Ending Homelessness in Toronto · Chapter 1

The Problem: Homelessness in Toronto Today

A chapter of Ending Homelessness in Toronto — this project’s receipt-backed book on ending homelessness for less than the crisis costs now. Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, the text says so on its face. How the checking works: how we verify · corrections.

The scale, and how fast it moved

Toronto counts its homeless population through the Street Needs Assessment (SNA), a combined point-in-time count and survey the City has run periodically since 2006. The trend line is the starting fact of this whole report:

Sources: City of Toronto, 2021 Street Needs Assessment Results Report; 2024 Street Needs Assessment, July 2025; Street Needs Assessment research page (Oct. 2025 count).

The 2024 count broke down as 63% in City-administered shelters, 17% in bridging/triage programs, 10% in provincially administered facilities, and 10% outdoors — and of the 12,304 people in shelter or bridging programs, 6,350 were refugee claimants (City of Toronto, 2024 SNA, July 2025). Toronto's shelter system is far larger than a single night's count suggests: average nightly occupancy was 9,010 in 2023 and roughly 9,700–9,800 in 2024–2025, but close to 22,000–24,200 different people cycled through the system across each of those years (City of Toronto, "Shelter System Flow Data"; 2024 Toronto Shelter and Support Services Annual Report). On the City's own throughput count, the shelter system served 20,700 unique individuals in 2022, a confirmed 27% increase over the 16,300 served in 2016 (City of Toronto, "City of Toronto update on shelter system capacity pressures," May 31, 2023). Even as the system has expanded, it has not kept pace with demand: an average of 278 callers a day were turned away from Toronto's Central Intake line unmatched to any bed in September 2023, falling to a projected 216/day in January 2025 and a targeted 125/day for 2026 — real progress, but still a daily queue of people with nowhere to go (City of Toronto, 2025 Budget Notes and 2026 Budget Notes, Toronto Shelter and Support Services).

The refugee claimant surge

Much of the 2021–2024 spike, and much of the 2025 improvement, traces to one population: refugee and asylum claimants. They were 13% of Toronto's homeless population in 2021 and over 50% by 2024, with average nightly shelter occupancy by claimants rising from roughly 530 a night in September 2021 to a peak of 6,490 on August 20, 2024 — more than an eleven-fold, roughly 1,125% increase (City of Toronto briefing note, March 19, 2025) — before falling to roughly 3,420–3,450 nightly as of September 2025. Mayor Olivia Chow's September 26, 2025 letter to Executive Committee states directly, "we now have 3,420 claimants in our shelter system... we are still providing shelter support for 3,450 refugee claimants every night," corroborated by an August 8, 2025 TSSS briefing-note figure of 3,528 and Chow's own August 21 public statement of "3,500 plus" (City of Toronto, 2024 SNA; Mayor Olivia Chow, letter to Executive Committee, "Cuts to Federal and Provincial Support for Housing," Sept. 26, 2025). This is squarely a federal responsibility colliding with a municipal budget: Ottawa's Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP), which reimburses cities for asylum-claimant shelter costs, lapsed without consultation in March 2023, was only partially reinstated that July, and Toronto has run funding gaps against it every year since — a $103 million shortfall in 2023, a $21.7 million gap in the 2025 budget, and Mayor Olivia Chow's public warning of a $107 million shortfall in 2025–26 (City of Toronto, Report for Action, Sept. 2023; 2025 Budget Notes; Report EX26.13, Cuts to Federal and Provincial Support for Housing, 2025). Chapter 6 returns to this as the single clearest example of how a funding fight between governments lands directly on people sleeping outside.

Encampments

Encampment counts have swung sharply with the overall crisis: from roughly 82 tents across 24 parks in March 2023, to over 200 tents across 72 parks by March 2024, to a peak of 539 people across 107 parks in November 2024, down to approximately 196–330 people by late 2025 as the refugee surge eased and City outreach intensified (City of Toronto, 2026 Budget Notes; Global News, "Encampments reported in 48 Toronto parks, a 55% decrease," Dec. 2025). Ontario's courts have weighed in on how cities may respond: in Heegsma v. Hamilton (City), 2024 ONSC 7154, the Ontario Superior Court upheld encampment by-law enforcement against a Charter challenge, holding that "the life, liberty and security of the applicants are not put at risk by enforcement of the by-law. They are put at risk by homelessness" — while declining to recognize an unlimited right to encamp on public land (CanLII, Heegsma v. Hamilton (City), 2024 ONSC 7154). Toronto has stated a preference for shelter-system and outreach responses over police-led clearing, though a 2023 Ombudsman investigation into the City's 2021 encampment clearings found the City had shown "significant unfairness" in how it carried that out.

Chronic homelessness, and what it costs in lives

Homelessness in Toronto is increasingly long-term, not episodic. In the 2021 SNA, 77% of respondents had been homeless for six months or more of the past year; by 2024 that had risen to 83%, with 66% homeless the entire prior twelve months and 49% homeless 18 or more of the preceding 36 months (City of Toronto, 2021 SNA Highlights; 2024 SNA). An administrative, case-tracked count put chronic homelessness at 7,688 individuals in 2024.

Toronto tracks homeless deaths through two separate systems that should not be confused. The City's own count of deaths among shelter residents — tracked since 2007 — recorded 59 deaths in 2024 and 59 again in 2025, a cumulative 884 since tracking began, with opioid overdose the leading identified cause (City of Toronto, "Deaths of Shelter Residents"). Toronto Public Health's broader count of deaths among all people experiencing homelessness — including those outdoors — is far higher: 331 deaths in 2022, 300 in 2023, and 135 in just the first half of 2024, with drug toxicity responsible for roughly half (City of Toronto, "Toronto Public Health releases updated data for deaths of people experiencing homelessness in Toronto," Feb. 3, 2025). The mortality gap this produces is stark: the median age at death for men experiencing homelessness was 50, against 78 for the general male population of Toronto; for women it was 36–43, against 85 for the general female population (same source). Homelessness in Toronto today shortens a life by roughly three decades.

Who is affected

The 2024 SNA found 57% of respondents male, 41% female, and 1% gender-diverse; 20% identified as 2SLGBTQ+; the average age was 41, but the average age at a person's first experience of homelessness was 35 — meaning most people counted are relatively new to homelessness even though, per above, most have now been homeless a long time once they enter it. Seventy-seven percent identified as racialized, including 58% who identified as Black, against roughly one-tenth of Toronto's general population; in the 2021 SNA, Black respondents were a confirmed 31% of the homeless population against roughly 9% of Toronto's general population (City of Toronto, 2021 SNA Results Report; 2024 SNA). Forty-one percent cited inadequate income as the reason they lost their housing — roughly double the share who said so in 2021 (City of Toronto, 2024 SNA).

The Indigenous overlay: overrepresentation that has never gone away

Indigenous people are consistently and severely overrepresented in Toronto's homeless population, in every SNA cycle the City has run. In 2018, 16% of all respondents and 38% of people sleeping outdoors identified as Indigenous, against an estimated 1–2.5% of Toronto's general population. In 2021 those figures were 15% and 23%. In 2024 they were 9% of respondents (338 people) and 31% of the outdoor population, against a citywide Indigenous population the City now estimates at up to 3.2% (City of Toronto, 2018 SNA Results Report; 2021 SNA; 2024 SNA). Read carefully, that declining "sheltered" share is not obviously good news: the City's own Indigenous-specific analysis of the 2021 data found that Indigenous people "tended to move from staying in the shelter system to staying outdoors more frequently" over time — meaning some of the apparent decline may reflect displacement onto the street rather than a real reduction in Indigenous homelessness (City of Toronto Shelter, Support and Housing Administration and Toronto Indigenous Community Advisory Board, "Indigenous Peoples' Experience of Homelessness in Toronto," June 12, 2023).

That same 2023 report gives the fullest picture of what Indigenous homelessness looks like in Toronto specifically: 77% of Indigenous respondents had been chronically homeless (six months or more) that year, against 83% of non-Indigenous respondents — though by the 2024 SNA this had reversed, with 92% of Indigenous and 85% of non-Indigenous respondents chronically homeless, so the earlier figures should not be read as a current or comparative-superiority statistic. Forty-nine percent of Indigenous respondents first experienced homelessness as children or youth; 38% had foster-care or group-home experience, rising to 54% among Indigenous youth specifically; 69% reported mental health challenges and 85% reported multiple health challenges. Nationally, Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada's coordinated point-in-time count found 31% of respondents identified as Indigenous against roughly 5% of the Canadian population, with Indigenous respondents more likely to be chronically homeless (75% vs. 68%) and far more likely to have first become homeless as children (55%) (HICC, "Everyone Counts 2020–2022," Dec. 2023). A 2022 literature review by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness puts Toronto's Indigenous overrepresentation in national context: 16% in Toronto, 30% in Ottawa, 46% in Saskatoon, over 60% in Winnipeg, and over 70% in Regina, against an Indigenous share of roughly 4.3% of Canada's overall population (Jessica Rumboldt, "Endaamnaan: Homes for All Nations: A First Nations Homelessness Literature Review," Assembly of First Nations / Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, 2022).

Jesse Thistle, the researcher whose framework now underpins how Canada understands this problem, insists Indigenous homelessness cannot be reduced to a housing-unit deficit: it is also "the outcome of historically constructed and ongoing settler colonization and racism," involving disconnection from "relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages and identities" (Jesse A. Thistle, Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press, 2017). That framing matters for everything that follows in this book: a solution built only around housing units, without land, culture, and Indigenous governance, will not close this gap. Chapters 3, 5, and 6 return to what specifically drives it, who is already doing the work, and what reconciliation requires of the rest of the system.