Winnipeg just admitted its homelessness numbers were wrong. Earlier this year End Homelessness Winnipeg reported about 8,200 people using services, including roughly 4,400 who were chronically homeless. The corrected figures are actually 2,231 and 436. The cause was a federal data system, HIFIS, that apparently didn’t close inactive cases the way the organization understood it would. As many communities use the same system, every tax payer and homeless person should be very concerned.
The numbers in these systems are entered and reported by the organizations that receive the funding. There is no apparent independent checks or audits on them, so they can be misreported, whether by mistake or by design. Funding decisions then follow those numbers, and the groups delivering the work can end up competing with each other for the same dollars.
Most communities fill the gap with a point in time count which is also designed each year by the Federal Government. It uses volunteers who tally the amount of the homeless people in their community who they can find over a day or a week, and now we even see smaller centres like Melfort are running them too. The people doing that work are committed, but a periodic snapshot can’t reliably tell us whether fewer people are homeless this year than last.
The federal government designs the national strategy, funds the response either directly through to oganizations or through the Province, and runs the data system. That makes it directly responsible for whether the results are real. If the programs were built around accountability and transparency, with a baseline, clear targets, public reporting and independent verification, we would get far better systems and results, and we wouldn’t need to rely on questionable point in time counts.
Behind every one of those numbers is a person, and we can’t help people we don’t understand. Some are homeless because of addiction, some because of mental illness, some because they are released from prison, aged out of care or lost a job or a relationship, and many for several reasons at once. Each of those calls for a different response. Understanding what people need, and then meeting those needs, and should be the whole point of the system.
What’s really sad is homelessness is rising across the country, and so is public frustration, with more protest and activism, just like we saw in our own city with the recent encampment clean up. I feel like banging my head on a brick wall, but I’ll say it again: a reduction plan has to come before things get further out of hand, and a plan can’t work if we can’t trust the numbers and stats.
That’s what I’ve been pressing for in my work with others: plans that involve measurable targets, open reporting, and review from outside the funded organizations. If a dollar goes out the door, we should be receiving reports and be able to see the effects of how many got housed, whether they stayed housed, and how we are adapting our programs to ensure more people don’t eter homelessness in the first place.