can get up to $733 a month for basic needs and shelter, while the maximum income support for a single person on ODSP is $1,368 a month.
“They’re not tied to inflation, they’re not tied to any kind of universal basic income or cost of living,” they said.
Outreach worker for Sanctuary Toronto, Greg Cook, agrees and says the crisis now feels overwhelming.
“I’ve been an outreach worker for over 15 years, and it keeps getting worse. I can say all three levels of government know what to do, that people need housing they can afford, but instead housing keeps getting more expensive,” he said.
Cook says this is putting a strain on the shelter system.
“The chance of getting a shelter bed is below 10 per cent when you call and it’s sometimes as low as one per cent,” he said.
Both Wilson and Cook say that more social and supportive housing is needed, but also an increase in intergovernmental collaboration.
“We’ve been demanding that there be an intergovernmental task force to address this issue years ago when it wasn’t nearly this bad,” Cook said.
The report also recommends more collaboration between all three levels of government.
Wilson says that different levels of government continue to ‘point fingers’ when addressing the issue.
“It requires the province and the municipality to collaborate and work together to allocate those resources in the appropriate buckets to ensure that there’s affordable, deeply affordable, supportive and social housing,” they said.
