Toronto Homelessness Data Dashboard
The City of Toronto, through its Shelter, Supports and Housing Administration (SSHA) division, launched Toronto’s new Shelter System Flow data dashboards on March 1, 2021. The data currently includes information about people experiencing homelessness who are entering and leaving the shelter system each month and will be expanded over time to capture more people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, including people who are sleeping outdoors.
“This is the most comprehensive and transparent public dashboard of its kind in Canada. Armed with this real-time, person specific data, Toronto will now be able to better target resources, improve homeless system coordination and most importantly, accelerate reductions in homelessness”
In line with many North American cities, the data points in the dashboards will inform efforts to end homelessness, including research and policy development, system monitoring, service planning and operations.
The two dashboards are:
The Monthly Snapshot dashboard will highlight the inflow and outflow of people to and from the shelter system in the reporting month.
The Historical Trends dashboard will highlight the inflow and outflow of people to and from the shelter system over time, and users will be able to filter data by sub-populations and specific time periods by using the built-in filtering options.
The dashboards include anyone who has recently used a City-funded shelter, respite, hotel/motel program, or warming centre (within the last three months). Over time, data will be expanded to include more people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, including people who are sleeping outdoors.
The TAEH is a partner in developing this dashboard, linking SSHA teams with the national Built For Zero model led by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) and co-chairing the Coordinated Access System Subcommittee with SSHA. This new dashboard, and the data collection and infrastructure needed to support it, is a critical tool to measure progress towards achieving our shared vision where experiences of homelessness in Toronto are rare, brief and non-recurring.
The data are also being shared through the Open Data portal. This means that interested people can see the raw data, analyse it and produce their own visualizations of what they learn from it. The TAEH is developing a way to support and share a community of learning to incorporate this and more details on how to participate will be released soon.