A Graph Analysis of the Impact of COVID-19 on Emergency Housing Shelter Access Patterns

TL;DR

This study uses graph theory to analyze how COVID-19 disrupted emergency shelter access in Calgary, revealing persistent changes and characteristics of vulnerable populations through detailed network analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a graph theoretic approach to visualize and analyze shelter access patterns before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns in Calgary.

Findings

Identifies shifts in shelter usage patterns due to COVID-19.

Highlights characteristics of populations with ongoing shelter reliance.

Visualizes shelter transitions using network diagrams.

Abstract

This paper investigates how COVID-19 disrupted emergency housing shelter access patterns in Calgary, Canada and what aspects of these changes persist to the present day. This analysis will utilize aggregated shelter access data for over 40,000 individuals from seven major urban shelters dating from 2018 to the present. A graph theoretic approach will be used to examine the journeys of individuals between shelters before, during and after the COVID-19 lockdown period. This approach treats shelters as nodes in a graph and a person's transition between shelter as an arrow or edge between nodes. This perspective is used to create both timeline and network diagrams that visualize shelter use and the flow of people between shelters. Statistical results are also presented that illustrate the differences between the cohorts of people who only used shelter pre/post-lockdown, people who stayed in shelter during lockdown and people who used shelter for the first time during lockdown. The results demonstrate not only how a complex system of care responded to the pandemic but also the characteristics of the people most likely to continue to rely on that system during an emergency.