The First Year of Homeless Shelter Use and What it Tells Us

Understanding for how long people stay in emergency shelters can help policymakers and those working in the homeless-serving sector monitor progress toward making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring and help them understand what policies and approaches will enable them to attain that goal.

If people stay in shelters for long periods, the shelter system can be described as “static” in the sense that the same people using shelter this month are the same people who used it last month and will be the same people who will be using it next month. In this case, the sector faces the challenge of re-housing people who have been without a home for a long time. If instead people move through shelters quickly, the system is more dynamic, and the focus can shift toward shelter diversion programs intended to keep people in their housing and helping people return to housing as quickly as possible.

This paper examines shelter use in Calgary, Alberta between 2009 and 2024 using anonymized administrative data on 52,129 single people. The data cover about 99 per cent of the emergency shelter beds available to single people in Calgary. People were grouped into annual cohorts according to the year they first entered the shelter system. Their shelter use was then tracked for the following 365 days.