The Missing Middle
When people don’t fit within the systems we’ve built
There is a space between traditional rental housing and formal supportive housing that far too many people fall into. It’s occupied by people who are capable of living independently but cannot afford market rent, people who need occasional assistance but don’t require intensive support, and people whose circumstances simply don’t fit the eligibility criteria of existing programs.
Some are living with disabilities or chronic health conditions. Others are working but cannot find affordable housing, escaping violence, recovering from a crisis, or trying to rebuild their lives after a period of homelessness. Some have children, pets, or family relationships they are unwilling to abandon in exchange for shelter. Others need little more than a stable address and an opportunity to get back on their feet.
Their circumstances are different, but they share a common problem: the housing and support systems available to them often leave very little room for individual needs.
At Rooted Cowichan, we call this The Missing Middle. It is the space between what people need and what existing systems are designed to provide. We believe that addressing it requires more than additional programs. It requires reconsidering how we connect people, housing, and the resources already present in our communities.
Homelessness in Cowichan: The numbers tell a story
On November 27, 2025, a Point-in-Time count identified 428 people experiencing homelessness across the Cowichan region. That compares with 223 people identified in 2023 and 180 in the 2024 snapshot. The results, released by United Way British Columbia in March 2026, illustrate the scale of housing insecurity in our communities.
These numbers represent people identified during a particular counting period, not everyone who experienced homelessness throughout the year. Changes in survey coverage and the involvement of people with lived experience also affect how many people are counted. Even so, the findings make clear that homelessness is a significant local issue requiring sustained attention.
The 2025 enumeration identified 284 people in the Cowichan Tribes and Duncan service areas alone. Other people were counted throughout the region, including Ladysmith, Chemainus, Crofton, North Cowichan, and surrounding electoral areas.
Behind these numbers are neighbours, parents, workers, elders, young people, and people living with disabilities. Their circumstances cannot be reduced to a single explanation or addressed through a single housing model.
Source: United Way BC — Cowichan Point-in-Time Count, March 2026
Homelessness is not a character flaw
Public conversations about homelessness often focus on addiction, mental illness, unemployment, and personal responsibility. These issues can be part of someone’s experience, but they do not adequately explain why people become homeless or why so many struggle to find their way back into stable housing.
Housing affordability, poverty, disability, discrimination, family violence, inadequate income supports, and a shortage of accessible services all contribute to housing insecurity. For Indigenous people, these pressures exist alongside the continuing effects of colonialism, displacement, and systemic discrimination.
The evidence challenges the idea that homelessness can be explained primarily by individual behaviour. In British Columbia’s 2023 homeless counts, 37% of respondents identified insufficient income as a reason for their most recent housing loss. Substance-use issues were reported by 25%, while landlord or tenant conflict and conflict with a spouse or partner were each reported by 17%. Respondents could identify multiple reasons, reflecting the complexity of housing loss.
The same report found that 67% of respondents had lived in the community where they were counted for more than five years, while another 23% reported having always lived there. The common assumption that people experiencing homelessness have simply arrived from somewhere else is not supported by those provincial findings.
A person can work hard, make responsible decisions, and still lose their home. Someone can experience addiction or mental illness and remain capable of maintaining a household. A person can need assistance without needing someone else to make decisions about their life.
Homelessness is not evidence that someone lacks value, ability, or potential. It is a condition shaped by economic pressures, individual circumstances, and the systems that determine who can access housing.
Source: BC Housing — 2023 Report on Homeless Counts in B.C.
When the system becomes the barrier
Imagine someone who needs a place to live. They don’t require residential treatment, institutional care, or intensive daily supervision. They need an affordable room, a stable address, perhaps some occasional support, and enough security to begin planning beyond their immediate survival. There has to be a housing arrangement between a CLBC Homeshare and a residential tenancy agreement.
Finding that arrangement should not be an extraordinary undertaking, yet it often is.
A person may earn too little to qualify for a conventional rental but too much to qualify for a particular subsidy. They may be considered insufficiently vulnerable for supportive housing while being unable to secure housing independently. They might have a pet, lack conventional references, or be unable to produce the identification and documentation required by an application process.
For someone living in a vehicle or encampment, even completing an application can be difficult. Internet access, transportation, reliable phone service, identification, and a mailing address are often treated as basic requirements, despite being precisely the resources someone experiencing homelessness may not have.
Many of these requirements exist for understandable reasons. Housing providers need to manage risk, public programs need accountability, and services must operate within funding and regulatory frameworks. The problem arises when those requirements collectively exclude the very people the programs were created to serve.
Frontline workers frequently recognize these gaps and work extraordinarily hard to help people navigate them. But individual dedication cannot compensate indefinitely for systems that are fragmented, under-resourced, or too rigid to respond to real circumstances.
When someone is turned away because they don’t meet a program’s criteria, their need for housing doesn’t disappear. They simply return to trying to survive without it.
The existence of housing is not the same as access to housing
British Columbia needs more affordable housing. There is little question that the cost and availability of suitable homes have become major barriers for people across the province. But increasing the number of buildings alone will not resolve every aspect of housing insecurity.
Recent reporting on unsold condominiums has highlighted an uncomfortable contradiction: newly constructed homes can remain empty while people struggle to find somewhere safe to live. Those properties are not necessarily affordable or available to people experiencing homelessness, and unsold inventory is not the same thing as housing that can immediately be occupied. Nevertheless, the contrast raises an important question about how housing is produced, priced, distributed, and accessed.
Housing can exist without being accessible to the people who need it.
The same principle applies on a smaller, more personal scale. A homeowner may have an unused room but feel uncertain about sharing their home. A property owner may have land or an existing building that could potentially support a housing arrangement but have no idea where to begin exploring the possibilities. Someone may be willing to offer employment, transportation, or practical assistance but have no connection to the people who could benefit.
These situations are not all straightforward, and not every unused resource is suitable for housing. Safety, accessibility, consent, and fair arrangements matter. But there is an important difference between recognizing genuine constraints and assuming that unconventional possibilities aren’t worth exploring.
Rooted Cowichan is interested in what happens when we begin asking different questions. Rather than focusing exclusively on what a person lacks or which program they qualify for, what if we began by understanding what they need, what they can contribute, and which resources might already exist around them?
What the evidence tells us about housing and stability
Decades of homelessness research have challenged the assumption that people must first resolve their personal difficulties before they can successfully maintain housing.
Housing First approaches prioritize access to housing without requiring sobriety or treatment as a precondition. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis examined four randomized controlled trials and found that people receiving Housing First interventions experienced significantly greater housing stability than those receiving usual services.
Across the trials included in the pooled follow-up analysis, participants receiving Housing First were approximately 2.46 times as likely to be housed after 18 to 24 months. The researchers also found reductions in emergency department visits and hospitalizations, although the evidence for improvements in other health outcomes was less certain.
The findings are important because they challenge the assumption that people must first demonstrate readiness for housing by resolving substance-use issues, mental health challenges, or other personal circumstances.
This does not mean that housing alone resolves every difficulty. People may still need healthcare, mental health services, income assistance, substance-use supports, or help developing community connections. Nor does it mean that every person requires the same type or intensity of support.
What the research reinforces is that stable housing provides a foundation from which people can address other areas of their lives. It is much harder to maintain employment, attend medical appointments, manage a disability, recover from illness, or build healthy relationships when every day revolves around finding somewhere safe to sleep.
The principle is straightforward: support should respond to people’s circumstances, rather than housing being conditional on their ability to satisfy a predetermined set of expectations.
Rooted Cowichan is not a Housing First program, nor are we proposing to replace established housing and support services. We are interested in applying some of the same person-centred principles to community-led opportunities that may fall outside conventional housing programs.
Understanding systemic oppression
Systemic oppression can sound like an abstract political concept, but its effects are often found in ordinary policies, procedures, and expectations.
Consider a housing application that requires a stable employment history from someone receiving disability benefits, or a service that expects clients to attend appointments in a community they cannot reach without a vehicle. A person escaping violence may be expected to produce documents they had no opportunity to collect. Someone who has experienced homelessness may be asked for landlord references despite having no recent rental history.
None of these requirements necessarily originates from deliberate cruelty. Individually, some may even appear reasonable. But when institutions repeatedly design their processes around the circumstances of people who already have stability, those without it face disproportionate barriers.
The effects are especially significant for people who experience overlapping forms of disadvantage. Indigenous people, people with disabilities, racialized communities, people living in poverty, and those escaping violence may encounter discrimination and exclusion at multiple points in their search for housing.
In British Columbia’s 2023 homelessness counts, 40% of respondents identified as Indigenous, compared with approximately 6% of the provincial population. Among Indigenous respondents, 71% reported that they or a parent or grandparent had attended a residential school.
These figures reflect profound and persistent inequities. The history of colonial displacement, residential schools, child welfare involvement, and systemic discrimination cannot be separated from the housing challenges Indigenous communities continue to experience.
Recognizing systemic barriers does not mean dismissing the importance of regulations, public accountability, or safety standards. These protections serve essential purposes, particularly when vulnerable people are involved. It means examining whether our systems are achieving their intended outcomes and whether the people most affected have meaningful opportunities to shape the solutions.
A system can be well-intentioned and still produce exclusion. A policy can be administratively convenient and still create unnecessary hardship. Good intentions are not a substitute for examining results.
Sources: BC Housing — 2023 Homeless Counts and B.C. Provincial Health Officer — The Disproportionate and Unique Impacts of Homelessness on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit People
What if we started with people instead of programs?
Much of our housing system is organized around categories: emergency shelter, transitional housing, supportive housing, subsidized housing, and market rental housing. Each serves an important purpose, but real lives do not always follow these divisions.
Someone may need temporary stability without intensive support. Another person may be comfortable sharing a home but unable to afford living alone. A property owner may want to contribute to a solution without becoming a conventional landlord. A community member may have skills or resources that could make an otherwise difficult arrangement possible.
These possibilities are highly individual. They require conversations, trust, clear expectations, and an understanding of everyone’s rights and responsibilities.
They also require us to recognize the difference between offering someone a genuine choice and expecting them to accept inadequate conditions because they have limited alternatives. Housing justice cannot be built on desperation or exploitation. Arrangements must be safe, fair, voluntary, and respectful of the dignity of everyone involved.
At Rooted Cowichan, we want to begin with conversations rather than assumptions. We want to understand what people are looking for, what they can offer, and whether there are opportunities to create meaningful connections.
Sometimes that may involve a conventional room rental. Sometimes it could mean exploring a shared living arrangement, a temporary housing opportunity, or a partnership involving several community members. Other possibilities may require professional expertise, additional resources, or cooperation with local authorities before they can proceed.
We don’t expect every idea to work. We do believe that possibilities deserve to be explored rather than dismissed simply because they don’t fit an established model.
Community action and systemic change belong together
There is a danger in suggesting that homelessness can be solved through goodwill alone. It cannot.
Communities need sustained investment in affordable and accessible housing, adequate income supports, healthcare, culturally appropriate services, and effective protections against discrimination and exploitation. Governments have responsibilities that cannot simply be transferred to volunteers, charities, or individual property owners.
At the same time, community members are not powerless while waiting for larger policy changes.
We can build relationships between people who would otherwise never meet. We can identify underused resources, explore responsible housing opportunities, and develop partnerships that respond to actual needs. We can document the obstacles encountered along the way and use those experiences to inform broader conversations about policy and practice.
Community-led initiatives can also provide opportunities to test ideas on a small scale before considering whether they could work more broadly. A successful arrangement does not automatically prove that a model is appropriate for everyone, but it can offer valuable insight into what makes housing opportunities possible, sustainable, and fair.
This is the role Rooted Cowichan hopes to play: connecting people, exploring opportunities, learning from experience, and demonstrating where different approaches may be worth pursuing.
We are not trying to create another layer of bureaucracy or another organization that people must navigate before they can receive help. We want to make connections easier, not more complicated.
What we’re building in Cowichan
Rooted Cowichan is a community-powered housing justice movement working to connect people who need housing with people who have space, skills, resources, or opportunities to offer.
Our approach begins with listening. We want to understand people’s circumstances, strengths, preferences, and needs without reducing them to a diagnosis, an income bracket, or a housing status. We also want to understand what community members are genuinely willing and able to contribute.
From there, we can explore whether meaningful connections are possible.
We are particularly interested in the opportunities that fall between established housing models: situations where a little flexibility, creativity, or community cooperation could make a significant difference.
As Rooted develops, we hope to document successful connections, identify recurring barriers, and explore community-led housing pilots that can inform broader change. We want to learn from the people participating, including what works well, what doesn’t, and what would make future opportunities safer and more accessible.
We don’t claim to have solved homelessness, and we cannot promise that every inquiry will lead to housing. But we believe there is value in creating a place where people can bring their ideas, needs, and resources together.
A different starting point
For too long, conversations about homelessness have revolved around what cannot be done. There isn’t enough funding. There isn’t enough housing. There aren’t enough services. Someone doesn’t qualify. A proposal doesn’t fit the existing framework.
Many of these constraints are real, and some reflect important protections. But they cannot be the end of every conversation.
We need to ask what is possible with the resources we have, what additional support would make an idea workable, and which barriers genuinely protect people versus those that simply preserve the status quo.
We need to recognize that people experiencing homelessness are not passive recipients of services. They have knowledge, abilities, relationships, preferences, and the right to participate in decisions about their own lives.
And we need to recognize that meaningful change can begin at more than one level. It can happen through public policy, investment, community partnerships, or a conversation between two people who might otherwise never have met.
Rooted Cowichan exists to help create those conversations and turn promising possibilities into real opportunities.
We are not here to manage homelessness. We are here to help create pathways out of it.
The resources exist. The connections are missing.
What do you have? What do you need? What can we create together?
