In the count they identified 54 homeless youth, with hidden or informal arrangements such as staying at a hotel or motel as their most common form of shelter.(Lauryn Mackenzie /CHLY 101.7fm)

Once again the numbers of those living unhoused in Nanaimo remains high as United Way BC releases the latest numbers from the 2025 Point-in-Time (PiT) Count.

Over a 24-hour period on December 3rd 2025, 577 people were found to be without stable housing.

Along with the high numbers of those living on the streets, Naomi Woodland, director of housing initiatives for United Way BC said the count reveals the depths of ‘hidden homelessness’ throughout the city.

One key difference, Woodland said, is that this is the first accounting of people living in space like an emergency shelter, transitional housing, or a car. In years previous they were only counting those unsheltered in a public space or in an encampment.

“So that piece around people living in vehicles, couch surfing, or staying with relatives, they might have somewhere that's got a roof over it,” Woodland said. “But it's not a permanent, long term, sustainable place for somebody to stay. So that's what hidden homelessness is.”

The 2025 PiT Count found 31 per cent of those surveyed living in a type of homeless shelter, nine per cent living in a vehicle, and seven per cent living in transitional housing.

The remaining 51 per cent were found living in an encampment or in an unsheltered public space.

While the count normally happens every two years, Woodland explains that as they are funded by the Government of Canada, the government has asked them to run enumeration counts as a way to check in on the past years numbers. An enumeration count works the same as the regular count but has a short survey for community members and collects less data from participants.

For the first time, they also counted the number of youth, people 24 years old and under, that were identified as unhoused.

In the count they identified 54 homeless youth, with hidden or informal arrangements such as staying at a hotel or motel as their most common form of shelter.

Factoring hidden homeless and youth into the count, Woodland said was driven by community partners such as the City of Nanaimo, Snuneymuxw First Nation, and other local non-profit organizations.

“It was actually at the direction of those partners that we started to include these other areas of data that honestly, most of those operators have known that that's a critical part of our understanding of homelessness locally, but it hasn't quite made it to those official survey points or data points, so there was a it was community driven,” Woodland said.

They said this is something they will continue to survey during all future PiT Counts.

The 2025 numbers of 577 people found unhoused is a decrease from 2024 which found 621 people unhoused.

But Woodland said this year’s numbers should be taken as a bare minimum for the number of those living unhoused in the city and that the true scale of homelessness is still very high.

“This is a 24 hour period. It depends on who shows up on the day, who we can find, who's willing to kind of participate,” they said. “So all of those things are massive variables that make a Point-in-Time Count. It's useful as a kind of snapshot, but is it an actual, real count of every single person that's experiencing homelessness within a community? Not necessarily.”

Woodland said homelessness is a complex social issue and since the COVID-19 pandemic, they have seen an explosion in the number of people experiencing housing precarity.

“Ask anybody that's earning a minimum wage or a low income or even middle income folks, the cost of living and the cost of housing has just gone up exponentially,” they said. “Statistics across Canada show that a significant number of families are two or three paychecks away from insecure housing. So I think I would just ask the community of Nanaimo to really consider that this could happen to anybody at any point in time.”

They said that people tend to look at the overall number of those unhoused, and while the 577 people counted is lower than the previous year, the need of support is not.

The next Point-in-Time Count is set to be conducted later this fall.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.