An increasingly political framing of issues around homelessness and substance use in BC communities has created an environment where visible problems intensify and multiply on our streets, yet we appear ever more helpless to act. For the sake of everyone touched by this crisis of homelessness on our streets, that simply can’t continue.
The March 2025 point-in-time survey done by the Community Social Planning Council identified nearly 1,800 people living homeless in the Capital Region on the night of the survey. But their diverse voices are almost completely absent from the public conversation. This is a grave omission.
The experiences, ideas and insights of the people who have been abandoned to live on our streets are integral to understanding how our communities got to this point, and how we might ever get out. Their very human stories of life on the street remind us that they are the true experts when it comes to homelessness, and that the supposed network of support services that we imagine being available to anyone who needs it is profoundly tattered, threadbare, and not even remotely up to the challenge.
This Street Stories project was launched on Instagram in Fall 2025 to provide a platform for those unheard voices. Listening to the experiences of people living homeless isn’t enough to end the crisis, of course. But the crisis definitely won’t end unless we start listening.
We’re in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis. Mental health needs have soared even while services have stalled. The ongoing toxic drug crisis adds a disturbingly life-threatening twist, killing at least 150 people in BC month after month, including a disproportionate number of people living homeless. There are real reasons for why so many people are falling into homelessness.
The politicization of the issues around homelessness and illicit substances directly prevents our communities from taking effective action. People need health care, but they’re forced to fight their way through stigma and judgment to get it. Potential solutions around substance use are shouted down, and then shut down, long before they can ever prove themselves one way or the other. Increasingly polarized opinions of a health and housing crisis unlike anything we’ve ever seen before dominate the public conversation. We are deep in a crisis that we will never get out of if we continue this way.
This is a social crisis 30+ years in the making, shaped by the actions and inactions of virtually every political party in BC and Canada and many generations of voters, Yet the blame is still being laid at the feet of the people caught up in it. No problem can ever be solved without understanding every aspect of it.
May the voices of the people living through this crisis light our way.