Primary sources only · every link goes to the original publisher

The Receipt Shelf

Every major source behind The Core Facts, in one downloadable place. Nothing here is our writing — these are the City’s, the auditors’, the courts’ and the researchers’ own documents. If a link ever rots, the document title and date are enough to re-find it or request it under freedom of information.

The counts — how many people

• 2024 Street Needs Assessment — full report (City of Toronto, PDF) The 15,418 count, its breakdown (9,026 sheltered / 1,446 outdoors / 1,724 provincial settings), demographics, and the methodology that excludes hidden homelessness by design.
• 2025 Point-in-Time Count & 2024 SNA — key highlights (City of Toronto, PDF) The October 22, 2025 count of 12,196 and the 21% year-over-year change.
• Street Needs Assessment program page (City of Toronto) The City’s own statement that hidden homelessness is not included.
• Health Impacts of Homelessness — Board of Health report, March 2026 (PDF) Deaths, median ages at death, and health-system contact for people experiencing homelessness.
• AMO / HelpSeeker — Municipalities Under Pressure: One Year Later, January 2026 (PDF) Ontario’s 84,973 known homeless, chronic homelessness doubled since 2019, and the funding-vs-growth gap. (the January 2025 original, PDF)
• The Trillium — provincial cuts and the shelter system Ontario-level reporting, including on the province’s internal (disowned, never corrected) 234,000 estimate.

The budgets — what we spend

• Toronto Shelter & Support Services — 2025 Budget Notes (PDF) $897.957M gross / $656.778M revenue / $241.178M net; 1,497.5 staff; the refugee-response line; the revenue breakdown that leaves $59.5M unlabeled.
• TSSS — 2026 Budget Notes (PDF) $786.068M gross; the federal refugee funding cliff ($300M → $97.078M, −68%); bed-night totals behind the $234.64 system average; declining bed-turnover series.
• TSSS — 2024 Budget Notes (PDF) $846.313M budget; the City’s own statement that pandemic-era shelter costs moved permanently onto the property-tax base.
• Mayor’s letter to Executive Committee, September 2025 (Council item 2025.EX26.13) The Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit collapse: $38M → $19.75M → $7.95M, against a $54M/yr ask.

The audits — what the money did

• Auditor General — Warming Centres & Winter Respite Sites, February 2025 The $136/$253/$336–$491 nightly cost ladder; 43→112→174 unmatched callers; 12,742 lost bed-nights; walk-in turnaways not tracked; $2.9M unrecovered operator surpluses. (attachment PDF — use the revised Feb 6, 2025 version)
• Auditor General — Emergency Shelters Part 2: Hotel Operations, 2022 $13.2M+ paid for charges the contracts did not permit, including full nightly rates on vacant rooms — ≈52,000 room-nights’ worth.
• Auditor General — Emergency Shelters Part 1: Case Management, 2022 1,340 clients admitted to 10+ different shelter programs; shelter vs supportive-housing vs subsidy cost ratios.
• Auditor General — Opening Doors to Stable Housing, 2019 The zero-construction win: better vacancy management ≈ 2,200 more people housed + $7M/yr recovered.
• Auditor General of Ontario — Homelessness value-for-money audit, 2021 (PDF) The provincial picture, including the per-capita rate the province’s own later internal estimate contradicts nine-fold. (2023 follow-up, PDF)

The price-list era — the transparency that ended

From 2007 to 2012 the City published every shelter’s nightly rate, by name. Then the figures stopped. This is the actual series — download it and see what the public used to be told, and no longer is:

• 2010 Per Diem Rates for the Purchase of Service Shelter System (staff report, PDF) The last full published price list: every operator, every rate ($20.25–$75.75/night), the Province’s share, the projected shortfall.
• The successor “Funding Allocations for Shelter and Related Services” series — totals still published, per-shelter rates gone: 2011 · 2012 · 2013 · 2014 · 2015 · 2016 · 2017 · 2018 Watch five public figures disappear in real time between the 2012 and 2013 editions — and note the 2016 report adopting the funding model “interim… until such time that City Council approves a final funding model.”

Oversight, rights & the long record

• Ombudsman Toronto — the refugee shelter-exclusion investigation (December 2024) The 122-page report: systemic discrimination — “specifically, anti-Black racism” — 14 recommendations, and the City’s response history.
• CAMH — The Shelter Safety Study, April 2024 (PDF) The 423.5% rise in staff assaults; violence and safety across the shelter system, from the researchers the City itself hosts.
• The Golden Report on Council’s record, 1999 (PDF) The 27-year-old blueprint. Read it, then check the date.
• John Howard Society of Ontario — From Incarceration to Encampment (2025), via CBC 7,455 no-fixed-address releases from Ontario jails in one year; 80% of those held on remand. (and the 2007 predecessor showing how long this has been documented, PDF)
• City of Toronto — how to file a freedom-of-information request The mechanism behind several receipts on this shelf — and behind our twelve standing asks.

Open datasets — check the live numbers yourself

• Daily Shelter & Overnight Service Occupancy (City open data) Every program, every operator, every night — occupancy and capacity. The dataset behind our nightly-occupancy snapshots.
• Deaths of Shelter Residents (City open data) The 2007-to-present series: 825 deaths through 2024.
• Suspected Opioid Overdoses in Shelters (City open data) Quarterly, by location, 2018 onward — the series showing the 2025→2026 doubling.

The peer-reviewed core

• Latimer et al. — Cost-Effectiveness of Housing First with Assertive Community Treatment, Psychiatric Services, 2020 The $6,311 net annual cost of housing a high-needs person — the other half of the $43,329 gap.
• Stergiopoulos et al. — At Home/Chez Soi trial results, JAMA, 2015 The largest randomized housing trial in Canadian history: 73% vs 32% of time stably housed.
• Richard — The Cost of Inaction (ICES data via Homeless Hub, 2024) $12,209 vs $1,769 annual healthcare costs; the $69.8M–$99.7M excess for Toronto.
• Ali et al. — gender and mortality among people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, BMC Public Health, 2026 (DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-27460-8) 2024’s 215 deaths; median age at death 38 for women; overdose as 76% of women’s deaths; the shelter-bed gender gap.

Our own data — download the working ledgers

• The Homes & Homelessness collection’s evidence ledgers (CSV downloads) Our claim ledger (3,000+ verified rows) and source registry — the machine-readable trail behind the research collection.
• The commons — all of this project’s open code and data Everything we publish, in one place, free to reuse.
• The full research package (zip) The book, the 28 backgrounders, and an offline copy of every page.