Jay has a house back in Ontario, “but home’s not good for me right now.” So he’s out west getting a new life going on. He was living in a tent for a while and now has one of the pod beds at the Arbutus shelter, which he can keep more or less indefinitely as long as he doesn’t miss more than a couple nightly bed checks in a row. “I’ve been here since October, and it’s not bad. You’ve at least got border walls around the beds and a locker for your stuff, and there’s a couple meals a day.” Shelters around Victoria are increasingly shifting into rough forms of housing through a “reserved” bed system. But while that brings more certainty for the people who can meet the rules for holding onto a reserved bed, anyone without one has a harder time finding one that’s available on any given night.