The City of Toronto funds and operates services dedicated to people experiencing homelessness in Toronto. The overnight services, including emergency shelters, respites, and other allied services (including hotel/motel programs and warming centres), use the Shelter Management Information System (SMIS) to intake people who are accessing these services into their programs.
The Shelter System Flow data shares information about people experiencing homelessness who are entering and leaving the shelter system each month, including the number of unique people who have used the shelter system at least one time in the past three months and are considered to be actively experiencing homelessness (ie; they were not discharged to permanent housing).
This information provides insight into who is experiencing homelessness and how the City's system is functioning. It will also help measure progress towards the vision of reducing homelessness in Toronto to rare, brief, and non-recurring instances.
Over time, the data will be expanded to capture more people, such as people sleeping outdoors and people using overnight homelessness services that are not funded by the City of Toronto to provide more comprehensive picture of all people experiencing homelessness in Toronto. Based on the most recent Street Needs Assessment, we anticipate that approximately 18 per cent of people experiencing homelessness in Toronto are not currently reflected in this data.