As of December, 2023, there were 423 people identified as homeless or residing in shelters just in the urban core area of the Cowichan Valley alone, according to Cindy Lise, from the Cowichan Coalition to End Homelessness.
Lise told the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s committee of the whole at its meeting on Sept. 11 that the number of unhoused people is much higher than the 229 that were identified throughout the Cowichan region during the point-in-time count that was conducted during a 24-hour period, from the evening of April 11 through April 12, 2023, by volunteers from the Cowichan Housing Association and the United Way.
She said a point-in-time count over one day is never enough to tell the whole story around homelessness in the region, so service groups who care for people in the community came together in December to do a “deeper dive” into the issue.
“It’s also estimated that approximately 3,000 people in this region are less than a paycheque away from being unhoused,” Lise said.
“Our current situation for shelter in the Cowichan Valley is extremely limited.”
The Cowichan Coalition to End Homelessness was formed in 2017 by dozens of community partners, including the Cowichan Housing Association and United Way, to work to increase affordable housing options and to reduce homelessness in the Cowichan region through research, community development, homelessness-prevention programming, and facilitating affordable housing development.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the coalition, which also consists of local government representatives, businesses, non-profit/charitable social and health services, Island Health, peers, and other groups, was well established in the Cowichan Valley.
Out of necessity, the work of the coalition shifted during the pandemic to addressing the immediate health and safety needs of the unsheltered population, but now it’s looking to get back to dealing with the broader issues around homelessness in the region.
Lise said there are currently just 60 shelter beds permanently available in the region, with another 15 that can be added during extreme cold weather at the Warmland shelter, and a location for an extreme-weather shelter in the region has yet to be identified.
“In 2023, 444 different individuals sheltered at Warmland, and it’s known that more than 300 people in the Cowichan region require permanent housing,” she said.
Coalition member John Horn, the former executive director of the Cowichan Housing Association who currently is the director of social planning and protective services in North Cowichan, said that while the situation, which many communities across Canada are also facing, may seem daunting, there are solutions.
“What we want to see in the community is an investment by our senior levels of government in the kind of social infrastructure that’s going to tackle these things head on,” he said.
“All social infrastructure devolves down to land, buildings and skilled humans. This situation has some urgency to it and it’s incumbent upon us to act quickly and effectively in terms of addressing these things.”
Horn said the coalition is proposing a comprehensive strategy to deal with the issues over an approximately 10-year time frame in three phases, with the costs expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
He said the first phase calls for the establishment of more sites like The Village transitional housing in Duncan, which is now being endorsed by BC Housing for other communities across B.C., more shelter spaces and more treatment beds to support people in recovery.
The second phase would include providing supports for seniors, including purchasing buildings to set up low-rent rooming houses, and providing income supports, while phase three includes buying sites and building supportive housing projects, as well as transitional and affordable housing.
Aaron Stone, chair of the CVRD, said he hopes it doesn’t take 10 years for the coalition and the community to achieve these goals.
“If you look at the sheer volume of money available across the province and country right now for housing and homeless initiatives, [we] should be able to raise the capital and make the investments that are needed and, hopefully, do it in a way that’s faster than 10 years,” he said.