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Transit and encampment outreach: rising activity, declining referrals, and a comparative benchmark

Toronto has built a formal, multi-agency outreach architecture on transit and at encampments, and its own data shows outreach activity has been rising — while the rate at which that activity converts into actual shelter placements has been falling.

The finding

The TTC's Five-Year Community Safety, Security and Well-Being Plan, approved by the TTC Board on November 3, 2025, formalizes a multi-partner response that includes Special Constables, Toronto Police Service, Transportation Supervisors, Streets to Homes Outreach Workers, and the Multi-Disciplinary Outreach Team (M-DOT), among other named roles, spanning both high-visibility enforcement/safety functions and social-services functions CSRL2-394. At encampments specifically, the City's enhanced outreach model resulted in outreach staff attending encampment locations 5,268 times in 2023, leading to 880 people referred by Streets to Homes into the shelter system and 358 people moved from outdoor locations into permanent housing CSRL2-454.

On transit specifically, the trend runs the opposite direction on the outcome that matters most. City data shows Streets to Homes workers made 7,844 TTC site visits in 2023, of which 517 resulted in a shelter referral; in 2024, site visits rose to 9,179, but only 122 resulted in a shelter referral — visits up roughly 17%, successful referrals down roughly 76% CSRL2-827. Reporting on the City's 2025 budget, Lorraine Lam of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network told CBC Toronto that adding more TTC outreach workers is a "Band-Aid solution" given there are no shelter beds available to refer people to CSRL2-588. Separately, transit consultant David Cooper of Leading Mobility told the TTC board that "transit agencies are experiencing mission creep as they take on complex public health and outreach responsibilities beyond their original scope" CSRL2-589.

System-wide, Toronto's Service Triage, Assessment and Referral Support (STARS) tool is used by all City-funded shelter and street outreach programs as a common intake and triage process, feeding information into the City's By Name List and Shelter System Flow data CSRL2-468. A broader, city-wide (not encampment- or transit-specific) annual figure from the 2024 Street Needs Assessment gives a wider lens on the same period: 1,078 people referred into the shelter system, more than 4,300 people housed, and 25,000 outreach visits city-wide [CL-50012] — a different scope than the encampment-specific and TTC-specific figures above, not a direct comparison point, but a useful indication that referral and housing outcomes at the city-wide outreach level do not show the same collapse as the TTC-specific referral rate. For comparison, Calgary's HELP outreach team (formerly DOAP) has a documented social return on investment of $9.43 for every dollar invested, one of the few quantified return-on-investment figures available for a daytime outreach and navigation model specifically CSRL2-409.

Why it matters

The TTC referral-rate collapse — visits up while successful shelter referrals fell by roughly three quarters in a single year — is a direct, measured illustration of both the Band-Aid-solution and mission-creep critiques above: outreach workers can find and engage more people without that translating into more housing outcomes if the shelter system itself has no capacity to receive referrals. Toronto has built the coordination infrastructure (a formal multi-partner architecture, a shared intake tool) but its own numbers show that infrastructure's central output metric moving in the wrong direction, while a different city's outreach program shows what a return-on-investment case for outreach spending can look like when paired with capacity to actually place people.

What this page does not cover

This page does not attempt to calculate a Toronto-specific return on investment for outreach spending, or compare it directly to Calgary's $9.43 figure, since the two programs are structured differently and the comparison here is illustrative, not a benchmark Toronto should be expected to match. It does not cover the encampment clearance and Council-vote history that a separate page in this library addresses. It does not evaluate outreach worker training, staffing levels, or working conditions.

T-0065 batch 6 (2026-07-08): a genuine S1 search this pass looked for a 2025 or 2026 continuation of this page's central TTC referral-rate metric (9,179 visits/122 referrals in 2024). A widely-circulated claim that "more than 202 people" were referred from the TTC to shelter "since January" surfaced across several searches, but could not be traced to a clear, dated, directly-fetchable primary source (the CBC article most consistently cited for it returned HTTP 403; the City's own transit-safety data page carries no quantitative figures at all) — not used here, left as a checked-but-unconfirmed lead rather than a resolved update.

Provenance note

T-0065 S1 retroactive discovery pass (2026-07-08, direct-search variant — WebSearch/WebFetch, not explore.py fan-out, per the earlier fabrication finding on that mechanism): searched for updated 2025/2026 TTC referral-rate data, more recent encampment outreach statistics, and any follow-up on the "Band-Aid solution" reporting. No page-specific TTC-transit or encampment-only follow-up figures beyond what's already cited were found. One genuinely new, on-topic, city-wide figure was found and added (CL-50012, above) — verified verbatim against its already-archived source (RES-0246) before being added, not trusted from the search summary alone. A broader 21% year-over-year decrease in Toronto's October 2025 point-in-time homelessness count (vs. October 2024) was also surfaced during this search, but was judged out of scope for this page specifically (it is a city-wide unsheltered/sheltered count trend, not an outreach-activity or referral-rate figure) and was not added here.

Sources

Jurisdiction: Toronto · Topics: outreach, transit, encampments, coordinated-access · status: working draft · review: pending (the library’s own tags, kept visible) · published 2026-08-17 · corrections welcome.