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Economics Speaker Series
February 7 at 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

The 2025 Economics Speaker Series kicks off on Feb. 7 with a lecture focusing on Ontario’s housing crisis, featuring Dr. Shari Eli.
Dr. Eli is an associate professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her fields of research are economic history, health economics, and demography.
Registration is not required. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Abstract
Ontario’s Housing Crisis in Medium-run Perspective
We use our post-2000 data on welfare recipients in Ontario to explore why this group faces unprecedented rates of homelessness, not just in Toronto but in communities throughout the province. Our welfare data is ideally suited for this question because we have information at the person-month level on accommodation type, which allows us to identify whether a person is homeless in every month in which they receive OW (welfare) transfers.
We find several interesting trends. First, between 2000-2022, the share of monthly OW beneficiaries who were homeless increased by a factor of more than 10, from less than 0.5% to 5%. The increase is concentrated among individuals accessing OW for the first time. Among first-time recipients, the rate of homelessness peaked at around 20% in 2019, prior to the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. The increase in homelessness is matched by a decline in the share of OW recipients who are in subsidized housing. By the mid-2010s, the share of new OW recipients who had a public housing unit was effectively zero.
Second, homelessness increased in the cross-section, but the rate of exit from homelessness also declined. This is driven by a reduction in the rate of transition into both private and subsidized rentals. The increase in homelessness is not driven by changes in the composition of the population of OW recipients, or by changes in the generosity of the program. Third, this increase in homelessness is also not driven by large cities. It is most pronounced in the rural region of Northern Ontario.
To explain the increase in homelessness among the low-income population in Ontario, we focus on three main factors: housing prices, the opioid epidemic, and a reduction in the availability of subsidized housing. We find that the probability of being homeless is significantly higher when housing prices are higher (even conditional on individual controls), and that this is even more pronounced for first-time recipients. Opioid overdoses have no significant relationship to the probability of being homeless. Finally, we find that transitions into homeless are not affected by housing prices but are positively related to opioid overdoses. Conversely, transitions out of homelessness are thwarted by high housing prices and not related to opioid overdoses.