Black people are over-represented in homeless counts in Canada but the details of who, where and why are clouded by a lack of data, a webinar audience was told.

The webinar was presented Feb. 1 by the Expert Community On Housing (ECOH) and was entitled: Filling in the Gaps: Estimating the Prevalence of Black Homelessness in Canada. It featured research led by Ashley Wilkinson, a Health Sciences PhD student at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) and Dr. Rebecca Schiff, Dean, Faculty of Human and Health Sciences, (UNBC).

Using data from 61 designated communities that participated in the 2018 national homelessness enumeration, researchers found that Black people were overrepresented in 80% of the point-in-time counts compared to their representation in the local population.

“In Halifax, 16% of the respondents in the homeless count identified as Black or African Nova Scotian compared to only 3.8% of the city’s population that identified this way,” Wilkinson said. “In Toronto, 31% of respondents in the homeless count identified as black compared to 9% of the city’s population. Therefore, we see a three-fold overrepresentation. And finally in Ottawa 15% of respondents identified as black in their homeless count, compared to just 6.5% of the city’s population.”

Wilkinson said there are many potential reasons for the overrepresentation, not the least of which was discrimination in education, employment and in housing.

Our team recently completed a systematic review on racism in housing, and found that Black people, as well as other racialized groups, continue to experience racism and discrimination in accessing the housing market,” Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson said better data and more research needs to be done on future enumerations to paint a more accurate portrait of Black people experiencing homelessness. Most communities, for eg., did not report data broken down/separated for each ethnic group, while others had a limited number of variations on Black, or they simply had an “other” category.

“The biggest barriers that we encountered were finding the data, identifying disaggregated data, and trying to really be representative of the populations,” Wilkinson said.

In the United States, where more data is available, the lifetime prevalence among non-Hispanic blacks is 16.8% compared with just 4.8% lifetime prevalence for their white counterparts, supporting the Canadian research findings, she said.

Watch the webinar recording here:
https://assets.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/sf/project/archive/ecoh_webinar/filling-in-the-gaps-en.mp4