HAMILTON — The key to really understanding Hamilton’s housing and homelessness dashboard is remembering that data represents people, says homelessness-policy and programs manager Nadia Zelisko.
“These are households in our community. For those who are in the front-line homeless-serving sector, these are our clients. In the health-care sector, they're often patients. But they are our neighbours. In many cases, these are family members.”
The city, like many others in Ontario, is gripped with a housing crisis. Hamilton’s leaders have been called on to support low-income and unhoused residents by addressing issues such as encampments, warming centres, and the cost of living — and that's just in the past month.
“Any time we make decisions around investments and how to meet people’s needs, we need to do so through an evidence-informed way,” Zelisko says. That's where the dashboard comes in. The publicly available tool displays data including average market rent, the wait-list for affordable housing, the number of unhoused individuals, and shelter occupancy in the city.
TVO Today asked Zelisko to go through some of the figures on the dashboard to explain what they say and what they mean. (The dashboard currently displays 2021 figures; Zelisko says that 2022 numbers should show up within a month or so.)
$1,190 — the average market rent citywide as of 2021
Average market rent tracks the mean monthly cost individuals in Hamilton pay in rent.
“The trends are showing an increased cost,” up from $901 per month in 2016, Zelisko notes.
In addition to measuring housing costs, this data is also used to inform the rates charged in affordable housing, for which a standard of 80 per cent of the average market rent is used.
Asking rents in the city are significantly higher than the average market rate — “a real barrier” for people entering the market or seeking a new lease, Zelisko says. She adds that, while the city provides some people with rent supports, “we are seeing high demand for those resources.”
9 % — the percentage of applicants on the city’s housing wait-list housed in 2021
The dashboard shows that, by the end of 2021, 541 applicants on its Access to Housing Waitlist had secured either a rent-geared-to-income unit or a housing benefit to subsidize rent. There were 5,716 active households on the wait-list.
Zelisko says that Hamilton aims to house 10 per cent of households on the list each year, a benchmark the city hasn’t hit since 2017. She notes that the median percentage of households housed from wait-list was 7.9 per cent across Canadian municipalities in the Municipal Benchmarking Network of Canada.
“The goal is about timely access,” she says, adding that that could be achieved through the increased availability of housing and/or housing benefits.
“There’s no doubt that, both in terms of affordable housing and ending homelessness ... availability or lack of affordable housing is the main driver. It’s one of the main barriers that Hamilton is facing, along with other municipalities across the country.”
1,509 — the number of actively homeless people in Hamilton as of December 2022
The homelessness portion of the dashboard shows that, at the end of 2022, 1,509 people in Hamilton were experiencing homelessness or had accessed the homeless-serving system at least once in the three months prior.
The city funded 515 shelter beds at that time.
The dashboard also shows that, in December, 142 people became newly homeless or returned to homelessness and 336 people either moved into housing or hit three months without using any homelessness-support services.
“We continue to experience unprecedented demand and capacity pressures in both the homelessness-service sector and affordable-housing support sectors,” Zelisko says.
The upward trend of unhoused people in the city, she adds, is likely due to “the higher costs of goods and services, the ongoing social and economic vulnerabilities that we’ve seen exposed throughout the pandemic years, the rising cost of housing,” and also improvements in the city’s ability to track homelessness.
In spring 2022, she says, the city improved its homelessness-data collection to better track how long people are unhoused for and how they use supports. The current system relies on regular input from over 400 people working in social services, and the goal is to have real-time data to work from.
“There’ve been really heroic efforts by front-line staff, in particular, throughout the pandemic, to both meet needs and document that need.”
23 % — the percentage of unhoused respondents who identified as Indigenous or having Indigenous ancestry in Hamilton’s last point-in-time count
Hamilton’s homelessness dashboard complements other data sources, such as the point-in-time count, a survey of unhoused individuals, Zelisko says, adding that the most recent count showed an important figure: 23 per cent of unhoused respondents identified as Indigenous or as having Indigenous ancestry.
Agenda segment, March 25, 2021: Falling short on housing and homelessness
Zelisko says that, given about 3 per cent of Hamilton’s population is Indigenous, this speaks to a “systemic overrepresentation” and that the city is working to address this with Indigenous partners. She also notes that the point-in-time count was conducted using methodology developed by Indigenous leaders who had told the city that earlier statistics underrepresented Indigenous houselessness.
Overall, Zelisko says, good data paired with an understanding of who it represents is crucial for progress and accountability.
“The numbers tell a story of need in our community,” she says. “The trends tell us about where we are successful in meeting people’s needs and where the demand is beyond our current capacity. It gives us the tools we need to then try to advocate and put policies and programs in place to meet the increasing demand.”
Ontario Hubs are made possible by the Barry and Laurie Green Family Charitable Trust and Goldie Feldman in Memoriam.