Economist speaks on homelessness in Calgary
07/10/2014
Memorial University recently played host to Ron Kneebone, a visiting professor from the University of Calgary who presented his work on homelessness in Calgary.
According to the Calgary Homeless Foundation, while Calgary is one of the richest cities in Canada, it also holds one of the highest rates of homelessness. An average of 2,000 people stay in shelters every night, while another 50-500 ‘rough sleepers’ stay on the streets.
In his presentation, Kneebone highlighted how problems of homelessness are interrelated with domestic violence, food insecurity, income support measures, and legal/police/by-law enforcement, which makes it at a complex issue to solve. He further claims that homelessness is a sign of a broken social safety net and can only be solved by changing the policies of governments and social agencies.
Calgary is currently in year 6 of a 10-year plan that has done little to mitigate the problem but has taken steps towards understanding it.
Breaking away from a career studying government finances, Kneebone says he became involved with the Calgary Homeless Foundation and learned that there was a complete lack of data on the subject. While the government knew how many people were checking into shelters each day, nobody was collecting data on who these people were, how long they stayed at the shelters, and how many times they returned. The government knew how many shelter beds were being used, but the data hadn’t been properly compiled to compare shelter use on different days of the week, different months of the year, or aggregate trends over time.
Once Kneebone saw these holes in the data, he began a project to fill the gaps and learned some interesting information. According to his data, homelessness in Calgary is positively correlated with the business cycle, so when the labour market is booming, the number of people in shelters rise as more people move to Calgary looking for work.
Related to this is the lack of affordable housing in Calgary. The city has been rezoning spaces and gentrifying areas, which has caused a dramatic decrease in the number of single room occupancy hotels and a complete removal of trailer parks. This trend has coincided with the rise in the use of shelters since the 1990s.
The issue of homelessness, however, is not as prevalent in Edmonton. Despite being a near-by city of similar wealth and size, Edmonton has half the number of homeless people but many more rental accommodations.
As a solution, Kneebone’s suggests municipality must rezone and create more areas with affordable renting accommodation by subsidizing the private sector. Echoing Brendon O’Flaherty, Kneebone also suggested incentivizing housing; giving people money for having a house and thereby minimizing behaviour that leads people to lose their homes.
One solution proposed was a guaranteed annual income, topping up everyone’s income so that they meet a certain living standard, with which they can do as they please. This was done in Dauphin, Manitoba between 1974 and 1979 to reported success.
http://themuse.ca/2014/10/07/economist-speaks-on-homelessness-in-calgary/
http://homelesshub.ca/resource/homelessness-alberta-demand-spaces-alberta%E2%80%99s-homeless-shelters