The high cost of homelessness

Every homeless person costs system $55,000, an amount that could buy supported housing for each of them
Lori Culbert, files from Randy Shore, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, March 21, 2008

VANCOUVER - We've been counting them and governments have been scrambling to try to help them, but a recent university study has been looking at a new question about homeless people in B.C. - what each one costs taxpayers a year.

The answer is $55,000 per person, or an annual total of $644.3 million in health, corrections and social services spending for all the homeless in B.C.

But the conclusion of the 150-page report - written by five academics at Simon Fraser University, the University of B.C. and the University of Calgary - is that B.C. taxpayers could even save money if that cash was instead spent directly on supported social housing.

"We wound up generating an estimated cost [of homeless people] in B.C. that is roughly the same as the cost of implementing the full-meal deal of housing and supports for every one of those people," said one of the authors, professor Julian Somers, director of SFU's Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction.

The report, completed last month, says its research shows that approximately 130,000 people in B.C. have a severe addiction and/or a mental illness; about 26,500 of those people are "inadequately housed and inadequately supported," including 11,750 who are "absolutely homeless."

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