Counting the Undercounted: Enumerating Rural Homelessness in Canada
Rebecca Schiff | Ashley Wilkinson | Terrilee Kelford | Shane Pelletier | Jeannette Waegemakers Schiff |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE, International Journal on Homelessness, 2022, (3)1: page 1-17.
Published 2022-12-13 https://doi.org/10.5206/ijoh.2022.2.14633
When most people think of homelessness, they see someone in a doorway off a busy city street or curled up over the ventilation grate above a subway.
But a new article primarily authored by Dr. Rebecca Schiff and Ashley Wilkinson, from the At Home in the North and Community Housing Canada research nodes, reveals that “significant” homelessness exists in Canada’s rural environments, largely “invisible” to the public.
“There are high rates of homelessness in rural Canada, including those experiencing absolute and chronic homelessness,” says their article in the December online issue of the International Journal of Homelessness, titled “Counting the Undercounted: Enumerating Rural Homelessness in Canada.”
The report builds on recently enumerated quantitative data, largely unavailable in the past because of the challenges of locating people who are unhoused over a dispersed geography and the prevalence of people living in undeveloped areas at the edge, or outside, of towns and settlements.
“Significantly, these reports show per capita rates of homelessness in rural communities that are higher than those seen in Canada’s largest urban centres,” the report states.
Of the 55 enumeration reports reviewed, 32 had homelessness rates in excess of .30%. Many had homelessness rates of .60% or higher -1.5 to 5 times higher than rates found in large Canadian cities. By comparison, only .21% of the population of Calgary, .32% of Toronto residents, and .08% of metro Vancouver residents were homeless in the 2018 Point –in –Time counts conducted in those cities.
The highest rates of homelessness were seen mostly in northern regions where several counts indicated homelessness rates exceeding .9% of the population such as in the Rainy River District of Northwestern Ontario, Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Thompson in northern Manitoba, and Prince Rupert in Northern British Columbia.
Almost all of the rural enumerations (96%) reported high proportions of Indigenous peoples experiencing homelessness.
Long-term residency rates were high in most rural counts, indicating that mobility into the areas was not related to the homelessness, except for regional centres like Whitehorse. Many counts reported in excess of 80% of homeless persons having lived in the area for at least one year and over 50% having lived in the region for over 10 years.
“Homelessness in rural Canada may be better understood as “invisible” and not “hidden” since there are large proportions of people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in rural Canada who are unsheltered, sleeping in emergency shelters, or in accommodations not intended for human habitation,” the report states. “Hidden” homelessness includes those “couch-surfing.”
“We suggest that policy and approaches to funding homelessness programs should be adjusted to take into account the changing knowledge about the scale and scope of homelessness in rural Canada,” the report recommends.
Rural homelessness is often “invisible”, under-acknowledged, and undercounted
