2026 Comox Valley Municipal Election Series

Almost every week, I talk to clients who say a version of the same thing. A young couple pre-approved for a number that doesn’t quite reach the price of the listings they actually like. Retired grandparents who want to downsize but can’t find anything smaller that pencils out. A tradesman driving in from Port Alberni because a Valley wage does not cover a Valley mortgage payment. The details change from one person to the next, but the squeeze remains the same.

That squeeze is what the 2026 municipal election is really about. Density, affordability, homelessness, and who gets to decide, they all come back to one question: whether the Comox Valley can house the people who already live and work here.

We vote on Saturday, October 17, with advance voting on October 7 and 14. Councils, the school board, the electoral area directors on the Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD) board, all of it is on the ballot. Candidates will talk about roads and rec centres and the outdoor pool, and they should. But the issue that touches nearly every decision these councils make over the next four years is housing. Whether the debate is taxes, transportation, infrastructure, homelessness, or neighbourhood character, housing is usually the reason those conversations exist in the first place.

The squeeze in numbers

Start with what the market has done to the people who live here. In Courtenay, home prices jumped 61 per cent between 2019 and 2022 while household incomes rose about 36 per cent, and the city’s own report cautions even that income gain is likely overstated by pandemic-era support. Roughly one in five Courtenay households now spends more than 30 per cent of its income on housing, and about one in ten is in core housing need, stuck in a home that is too expensive or unsuitable with nothing better within reach. That is why buying a first home, or finding one where a family can actually get ahead, is now a stretch even on two working incomes.

Behind those percentages are familiar trade-offs: adult kids moving back into the spare room, couples staying in a house they would rather not share, workers taking on long commutes because nothing closer fits the budget. A 2025 Point-in-Time count found 218 people experiencing homelessness in the Comox Valley, and that count went up even as new non-market units came online.

Then look at what is coming. Courtenay projects it will need about 8,350 additional homes by 2041 to house a population expected to reach roughly 42,415. That isn’t a developer’s wish list. It’s the city’s own assessment of what will be needed simply to keep pace with the people already expected to arrive.

Eight thousand homes is an easy number to skim past. In practical terms, it means accommodating the equivalent of another town the size of Comox over the next generation, within a valley already constrained by farmland, floodplains, forests, and established neighbourhoods.

The five threads

Housing isn’t one debate. It’s several different arguments happening at once, and every candidate should have an answer for each. None of these debates is as simple as “pro-development” versus “anti-development.” Each involves trade-offs that will shape taxes, neighbourhoods, infrastructure, and who can afford to live here. This series will look at them one at a time.

Whose call is it. The province’s Bill 44 now requires municipalities to pre-zone for Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing (SSMUH), allow secondary suites and garden suites, and rezone for twenty years of growth. Courtenay was handed a provincial housing target in June 2025: 2,472 new units by 2026. Some candidates welcome the push, while others call it Victoria overriding local judgment.

How big, how tall, how fast. Comox adopted a new Official Community Plan (OCP) in February 2026 by a single-vote margin, with three councillors opposed and a packed gallery unhappy. The Aspen East proposal drew protesters to council over height, traffic, buffers, and Brooklyn Creek. Courtenay is reworking its own OCP and the cost charges that come with growth. This is the loudest fight of the campaign: neighbourhood character against the need for new supply.

Where people sleep tonight. This is the sharp end of the same squeeze: the 218 people counted without homes, and the many more doubled up or sleeping in vehicles because nothing they can afford is available. Construction began in July 2026 on the Braidwood Road site: 70 supportive homes, which pair permanent housing with round-the-clock staff and services, and 73 emergency shelter beds for people with nowhere to sleep that night. The building does not open until around 2028. Projects like this often draw neighbourhood resistance over where they land, and raise difficult questions about who should pay to build and operate them. Candidates will have to answer both, and say what they will do in the years before the doors open.

The room down the hall. Courtenay and Cumberland have both tightened short-term rental rules, on the premise that every suite rented to a visitor is one unavailable to a resident. Whether those rules go far enough, and whether they are returning homes to the long-term market, is a live question in a valley with very low vacancy.

Who pays. The CVRD approved a regional Housing Authority in December 2025 with a budget near $880,000 a year. The 2026 regional budget carried a 7.6 per cent tax revenue increase. Every housing promise has a price, and we all have to pay it.

So where does that leave voters?

Over the next ten weeks I will take each thread in turn, in plain language, with the sources laid out so you can check my work. As nomination lists firm up in September, I will publish where the candidates in Courtenay, Comox, Cumberland, and the electoral areas actually stand on each one, side by side, without telling you how to vote.

I work in real estate here, so I read these files for a living. Zoning maps, needs reports, council agendas, the fine print that decides what gets built and what your street looks like in ten years. My aim with this series is simple: to hand you the same picture I use, so you walk into the booth on October 17 knowing which candidate’s answer on housing you actually believe.

The young couples, the downsizers, and the workers forced into long commutes will keep coming to me, whatever the ballot says. The next council’s decisions will determine what I can actually help them buy or downsize into, and ultimately what kind of Valley we become. That is what voters will decide on October 17.