Torontonians dealing with homelessness are dying younger and it's getting worse, new study finds

A homeless person is seen in downtown Toronto, on Wednesday, January 3, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov

People who are homeless in Toronto are dying younger than the general population, and the disparity is getting especially worse among younger generations, a new study has found.

The study published on Friday by Unity Health Toronto found that people who are homeless in Toronto are dying, on average, 17 years younger than those who are not homeless.

The study warned that the gap between life expectancies for people who are housed versus people who are homeless has been growing, and is especially pronounced for younger generations.

Lucie Richard, a researcher at Unity Health Toronto, told CTV News Toronto that the age disparity was the most disturbing finding in her research. The mortality gap, she said, wasn’t concentrated to those facing homelessness in their older years, and was actually most pronounced at younger ages.

“People who are between 25 and 44 years old have over 16 times the risk of death compared to age equivalent people who are housed. It's a very, very large disparity,” she said.

“It's not fully explained by things like substance use and mental health, which is what we often think about when we think about disparity and mortality. We did adjust for those factors and after you adjust for those factors, you still have more than twice the risk of death and across all age groups.”

While the study observed zero deaths among housed participants between the ages of 16 and 25, there were a number of deaths in that range among the homeless cohort.

“In the general population, when you're younger, the likelihood of death is much lower and as you age, the risk increases. That's not true when people are experiencing homelessness,” she said.

“There's a whole lot of exposures and risks that you have when you're homeless that you wouldn't have otherwise. So it does increase your risk.”

Richard said the new data suggests a significant worsening compared to research conducted in Toronto in the 1990s, which found a similar disparity.

“The numbers that we're seeing are substantially higher,” she said. “This is not new information. Everybody knows that mortalities are high in this group and it’s been that way for a long time.”

“What I would like to see is this is a renewed call to action.”

The study, conducted by researchers from Toronto, London and Hamilton, followed 640 people in Toronto who were experiencing homelessness over the span of one year.

The participants were matched based on their age, sex and a score of overall health with two comparison groups – a general population group and a low income housed population.

Over the span of a year, more than a dozen participants of the study died while homeless across Toronto. While compared to the two comparison groups, the average person who died while homeless was 17 years younger.

“There's a lot of interventions that people have already seen that improve people's lives when they are experiencing homelessness, but frankly, the best solution is to avoid homelessness to begin with,” Richard said.

“So improvements to rent subsidies and other measures to prevent homelessness are things that really need to be discussed more.”

According to the City of Toronto data, there are currently more than 8,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto. So far in 2024, 43 people have died in the city’s shelter system.

Richard said the biggest limitation in the study is the lack of information on the cause of death.

“The biggest limitation for this project that I'm regretting big time is that we don't have cause of death information to help us pinpoint where to target efforts. That information is needed,” she said.