EHSJ is excited to release the updated homelessness data from August 2023 to February 2024. Last summer, we upgraded our database to better manage the By-Name List and its crucial data. Despite a successful transition, we initially couldn't report collective inflow and outflow data. We've now resolved this and recalculated the missed data from this period. Thanks for your patience as we enhance our systems for greater accuracy.

Remember, our figures don't show every person experiencing homelessness in the city but only those connected to services, which is always an underestimate. Over the past year, we've improved our systems and expanded the Coordinated Access to Homes network. While rising numbers indicate more homelessness, they also show our enhanced ability to identify previously unconnected individuals. We have made significant upgrades, including integrating HIFIS 4.0 which is a homelessness information management system that is shared among partner organizations. This system is now used by emergency shelters and housing case management programs across St. John's to track individuals' shelter stays, interactions, housing history, case development, and journey through the homelessness system.

To simply look at the numbers without any context would suggest that homelessness in St. John's grew more than 50% from February 2023 to February 2024. However, given so much system growth and improvement taking place at the same time, when discussing increases in homelessness, a more precise statement is: "The number of people known to be experiencing chronic homelessness increased by X in the last year, due to more people entering homelessness and improved data quality."

You may notice some inconsistencies in the numbers across months early in this update. This is because we consolidated several months of data corrections and updates. With our database enhancements and a new data source, we've conducted an extensive data quality review during this process. As a result, we've found that in July 2023, 263 people were experiencing homelessness, 161 of whom were chronically homeless. Before August, 14 additional people were housed, including 7 exiting chronic homelessness. These numbers reflect the most accurate data now available, an improvement over previous reports.