Explore our research findings and policy solutions to address hidden homelessness in Saskatoon, and how these solutions can be applied to other municipalities across Canada.
Across Canada, many people who lack a secure and permanent home have had to seek informal and temporary solutions like staying with family and friends, or couch surfing with strangers. These experiences are examples of hidden homelessness – a form of precarious housing where people temporarily stay with other people when they lack permanent housing of their own. These experiences represent a critical point of intervention to connect supports to individuals who are at risk of falling into more severe states of homelessness. Yet, a lack of data means these experiences are often overlooked in the design of services and solutions.
To address this knowledge gap, the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights and CTLabs conducted a research project from 2022-2024 using Saskatoon as a case study to better understand and estimate the scale and scope of hidden homelessness. The findings from our research can help to deepen our collective understanding of the issue, shedding light on the needs, barriers, patterns and solutions to address hidden homelessness.
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CHALLENGE BRIEF
Contextualizing and mapping journeys of hidden homelessness
This brief provides a detailed analysis of the housing crisis in Canada and Saskatoon to help inform and contextualize an understanding of hidden homelessness. It also presents our definition of hidden homelessness, a proposal for the ideal dataset to estimate this issue, and initial policy insights that are further developed in the Policy Brief below.
PROTOTYPE REPORT
Test, test, test: Three solutions to address hidden homelessness
This report presents three solutions (called “prototypes”) that were developed and tested to assess their usefulness in initiatives to understand and enumerate hidden homelessness. The report identifies the strengths and limitations of each prototype and how each could help strengthen the City of Saskatoon’s capacity to monitor and address hidden homelessness.
POLICY BRIEF
Unseen and Unaddressed: A Call to Action on Hidden Homelessness
This brief presents a series of policy recommendations for decision-makers in municipal, provincial and federal governments to address hidden homelessness. Our recommendations are centred around developing a city-wide data collection strategy to identify the evolving needs of people experiencing hidden homelessness, allowing decision-makers to adapt and properly address this issue. Special emphasis is given to Indigenous-led initiatives and the importance of sovereignty in data collection for First Nations and Métis governments and organizations.
Key findings
Through interviews and surveys with people with lived experience of hidden homelessness, as well as workshops with organizations, academics, community leaders, and government authorities, we have uncovered six key insights:
- Hidden homelessness has a unique place in the housing continuum. It can provide people with a temporary space to stay while they search for secure housing. It can also be the last stop before street-level homelessness, where needs and trauma become even more complex. This makes it an important spatial location on the housing continuum for preventing homelessness.
- Evictions and low levels of income seem to be two of the most important factors causing people to lose their housing and then experience hidden homelessness. Some of the ways people experiencing hidden homelessness are able to secure housing is through ties to cultural or ethnic communities, securing a job, setting up financial assistance, or splitting housing costs.
- Despite having shelter, the experience of hidden homelessness comes with a great level of uncertainty and risks for those who experience it. This includes a lack of security in their housing arrangements and no recourse if conditions change or if the arrangement ends unexpectedly. Having reliable and tailored supports like employment assistance, support finding housing and guidance connecting with other services such as counselling or legal aid, can lead to faster re-housing processes that prevent a further decline in their housing situation.
- Culturally competent and gender-sensitive care for people experiencing hidden homelessness is a key intervention point. First Nations peoples, women and gender-diverse people experiencing gender-based violence are overrepresented in this situation, creating a strong need for tailored services that can meet their needs and address their systemic and context-specific realities.
- People who offer temporary accommodation usually provide assistance and support without the proper resources or tools to do so. Sometimes, this puts them in precarious and vulnerable situations before, during, and after receiving people in their homes in terms of their tenure, safety, relationships, and mental health.
- City-wide data collection is a key area of opportunity to better understand all forms of homelessness, including hidden homelessness. More than enumeration, understanding trends and service needs of all forms of housing precarity is key to improve housing outcomes. At the same time, improving protections for tenants, increasing the stock of affordable housing in the city, and providing additional income supports to meet the rising cost of living are urgently needed to ensure people can find and maintain secure and permanent housing.
Policy solutions
Our recommendations for municipal, provincial, and federal decision-makers aim to advance efforts to better understand and estimate hidden homelessness, and ultimately all forms of homelessness, as a critical component to address the larger housing and homelessness crisis.
These recommendations focus on addressing hidden homelessness in Saskatoon, however they can also help inform the development of solutions in other communities across the country that are facing similar challenges.
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Develop city-wide and collective efforts on data collection, monitoring, and usage regarding all forms of homelessness, including hidden homelessness.
- Data collection should include disaggregated and intersectional qualitative and quantitative data that facilitates the development of evidence-based responses to the homelessness crisis from the city by informing funding, programming, service delivery and policymaking.
- A city-wide approach should include community organizations, service providers, people with lived experience, Indigenous organizations and governments, and officials from the City of Saskatoon.
- Adequate mechanisms should be in place to properly account for less visible forms of homelessness, such as hidden homelessness, people who are institutionally housed, etc.
- Data collection efforts should ensure the participation of marginalized and/or hard-to-reach populations, such as Indigenous people, people with disabilities, youth, women, gender-diverse individuals, and survivors of gender-based violence.
- Collection efforts should minimize the burden on people with lived experience, reduce the number of times information is requested from them, use a trauma-informed lens, and have a gender-sensitive approach.
- Data collection strategies should ensure the right to privacy and confidentiality for those who provide information, especially for individuals in high-risk scenarios, such as survivors of gender-based violence.
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Dedicate funding toward the development of a data collection strategy at the municipal level, including pilots, prototypes, and enhanced data collection efforts.
- Funds should provide adequate resources to develop the necessary infrastructure for a comprehensive system to capture data on all forms of homelessness with emphasis on reaching hard to reach populations.
- The funding strategy must ensure that data collection efforts remain operable over the long term.
- Barriers to access these funds by First Nations and Métis organizations and governments, as well as other relevant stakeholders must be identified and addressed to ensure meaningful participation from all relevant parties.
- Funds should be available to appropriately compensate individuals with lived experience, whose knowledge and expertise are critical to developing these systems. Funds should also be available to address barriers to participation for hard-to-reach populations, such as lack of childcare and transit access.
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Strengthen and expand the Homelessness Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS).
- All key organizations and institutions at the municipal level responding to the needs of people experiencing street-level and hidden homelessness should have access to the HIFIS to improve the enumeration of these experiences and provide regular updates.
- Data collection forms should include hidden homelessness and other forms of homelessness as disaggregated categories to create differentiated data that supports policy and programming changes that are sensitive to the unique needs of different groups.
- Where possible, data collection should rely on people being able to self-identify their housing status to avoid stigmatization and bias.
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Conduct a review of municipal and provincial institutions’ data collection and sharing efforts regarding all forms of homelessness.
- This review should focus on provincial and municipal public institutions and ministries that provide housing, supports for homelessness and other related services, such as the Ministry of Social Services, Child and Family Services and the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
- Institutions should capture information on less visible forms of homelessness, such as hidden homelessness, through existing data collection methods (intake forms, records, surveys, etc.).
- Special effort should be put into capturing information on homelessness and housing precarity of vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations (for example Indigenous people, women and gender-diverse individuals, youth, people with disability, survivors of gender-based violence).
- Improved data sharing between institutions, decision-makers, and community organizations should be a key goal of this review, to ensure the consistency and reliability of data, and to leverage this information to create evidence-based policies, programs, and services.
- This review should focus on provincial and municipal public institutions and ministries that provide housing, supports for homelessness and other related services, such as the Ministry of Social Services, Child and Family Services and the Saskatchewan Health Authority.
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Ensure mechanisms for data collection are used to prevent all forms of homelessness, enhance service provision, and inform decision-making at the municipal and provincial level.
- Data should be available for all relevant stakeholders to inform their decision-making processes and service delivery in a way that protects the information of people who are experiencing homelessness.
- Regular monitoring and reporting mechanisms should be established to ensure up-to-date information is available for decision-making at all levels of government, as well as for community organizations.
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Co-develop and support an Indigenous-led data collection strategy to shift toward a decolonial approach in policymaking, service delivery, and culturally relevant programming.
- Municipal, provincial and federal governments, in collaboration with Indigenous governments, should adequately fund and support the development and implementation of Indigenous-led data strategies.
- Data collection strategies should be designed in collaboration with Indigenous communities, and data collection efforts should be led by Indigenous communities themselves.
- Indigenous communities must retain ownership and control over the data, including its use by other orders of government and service providers.
- Data sovereignty and ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP) should be respected to ensure rights-based collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous institutions.
- Municipal, provincial and federal governments, in collaboration with Indigenous governments, should adequately fund and support the development and implementation of Indigenous-led data strategies.
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Design ways to estimate a national baseline for hidden homelessness and adequately track its evolution over time.
- The Census of Population should include questions that capture data on hidden homelessness.
- The federal government should collaborate with provinces to develop innovative ways to obtain data on hidden homelessness, such as PiT counts and other data collection strategies.
- The federal government should collaborate with provinces and municipalities to leverage all information collected regarding all forms of homelessness to ensure that decision-making is informed by reliable, updated, and high-quality data on all forms of homelessness.
- Best practices within Canada, as well as from other countries, should be considered to better estimate all forms of homelessness.
We issue an urgent call to policymakers, community leaders, and all stakeholders to acknowledge and confront the complexities of hidden homelessness. It is our shared duty to offer support and drive meaningful systemic transformations.
Roadmap infographic
During the road mapping phase, a list of key steps to upscale the prototypes was developed.
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the contributions of our advisory committee, people with lived experience, service providers, community organizations, advocacy networks and officials from municipal, provincial and federal governments. We are grateful for their time and dedication to this initiative.
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Service providers, community organizations, advocacy networks, and government agencies
National:
- Blueprint
- Employment and Social Development Canada
- Infrastructure Canada
Provincial:
- Coordinated Access – Métis Nation Saskatchewan
- Saskatchewan Health Authority
Municipal:
- Chokecherry Studios
- Christians Against Poverty Saskatoon Branch
- City of Saskatoon
- Community Legal Assistance Services for Saskatoon Inner City Inc. (CLASSIC)
- Emergency Wellness Centre Saskatoon Tribal Council
- Friendship Inn
- OUTSaskatoon
- Prairie Harm Reduction
- Pride Home
- Quint Development Corporation
- Salvation Army Saskatoon
- Saskatchewan Intercultural Association
- Saskatoon Fire Department
- Saskatoon Food Bank & Learning Centre
- Saskatoon Housing Initiatives Partnership
- Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership
- Saskatoon Public Library
- Saskatoon Tribal Council
- University of Saskatchewan
- YWCA Saskatoon
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Advisory Committee
- Cara Bahr, Chief Executive Officer – YWCA Saskatoon
- Chantelle Johnson, Executive Director – Community Legal Assistance for Saskatoon Inner City (CLASSIC)
- Debbie McGraw, Co-Chair of the Canadian Lived Experience Leadership Network
- Geoffrey Peters, Director – Cress Housing Corporation – Saskatoon Tribal Council
- Isobel Findlay, University Co-Director – Community-University Institute for Social Research (CUISR), University of Saskatchewan
- Lydia Moss, Senior Manager – Saskatoon Public Library
- Michael Kowalchuk, Senior Planner – City of Saskatoon
- Obadiah Awume, Planner – City of Saskatoon
- Sandra Kary, Executive Director – Friendship Inn
- Sarah Buhler, Associate Professor – College of Law and CUISR, University of Saskatchewan
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the 157 individuals who participated in interviews, workshops, focus groups, and surveys. We hope to inspire others through your voices.
The project “Understanding and Estimating Hidden Homelessness in Saskatoon” received funding from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) under the NHS Solutions Labs, however, the views expressed are the personal views of the author and CMHC accepts no responsibility for them.