Counting Backwards
BY Nadeem Basaria
Illustration by Evan Munday
Armed with 10-question surveys and $5 fast-food vouchers, about 400 workers and 750 volunteers fanned out across Toronto in April to count and survey the homeless. Canada’s largest city is the latest to get in on the dubiously useful national trend of counting homeless people, following in the footsteps of Vancouver, Calgary, Victoria, Edmonton and Sudbury (and most American cities).
Toronto officials claim the project will help the city better understand its homeless problem and budget for future social programs. It’s impossible, however, to get an accurate count of a transient population—you have to be able to find people to count them, and it’s estimated that for every person on the street there are several more who are couch-surfing or otherwise hidden.
Cathy Crowe, of the homeless advocacy group Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, estimates the actual cost of the project at $200,000, and is frustrated the count was conducted despite knowledge that its results would be inaccurate. “We proved the methodology was flawed … the project was a tremendous waste of time and money.”
While it may be bureaucratically comforting to have these count numbers, is spending time and money to bribe a fraction of homeless people with fast-food vouchers really the best use of city resources to tackle this problem, when it’s obvious that what homeless people need are homes?
