City prepares for 24-hour homeless count

200 workers will fan out to collect data via an 18-question survey

The City of Ottawa’s first point-intime count of homeless people will happen over a 24-hour period this week, involving about 200 city and agency workers administering surveys in shelters, hospitals, correctional centres and on the streets.

City housing director Shelley VanBuskirk said the project working group hopes to survey about 2,800 people starting Thursday at noon.

“We’ve marked out walking routes across the city,” VanBuskirk said. “Teams (of two) will attempt to find people who are sleeping rough, and we also do it at other locations. For instance, the survey will be administered at emergency shelters, day programs, violenceagainst-women shelters, and the Indigenous community is putting on some community feasts for their population.”

The teams will also go to community health centres, transitional housing and treatment programs.

The walking routes will end at 11 p.m., but Salvation Army outreach workers will help during the overnight hours, VanBuskirk said.

City councillors have been asked if they want to help with the surveys and some have confirmed their participation, she said.

The Ontario government requires municipalities to conduct counts in 2018 and every two years after. The federal government is also collecting the data to get a national snapshot of homelessness. The city received $81,000 in federal funding to cover the work being done in Ottawa. A firm with expertise in housing issues, OrgCode Consulting, is helping with the city’s project.

The time of year for the count is determined by the upper governments.

While the city hasn’t done an anonymous point-in-time count, the Alliance to End Homelessness participated in a registry week in 2015 that recorded people’s names, VanBuskirk said.

This week, the 18-question survey will collect demographic information, family statuses, reasons for homelessness, sources of income and any information on military service.

The count will provide valuable data at the midpoint of the city’s 10-year housing and homelessness plan, which started in 2014.

VanBuskirk said the city has an idea how many people are homeless based on who’s using shelters, but it doesn’t have a handle on the so-called hidden homeless. These are people who periodically stay with relatives or friends but have no permanent home.

Those folks can contact the count command centre by emailing pitcount@ottawa.ca or by calling 311 to learn how they can participate in the survey this week.

The count will also give the city a better understanding about people in institutions.

“We don’t often have a great idea about who’s in the correctional system,” VanBuskirk said. “If they were to be discharged tomorrow, would they be discharged to no fixed address, or from the hospital system to no fixed address?”

One criticism of the point-intime count is that the results don’t accurately reflect the state of homelessness, since the collection is only done over 24 hours.

“We need to be very careful how we message it,” VanBuskirk said. “It’s really just an estimate on how many people are experiencing homelessness at any given point in time.”

VanBuskirk said a report with the results should be ready by the end of summer.