What is Homelessness?

This Project defines homelessness broadly to reflect the reality of urban homelessness in Canada. It includes people who are homeless, transient, staying in emergency shelters, or underhoused in substandard apartments and rooming houses. People who are homeless also tend to be living in extreme poverty and excluded from opportunities for employment, education, recreation, and social contact.

Homelessness in Toronto

Over the last two years, homelessness has increased dramatically in Toronto. This is most apparent in the winter months. According to The Toronto Star, 4,400 people stayed in Metro Toronto's emergency shelters each night of December, 1995. This figure does not include those who stayed in church-sponsored basement shelters, those who slept outside, or those who stayed with friends. In 1995, the Yonge Street Mission's executive director stated that there were up to 10,000 street youth in Metro. In the last three years, there has been a 53% increase in the number of families seeking emergency shelter, and a marked increase in the number of children, two parent families, and single women who were homeless. More people were staying in the hostel system longer. 8On any given day in 1996, 1 200 Toronto children were housed in temporary quarters, including a family shelter/motel strip in Scarborough.9

The human cost is staggering, and so are the financial costs of emergency, band-aid responses. Hostel accommodations in Toronto averaged a cost of $1 200 a month per person10 , almost double the cost of a one bedroom apartment.

Homelessness is created and supported by the recession, the absence of affordable housing, insufficient supportive housing, high unemployment, and cuts to welfare rates. While addictions and mental health issues affect many people living on the street, it is important to look first at the structural causes of homelessness. In order to work effectively with people who are homeless, it is important to be aware of and work to change the root causes of homelessness. Effective literacy and homelessness work is integrated into the struggle to end homelessness and poverty.

Literacy and Homelessness: What's the Connection?

What does it mean to do literacy work with homeless adults? What does it say about the nature and causes of homelessness? Does our work imply that literacy will empower people to transcend homelessness? "Two critical assumptions (of this work) were that homeless adults needed such training and that adult educators would know how to provide it..."11 An American Government report about Adult Education for the Homeless programs was entitled "Learning to Hope." Are literacy facilitators in drop-ins and shelters expected to be magicians of hope?


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