Comox Valley 2026 Municipal Election series, Post 4 of 10
A client came by our Fifth Street shop a while back to sign some documents. They had spent a couple of minutes circling for a parking spot, and when they sat down they mentioned what they had just driven past: the Connect shelter across from City Hall, a temporary place that has taken on the look of something permanent, a dozen people gathered out front and a good chunk of the parking lot next door taken over by blacked-out chain link surrounding tents. Then they said the thing I hear more and more these days: “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
It is a fair question. Connect is one of the stretched, stopgap pieces of infrastructure the Valley’s shelter system runs on, and the province’s permanent answer is already going up across town on Braidwood Road: a supportive housing building and a shelter, the biggest project of its kind the Valley has taken on. There is also a 58-page freedom-of-information release from BC Housing on this project. It lays out how the site was chosen, what it will cost, what the neighbours were told and when, and one uncomfortable design question that does not have a particularly satisfying answer. More on that below. First, the number.
218 people
Every couple of years, volunteers spend 24 hours counting the people in the Comox Valley who have nowhere stable to live. The 2025 Point-in-Time count found 218 people. Of those, 137 were unsheltered, sleeping outside, in vehicles, or somewhere not meant for permanent living. The other 81 were in a shelter or transitional bed on the night of the count.
That 218 is down from 272 in 2023, and it would be easy to read the drop as the problem easing. That reading is too quick. The total count fell, but the number of people counted as unsheltered, sleeping outside rather than in a bed, rose from 95 in 2023 to 137 in 2025. A Point-in-Time count is also only a snapshot of a single day, and the people who run it are clear it captures the minimum, not the total. Advocates on Vancouver Island have questioned whether the lower 2025 numbers reflect fewer people or a harder-to-find population. And even the lower 2025 count is well above where the Valley sat in 2020, when the same count found 132.
Who the 218 are
More than eight in ten of the people counted reported mental-health challenges, and nearly three-quarters reported substance-use or recovery needs. Physical disabilities, chronic medical conditions and cognitive disabilities were also common. Forty-two per cent of respondents identified as Indigenous, compared with about seven per cent of the general population. One in five of the people counted was 55 or older.
Seventy-one per cent had lived in the Comox Valley for five years or more, overwhelmingly locals who lost their footing in a community they already belonged to. The most commonly cited reason was not addiction. It was insufficient income: 41 per cent simply did not have enough money coming in to keep a roof.
This is the affordability squeeze measured at its far end. When housing costs climb faster than incomes, the people with the least room in their budgets are the first ones pushed out.
What is being built on Braidwood
At 925 Braidwood Road, BC Housing is building 70 self-contained supportive homes: furnished studios, each with its own bathroom and kitchenette, in a four-storey building. Rent is geared to income, with residents paying up to $500 a month. Staff are on site around the clock, providing meals, health supports, and help with the daily skills of holding onto housing. The operator is Lookout Housing and Health Society. Next door at 933 Braidwood, a two-storey shelter run by Connective will hold 73 beds, with room for up to 30 additional mats in bad weather, staffed 24 hours a day.
The buildings will replace the Connect shelter on Cliffe Avenue, which the city has run on a lease for years in a building that was never purpose-built for the job. When Braidwood opens, Connect closes, so part of what looks like new capacity is really a permanent replacement for a temporary one.
The project is also bigger than it started out. When the province announced the land purchase in March 2024, the plan was for roughly 60 supportive units and a 40-bed shelter. What is now going up is 70 homes and 73 beds. The shelter side has nearly doubled since the first announcement, as the province reassessed the need between buying the land and drawing the plans.
The money is public and considerable. The land cost about $4.4 million. The supportive housing building runs roughly $22 million, the shelter roughly $17 million, both from provincial housing funds. The City of Courtenay’s contribution came as about $157,000 in development-cost reductions. The builder is Island West Coast Developments.
There is another layer to the site. Before the work began, an eagle-down blessing ceremony was held on July 24, 2026, with elders, matriarchs, and representatives of the K’ómoks, Pentlatch, Sathloot, and Sasitla. The ground itself is culturally significant: 3,800-year-old artifacts were found nearby in 2025, and archaeological investigation followed before building. Jessie Everson of K’ómoks First Nation described the ceremony as spreading a blessing and a peace across a project meant to shelter people who need it. That history is part of why the K’ómoks treaty and the Nation’s relationship to this land sit closer to this story than they might first appear.
What the records show
The freedom-of-information package (BC Housing file HSG-2024-41513, available through the province’s open-information site) covers the spring of 2024, when the purchase was announced. Most of it is internal communications: draft question-and-answer documents, media requests from the Comox Valley Record, and the back-and-forth among government staff over how to describe the project.
The numbers in the file are blunt. As of early 2024, the province’s own briefing noted 111 supportive homes already operating across two Courtenay projects, all of them full, and more than 133 people on the Supportive Housing Registry waiting for a spot in Courtenay and Comox. Alongside 59 shelter spaces the records describe as at or near capacity most of the year, that is the math behind Braidwood: the existing system is full, and the line for it is longer than a single new building can clear.
The site has a backstory of its own. The three-acre parcel fronts both Ryan Road and the quieter Braidwood Road. It was zoned for private seniors’ housing and carried a covenant on title restricting it to that use, which the city had to lift. The province bought it from Pacific Swell Developments, a private company that owned the site and stayed on to help develop it, and Courtenay council voted unanimously to support the plan back in October 2023.
The sharpest exchange in the file is a reporter’s question the public announcements don’t really resolve. Putting supportive housing and an emergency shelter on the same site sounds efficient. A source with frontline experience at a troubled Victoria supportive housing building warned the Record it can backfire: people working hard to stay away from drugs can be pulled back by close daily proximity to others in active use, and the reporter asked whether Braidwood would place the shelter too close to the homes. BC Housing’s answer, in its own notes, is that beds will be filled through a Coordinated Access and Assessment process meant to achieve what it calls a “balanced tenant population,” backed by 24-hour staffing, guest policies, wellness checks, and built-in security. Whether that balance actually holds is something a council and an operator only find out once people are living there.
The file is also, plainly, a communications exercise. Staff debate whether to mention a troubled Victoria precedent at all, how to frame an earlier Courtenay purchase that went less smoothly, and how to hit reporters’ deadlines with agreed language. None of that is unusual. But the file shows something the public rarely sees: the government working out what to say about this project, and what to leave out. Several passages are withheld under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, including two pages held back entirely as policy advice, so even the released file is not the whole file.
The part that lands on a ballot
One part of the file connects directly to the question running through this series. When BC Housing bought a Cliffe Avenue property for supportive housing in 2023, the mayor felt the city had been bypassed. For Braidwood, the province took visible care to do it differently: staff met with the city weekly, reviewed more than 50 potential properties together, and lined up council’s unanimous support before going public. The file shows communications staff working out how to explain why this time was smoother than last.
The people living closest to the site were among the last to hear about it. By early May 2024, more than a month after the announcement, a group calling itself Neighbours of 925 Braidwood Road held a press conference to say they had not heard from a single BC Housing official. Internally, the records show the neighbour letters had been drafted but not yet mailed, held up while BC Housing waited on the city for an address list. Council had been consulted and had agreed. The immediate neighbours were still waiting.
That gap between consulting a council and consulting a neighbourhood is precisely what the first post in this series, on Bill 44 and who actually holds housing power, was about. Much of what happens on a site like this is decided by the province, not the council you elect. But councils still have a local role: how residents are brought into the process, how their concerns are carried back to the province, and whether they hear about a project before or after the big decisions have already been made.
The gap, and the next council
The supportive homes are not expected to open until early 2028, and the shelter until spring 2028. Braidwood is coming, but there are still two winters between here and there.
That gap is where the next council actually operates. Braidwood was set in motion by the province and by decisions already made. What the people you elect this fall will decide is what happens in the meantime: how much shelter capacity the Valley funds while it waits, especially with Connect eventually closing rather than adding to the total; how encampments are handled through two more winters; and how the towns and the Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD) split responsibility for a population that does not stop at a municipal boundary.
A question for the doorstep
When a candidate knocks this fall, homelessness will be one of the issues they have a tidy line about. Push past the line:
Braidwood will not open until 2028, the Connect shelter closes when it does, and the last count found 218 people without stable housing. What will you do about the gap between now and then, and how will you pay for it?
From there the follow-ups come easily. Where should shelter capacity go while the Valley waits? How should the towns and the CVRD share the cost and the responsibility? What do they expect of an operator, and how would they hold one to it? And when residents near a site raise concerns, or find out about a project after their council already signed off, what role should council play between the neighbours and the need?
Supportive housing draws a strong and understandable response from the streets around it. People living nearby are entitled to expect that a building is well run, adequately staffed, and answerable when something goes wrong. And 218 of their neighbours are entitled to somewhere to sleep that is not a doorway. Both of those are true at once, and a candidate who only ever speaks to one of them is telling you which voters they are counting on.
What tells you the most about a candidate here is whether they can hold both the 218 and the neighbours in the same sentence without flinching from either.
Next in the series: The Room Down the Hall, short-term rentals and the housing squeeze.
Sources
- Comox Valley 2025 Point-in-Time Homelessness Count: Key Findings and Community Insights, Comox Valley Coalition to End Homelessness, December 2025. Link
- 2025 Homeless Count, Comox Valley community report, BC Housing, 2025. Link
- “218 Comox Valley residents experiencing homelessness in 2025 Point in Time count,” Comox Valley Record. Link
- “Vancouver Island, Sunshine Coast advocates question drop in numbers from B.C.’s 2025 homeless count,” CBC News. Link
- 925 and 933 Braidwood Road supportive housing and shelter, project page, BC Housing. Link
- “Building new supportive homes, shelter for people in Courtenay,” BC Housing news release, July 2026. Link
- “Courtenay to get new supportive homes and shelter,” Comox Valley Record, July 22, 2026. Link
- “New supportive housing and shelter project the site of ground blessing ceremony,” Comox Valley Record, July 28, 2026. Link
- Freedom-of-information response package HSG-2024-41513, BC Housing / Ministry of Housing, released through the Province of B.C. open-information site. Link