Volunteers help count Montreal’s homeless population; experts predict increase since 2018

On Tuesday, more than 1,000 trained volunteers will take to the streets of Montreal and 13 neighbouring regions of Quebec to conduct a homeless population count.

This will mark the City of Montreal’s third homeless population count. The last one was in 2018.

“Four years later, we’re going to really find out in the context of both the metropolitan area of Montreal and right across Quebec, what the trend is in homelessness,” said James Hughes, the president and CEO of Old Brewery Mission.

Volunteers will head to different areas of the city to count all the visibly homeless people in the streets, in parks, under bridges and in shelters.

“There’s actually interviews that are done as well, so that actually you can try to get behind a number of factors such as in particular what that person believes caused their state of homelessness,” added Hughes.

Experts in the sector are predicting the number of visibly homeless people will go up this year compared to 2018, which saw a total of 3,149 people experiencing homelessness. Nearly 700 of those were sleeping in the street.

The Old Brewery Mission is a network of facilities, programs and services all geared at ending chronic homelessness in Montreal.

“We’re full all the time,” said Hughes. “All of our sister organizations are full all the time. We see a lot of street homelessness encampments in a way we didn’t see four years ago. So the expectation is going to be that it’s much more.”

RELATED:

• Housing crisis increasing homelessness in Montreal
• Surging rents, lack of affordable housing leading to evictions and poverty, warns advocate
• Crowded Montreal homeless shelters leave many out in extreme heat

Eric Latimer, a research scientist at the Douglas Research Centre, also predicts an increase in the total number of people experiencing homelessness in Montreal following Tuesday evening’s street count.

“We’re sure the number’s going to go up,” said Latimer. “We know that there are more emergency beds occupied currently, hundreds more. More beds in transitional housing as well.”

These experts say many factors are to blame.

“What we actually expect, in part because of COVID but also because of the skyrocketing prices in terms of housing, the really big difficulty is finding affordable housing,” said Hughes.

To better account for the number of homeless people in Montreal, Latimer says the homeless population must be categorized into subgroups.

“The rest we can count pretty precisely. Because we get all the emergency shelters to tell us how many people spent that night within their walls,” he said.

WATCH: Housing crisis increasing homelessness in Montreal

Hopes are that this operation can also be a catalyst for change

Hughes believes such an operation is very important, particularly when it comes to policy development.

“This is very important for funding, budgets and services. A lot of people rely upon the street count to actually make decisions of that nature,” he explained.

“What we need is for the population to be more and more sensitized to the fact that we’re seeing homelessness rising and rising,” added Latimer.

This year’s theme for the count is “Everyone Counts.”

All volunteers will have been trained prior to the start of the count and the SPVM will also be on site throughout the evening.