Carleton University Newsroom

More than 150,000 Canadians are homeless. Thousands more are deemed to be at risk. It’s estimated that 700,000 households nation-wide are spending more than half of their income on shelter, leaving them at considerable risk of homelessness. Many others, especially children, are living in inadequate or sub-standard housing.

“We wanted to examine how our cybercartographic research is relevant to cities,” says Dr. Fraser Taylor, distinguished research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. So he and PhD student Tracey Lauriault created the first national interactive online Atlas that looks at the risk of homelessness in Canada. “Our new Atlas shows where the risks of homelessness are and provides policy-makers with the information they need to address the challenges.”

Speaking at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the two researchers revealed that they incorporated 25 risk indicators such as vacancy rates, the number of families spending 50 percent of their income on rent, housing starts, the number of rent geared-to-income units and age of social housing units.

“Together, all of these factors can help policy-makers, politicians and other interested parties more readily distinguish trends, patterns and specific issues they are facing on the homelessness front,” says Lauriault. “For example, anyone who looks at our Atlas can quickly see the face and pattern of social housing in cities such as Toronto.”

The pilot study was conducted in partnership with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Quality of Life Reporting System, which focused on the City of Toronto, la Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) and the City of Calgary.

The City of Calgary says that the Atlas is a powerful interactive tool that can be used to show how Calgary compares to other cities in terms of households at risk of becoming homeless. “The variation within
neighbourhoods will enable us to deliver some key messages to communities quickly and easily.”

The Atlas was designed using the Nunaliit Cybercartographic Atlas Framework (http://nunaliit.org/) which is an open source software designed at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University.

This research project is one of hundreds of new and exciting social science projects being unveiled this week by thousands of delegates attending Congress 2009 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Congress is organized by the Canadian Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences. It is the largest multidisciplinary academic gathering in Canada, attracting delegates from every corner of Canada and around the world.

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For more information:
Dr. D. R. F. Taylor
Distinguished Research Professor
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University
fraser_taylor@carleton.ca
(613) 520-2600, ext. 8232

Tracey P. Lauriault
PhD Student, Carleton University
tlauriau@gmail.com
(613) 234-2805

Lin Moody
Media Relations
Carleton University
lin_moody@carleton.ca
(613) 371-4843

 

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