Forty-Two Homeless People In Frontenac County?

Jeff Green | May 22, 2013

“It would be nice, at some point, to do an in-time survey of homeless people in Frontenac County,” said John Whitesell of OrgCode consulting, which has just completed a homelessness reduction plan for Kingston and Frontenac County, “but for now we have to be satisfied with a reverse-vector analysis.”

The reverse vector analysis that Orgcode has done pegged the number of homeless people in Frontenac County at 42.

But where did that number come from, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Not exactly.

OrgCode used a study that was completed in England in 2010 that looked at rural and urban homelessness. The study concluded that in “rural districts” there were 14 homeless people per 10,000 population, and in “urban-rural mix” districts there were 12 homeless people for every 10,000.

With a total population of 26,303 people, I would have thought there would be 36.4 homeless people in Frontenac County, but OrgCode added six more, perhaps considering those at risk for homelessness as well.

Never mind all that.

The point is Orgcode did not actually study homelessness in Frontenac County. Their "study" consisted of a meeting at the Grace Centre in Sydenham. A lot of people showed up and talked about housing challenges. No one at that meeting was, in fact, homelessness, although some said they had been at some point in their lives, but the information that was shared was merely anecdotal.

Orgcode came up with their numbers based on studies done somewhere else, somewhere a long way from here.

If I looked in detail at the rate of frostbite in the Arctic, and did a good job and came up with solid statistics, and then reverse vectored my way over to Ecuador and concluded that 1.82 million Ecuadorians have suffered from frostbite at some point in the last ten years, I would be wrong.

So who is to say that OrgCode is right when they say there are 42 homeless people in Frontenac County because of surveys that were done in rural England, which is a very different society than rural eastern Ontario.

Whitesell went on to make some seemingly reasonable proposals about how to cut homelessness in Frontenac County by 60% within 10 years.

The recommendations may indeed be useful, but given that, to my limited way of thinking, the number 42 was “reverse vectored” from thin air, why should I take anything Mr. Whitesell said seriously?