The latest point-in-time count in the city has revealed there are 419 people in Kamloops experiencing homelessness, who are either sleeping on the streets, in shelters or without a permanent place to lay their head.
The count took place over a 24-hour period in October 2025 and was done in conjunction with more than a dozen organizations in the city.
Of the 419 identified as experiencing homelessness, 274 were counted in the city’s 10 shelters, which were recorded to be at 95 percent capacity the night of the count. Additionally, there were 136 who were sleeping unsheltered and nine people who said they were couch surfing.
Not included in the tally were 48 people identified as likely experiencing homelessness who refused to be interviewed, 27 people in corrections facilities or the emergency department and 12 in treatment centres.
The information was presented by City of Kamloops social development and housing supervisor Karina Latras and social, housing and community development manager Natasha Hartson.
The city has 266 year-round shelter beds, 40 temporary winter shelter beds (from October to March) and 35 extreme weather event beds. Latras said that leaves more than 100 people without a place to sleep every night.
At the conclusion of the report, Coun. Dale Bass repeated a decade-long call for a sobering centre in the city.
“This is wrong. It’s just wrong. Someone asked recently, ‘What happened to the NDP government?’ I don’t know who they are anymore, but they certainly aren’t the NDP I know,” Bass said.
City staff confirmed that after a number of letters, meetings and even changes to the city’s business plan for the centre that catered to requests from Interior Health, there remain “no commitments whatsoever.”
Coun. Katie Neustaeter called the report results “profoundly heartbreaking and disturbing” and pointed to failures at the provincial level to remedy the situation.
“This shouldn’t even be a local conversation,” Neustaeter said.
Coun. Mike O’Reilly shared a similar sentiment.
“This is around the provincial government. To me, they have not just let community down, they have let the most vulnerable people of our community down,” O’Reilly said, referring to the province’s “housing first” strategy as “warehousing first.”
“The province needs to provide the support for mental health and addictions. I know people who are trying to get in right now, waiting weeks or months after they have made the decision to do it, and they can’t get help,” he said.
Asked what possible path forward there might be to resolve the issue, Hartson said it would help if the systems “feeding people into shelters” could be fixed, as well as proper staffing levels, by people with expertise, at places where the help is needed most.
“There is a discharge plan from hospital to shelter. This is wild. We are putting people from hospital into shelters. We are putting people who are too complex for complex care into shelters. We are taking people from corrections facilities and putting them in shelters,” she said.
“Shelters are not housing. They are emergency response, and they are quickly becoming the only thing we have to offer people when they are coming out of major systems. We continue, unfortunately in my opinion, to blame shelters for the problem. The problem is that the systems are broken and they are not supporting people,” Hartson said.