Homeless Shelter Use by Age and Community with Implications for the Cost of Maintaining City-Wide Systems of Emergency Shelters: A Comparison of Calgary and Toronto

We use administrative data from Calgary and Toronto to tie together three key results from the literature on homeless shelter use. Those results are used to derive estimates of the cost of maintaining a community-wide system of homeless shelters. The three key results-that people experience sheltered homelessness in vastly different ways, that the experience varies by their age, and that these experiences vary by community-are shown by using comparable data collected over a common period of time and by applying common assumptions and methods to the treatment of those data. This approach allows us to test for statistically significant differences in how sheltered homelessness is experienced and so provides a set of results confirming how much the ways in which people experience sheltered homelessness are sensitive to their age and their location. Finally, we show how these differences matter for the cost of maintaining a community-wide system of emergency homeless shelters. Our results confirm that what may be an inexpensive solution to providing shelter in some locations and for some demographics is rather more expensive in another location and for a different demographic. The cost savings realized by shelter operators from housing those who were previously homelessness is also measured.