Housing, Homelessness & Public Safety

The tools to make progress on housing and homelessness already exist. Other BC cities have used them. What has been missing in Nanaimo is pace, the willingness to say yes when proposals arrive, and a coordinating body strong enough to keep the work moving between elections.

Main points

• Build housing on land the City already owns. Lease the land, fast-track the permits, and use the provincial funding that is already on the table.
• Spread services out. Clustering every homeless service downtown has failed residents and service users alike. Scattered sites work better.
• Replace the walk-in hub model with a properly sited Navigation Centre. Referral-only, twenty-four hours a day, on commercial or industrial land, focused on placing people into permanent housing.
• Build a range of housing types. Sober supportive housing for people in recovery, youth-specific units to break the foster care to homelessness pipeline, complex care for concurrent mental health and substance use needs, and Indigenous-led housing reflecting the population actually being served.
• Formalize the homelessness partnership with Snuneymuxw First Nation. Indigenous residents are 35% of the homeless count and 8% of the general population. The most effective services are Indigenous-led, on Snuneymuxw reserve land or in dedicated City-provided facilities staffed by the Nation, with funding shared between the Nation, the Province, and the federal government rather than absorbed by the City as the default.
• Rebuild the coordinating function the City defunded in November 2025. The Systems Planning Organization is gone, and nothing has replaced it.
• Every supportive housing site comes with a binding Neighbourhood Integration Plan. Twenty-four-hour phone line, scheduled community advisory committee meetings, performance metrics tied to operating funding.
• Lead a mid-island coalition for provincial action. The Province responds faster to coordinated regional asks than to individual ones.
• Say yes, or come with an alternative. The October 2025 vote against a community health centre that would have served 2,700 residents was a no without a plan for where else the project should go. That has to change.
• Protect funding for the RCMP and Community Safety Officers. Stable funding for the people who actually respond on the street. No cuts.
• Make the numbers public. The City and its partners already collect data on safety, housing, and downtown conditions. Residents should be able to see it.

Policy detail

Build, do not manage

The 2024 Point-in-Time Count recorded 621 people experiencing homelessness in Nanaimo, up from 174 in 2016. Outreach workers put the real figure closer to 800 to 1,000. The trajectory has not slowed despite over $32 million in provincial investment through BC Housing's homelessness response program. The model the City has been running under is not delivering, and the evidence elsewhere is clear about what does.

Finland reduced homelessness by 45% by converting shelters into permanent housing rather than building more emergency beds. Medicine Hat, Alberta, with a population comparable to Nanaimo's, functionally ended chronic homelessness in 2021 using the same Housing First approach. Canada's own At Home Chez Soi trial, the largest randomized study of Housing First ever conducted, showed the approach placed 60% of high-needs participants into stable housing, almost double the rate of standard programs, with 69% of program costs offset by reduced emergency service use.

The implication for the next council is straightforward. House the people who are already on the street. The City owns enough land inside the urban containment area to meaningfully expand supportive and non-market housing without buying a single new parcel. The pre-zoning initiative covering more than 2,000 parcels removed the regulatory barrier. The Province has the funding sitting on the table through the homelessness response program and BC Builds. What is needed is a council that leases the land, fast-tracks the permits, and stops treating each project as a fight to be re-litigated.

The housing also has to fit the population. The current system mixes people in early recovery with people in active addiction, youth aging out of care with adults in crisis, and Indigenous residents (35% of the count, against 8% of the general population) with a service architecture that is mostly not Indigenous-led. Each of those groups needs a different kind of housing and a different kind of support. Sober supportive housing for people in recovery. Youth-specific units to break the pipeline from foster care into homelessness. Complex care for concurrent mental health and substance use needs. Indigenous-led housing reflecting the population actually being served. None of this is exotic. All of it is funded provincial program area Nanaimo has used too little.

First Nations housing and the partnership question

Indigenous residents are 35% of the homeless count against 8% of the general population, a 4.4 times overrepresentation that is the highest among Nanaimo's peer cities. Snuneymuxw First Nation has been doing real work on this. The Nation operates the 35-unit project at 355 Nicol Street, co-leads Te'tuxwtun, and led the 2024 Point-in-Time Count. Tillicum Lelum and Salish Lelum carry a substantial share of the rest of the Indigenous-specific service load. The next council should support and expand those efforts and stop running parallel programs that duplicate work the Nation is already in a stronger position to do.

The piece that is not yet settled is who pays for what. Snuneymuxw receives federal funding for member services. The City funds its share of the municipal contribution. The Province funds the homelessness response through BC Housing. Federal homelessness funding reaches Nanaimo through the United Way. When a Snuneymuxw member becomes homeless and is sleeping rough downtown, multiple agencies have a responsibility, the financial and operational division between them is unclear, and individuals fall through the gap. The same is true for Indigenous residents in Nanaimo from other Nations.

The next council should formalize the partnership in writing. Indigenous-led services on reserve land, where the Nation has full operational authority, are the strongest model. The fallback model is dedicated City-provided facilities staffed by Snuneymuxw or Tillicum Lelum personnel. Either is preferable to an Indigenous resident receiving services from a non-Indigenous-led organization with limited cultural knowledge. The operating funding should be split between the Nation, the Province, and the federal government according to a signed agreement, with the City contributing facility space or transition funding rather than absorbing the ongoing operational cost as a permanent municipal expense. The Nation's existing capacity can grow with the right funding architecture in place. Building that architecture is the next council's job.

A serious replacement for the walk-in hub

The drop-in hub at 55 Victoria Road closed at the end of March 2026 when its City funding expired. Roughly 100 daily visitors lost their day services. The City reviewed thirty properties without finding a successor site that worked, and the closure has not solved the underlying problem.

The reason no successor site has worked is that the walk-in, residential-neighbourhood model was the wrong model in the first place. It produced 503 RCMP calls in its first year, neighbourhood opposition severe enough to break council coalitions, and a political environment that swallowed the October 2025 health centre vote on the same block. The research on facility siting consistently identifies residential proximity as the single biggest risk factor for the kinds of neighbourhood impacts the South End experienced.

The replacement model is a Navigation Centre. The differences from the walk-in hub are concrete:

• Referral-only access, which eliminates lineups and visible congregating.
• Twenty-four-hour operation, which avoids the morning dispersal into the surrounding area.
• Located in a commercial or industrial zone with transit access, not on a residential street.
• Stays of thirty to ninety days focused on placement into permanent housing, with on-site case management, clinical support, and employment navigation.

San Francisco's Navigation Centres have moved 46% of clients into permanent housing. Houston, Oceanside, and Palm Springs have adopted the same model. The closer-to-home templates are Kelowna's tiny-home village on industrial land at Crowley Avenue, built in four months with sixty units, and Kamloops' conversions of a former auto dealership and a former bus depot into shelters on commercial corridors. Nanaimo's own supportive housing project at 1030 Old Victoria Road, with indoor and outdoor common areas inside a controlled perimeter, is a better template than the walk-in hub it operated alongside.

The next council should commission a site selection process using community-derived criteria. The criteria must include commercial or industrial zoning, transit access, distance from schools and homes, and a footprint large enough to handle services indoors. The Province should be approached for capital and operating funding so the facility does not depend on annual municipal grants. The default, going forward, is no more walk-in hubs in residential neighbourhoods.

The standard for saying no

The October 2025 vote on the community health centre that would have served 2,700 people without a family doctor is the cleanest example of where the current council process breaks down. The siting concerns the dissenting members raised were real. The South End is over-concentrated with services. The drop-in hub closed five months later and the neighbourhood has been carrying that pressure for years.

The problem with the vote was not the no. It was that the no came without a yes attached. There was no companion motion identifying a different location, no commitment to find one within a defined timeline, no follow-up. The 2,700 people were left without a doctor and the council moved on to the next item.

The standard the next council should hold is straightforward. If a healthcare or housing proposal is in the wrong place, the response is to direct staff to find a better one within a fixed timeframe, not to let the project die. Saying no without owning the alternative is the pattern that produces vacant lots, blocked clinics, and an underbuilt city. That pattern has to end.

Coordination is broken

In November 2025, council voted in a closed meeting to defund the Nanaimo Systems Planning Organization. The organization was the arm's-length body created to implement the City's Health and Housing Action Plan and to coordinate the response among BC Housing, United Way, the non-profit operators, Snuneymuxw First Nation, and the City. It had performance issues. The response to those issues was elimination, not reform, and no replacement coordination function was put in place.

Six months later, the operators each run their own programs, BC Housing manages its capital file, United Way distributes federal homelessness funding through its Community Entity role, and the City contracts with operators bilaterally. Nothing connects them. When the drop-in hub closed in March, no single body was responsible for tracking where the displaced visitors went, what services they did or did not access, or what the next site needs to look like.

Kelowna's Journey Home Society shows what a working coordination body looks like. Arm's length from council. Performance measured against published targets. Institutional permanence beyond election cycles. The next council should reinstate Nanaimo's coordination function with clearer performance metrics and accountability, or assign the role to an existing body with the staffing and authority to do the job. The current arrangement has not worked since November and will not start working in October without a deliberate change.

The neighbours are part of the deal

The opposition to 55 Victoria Road did not come from residents who oppose helping homeless people. It came from residents who watched a high-volume daytime hub get sited next to homes and schools without a binding plan for how the surrounding streets would be managed. The standard "Good Neighbour Agreement" used in most Nanaimo siting decisions is voluntary and has no enforcement mechanism.

A Neighbourhood Integration Plan is different. It is binding, developed in consultation with residents and businesses before a site opens, and tied to continued operating funding. Every supportive housing or service site should require:

• A twenty-four-hour direct phone line to on-site staff for neighbours to report issues.
• A Community Advisory Committee that meets on a published schedule, with minutes available to the public.
• Performance metrics, including calls for service in the surrounding blocks, neighbourhood incident rates, and throughput to permanent housing, tracked and published.
• A clear consequence if the metrics fall. Funding can be paused, leadership can be changed, the operating model can be revisited.

This is the trade. The City asks neighbourhoods to host facilities serving people in crisis. In return, the neighbourhoods get a real voice in how those facilities are run and a real mechanism if they are not run well. That trade is the political precondition for getting the next ten years of housing built.

Pace and provincial leverage

Nanaimo's permitting system is slower than its peer cities. The 2021 Neilson review told council the staffing was inadequate for the volume; in 2026, the Planning and Development department has fewer planners than it did then despite the city adding 130 positions elsewhere. The pre-zoning of more than 2,000 parcels for social housing was the right move. The fast-tracking of permits on those parcels is what comes next. Delegating routine approvals to professional staff, eliminating redundant design review on land that is already pre-zoned, and reviewing applications in parallel rather than in series are achievable in one council cycle and would compress timelines from years to months.

Provincial leverage is the second piece. Kelowna's success in securing supportive housing capital was built on a coalition with West Kelowna, Vernon, Lake Country, and the Okanagan Indian Band. They went to Victoria together, with a single ask, on a single timeline. Nanaimo, the regional centre on Vancouver Island, has been going alone. A mid-island coalition with Parksville, Ladysmith, the Regional District of Nanaimo, and Snuneymuxw First Nation as partners would carry weight that no single municipality can. The Province responds faster to coordinated regional asks than to individual ones, and a coalition is the cheapest political infrastructure a council can build.

Safety, visible and supported

The Community Safety Officer program is one of the few municipal investments that touches the daily experience of street-level disorder without depending on the criminal justice system. Twelve officers, more than a thousand calls per month, four in the afternoon to midnight. The 2025 budget proposed a phased expansion of nine more officers over two years. That expansion should be funded and the officers retained as part of a stable program rather than treated as a budget line to cut when revenues are tight. The same applies to the RCMP detachment funding. People who actually respond on the street need stable employment terms.

The data piece is straightforward. The City already collects safety and housing statistics through the RCMP, the Community Safety Officers, the Health and Housing Action Plan, and the Point-in-Time Count. Most of it is reported to council in annual or semi-annual cycles. The same numbers should be published on a public dashboard with monthly updates. Residents who want to know whether downtown is safer now than it was a year ago should not have to file a freedom-of-information request.