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Experts say the increase is driven by a combination of worsening housing shortages, drug toxicity and limited access to health care.
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Vincent Tao remembers seeing Dino Bundy, also known as Boomer, outside the usual meeting space for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users in the Downtown Eastside in 2023.
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Standing in the parking lot with his glasses off, he stared into the empty sky. The scene, Tao recently recalled, felt unsettling — like someone waiting for something that had already arrived.
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“I asked him what was going on. Boomer told me he had just been evicted from the single-room occupancy unit he had lived in for several years,” said Tao.
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Bundy, then 60, died soon after that encounter when the electrical closet he ended up living in caught fire. His death in April 2023 followed a series of failed housing searches, according to Tao.
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“He died all by himself.” Tao said it was not Bundy’s opioid-use disorder that ultimately killed him, but the unstable and unsafe housing he was forced to rely on due to a lack of affordable housing.
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Annual deaths among B.C.’s homeless population have more than tripled over the past decade, according to a recent report from the B.C. Coroners Service.
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There were 507 deaths among B.C.’s homeless population in 2024, the highest on record and the most recent year for which data was available. That’s up from a 10-year low of 140 homeless people in 2019, following five years of decline.
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Experts say the increase is driven by a combination of worsening housing shortages, drug toxicity and limited access to health care.
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Nearly half of the deaths among B.C.’s homeless population in 2024 were people living outdoors in makeshift shelters, vehicles or abandoned buildings, said the report. Another third were people staying in emergency or short-term shelters, safe and transition houses, or temporarily with friends and family. Living conditions for the remaining deaths were not known.
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Nearly three-quarters of deaths among homeless people in 2024 were linked to the toxic drug supply, up from just over half in 2016.
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While toxic drug deaths have begun to decline slightly in the last few years, that improvement has not happened among people lacking stable housing. Deaths among homeless people have remained stable.
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“It used to be a mirror,” B.C.’s chief coroner, Jatinder Baidwan, said of the relationship between deaths of housed and unhoused people.
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Now, he said, “the divide is getting bigger, not smaller.”
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Tao said Boomer’s story sits inside that growing divide.
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Bundy was half Black and half Indigenous, orphaned at the age of five. He spent part of his childhood at the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, according to his cousin Tanya Bundy. The institution was the subject of national scrutiny after former residents reported years of abuse, leading to a class-action lawsuit and a 2014 apology from the Nova Scotia government.
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“Even though his situation wasn’t good, he tried his best to help others during his struggle with life, drugs and homelessness,” his cousin said. “He always had a smile on his face.”
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In Vancouver, Bundy rebuilt himself repeatedly — as a tenant organizer, as a harm-reduction advocate, and as a constant presence in housing and health fights across the Downtown Eastside.
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But despite his community activism, Tao said, the odds were stacked against him.
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For years, Bundy cycled between precarious housing and temporary relief.
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“We went to one showing at an SRO on Main Street after work one day and even the guy running the place told him it wasn’t a good unit,” he recalled. “It was like a tiny closet with no window.”
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Bundy had been working occasional odd jobs, relying on social assistance and at times lived in a tent behind VANDU or in a car before ending up in the electrical closet.
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“This is what happens when people get evicted in Vancouver,” Tao said.
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“Not just people in the DTES — this is happening in places like Mount Pleasant, too, even among seniors I’ve worked alongside. Once housing is taken away from people under the poverty line, this is what happens — people die.”
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According to the B.C. Coroners Service data, in 2019 there were 5.7 deaths per 1,000 homeless individuals in B.C. By 2024, that figure had nearly tripled, to 15.7 deaths per 1,000.
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The largest number of deaths happened in the large population centres of Vancouver and Surrey. Relative to population size, however, death among the homeless population was highest in parts of Vancouver Island and northern B.C.
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Baidwan blamed the limited services available in rural and remote communities, a higher proportion of Indigenous residents and reduced access to mental health supports as likely contributors.
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Stephanie Laing, director of operations at the Kelowna Homelessness Research Centre, agreed.
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“There’s a lack of resources, there’s a lack of services. Typically those communities are spread out a little bit further, as well, which can make it really challenging for someone to go to services,” she said. “You also often can’t just pack up all of your belongings and bring them with you.”
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Laing said six people in the community died in the two weeks of filming a documentary, No Fixed Address: The White Cart Memorial, which sheds light on how people among Kelowna’s homeless population struggle with grief and loss after the death of someone they care about.
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“It’s often sudden, it’s often unexpected,” she said. “It’s incredibly challenging to grieve and to cope with.”
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“When you’re living on the streets, there’s always, like, a really strong brotherhood/sisterhood about it, and when someone does pass on through suicide or drug overdose, it affects everybody, not just close personal friends,” said Harold, a member of Kelowna’s Lived Experience Circle on Homelessness, a group that lobbies on policies and programs on homelessness.
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Laing’s research found that nearly half of participants interviewed in Kelowna identified grief and loss as a direct risk factor for their own homelessness. Often someone is pushed into homelessness when they lose a partner or roommate because rent became unaffordable.
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“You’re often a death away from experiencing homelessness,” Laing said. “That’s not something people think about.”
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Laing’s team partnered with the Lived Experience Circle on Homelessness to create the White Cart Memorial, a shopping cart painted white and marked with the initials NFA, for “no fixed address.” Community members filled the cart with food and water and organized a public memorial and walk that included smudging, drumming and community elders. Residents wrote the names of people they were mourning on wooden tags and hung them from the cart.
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The cart was then offered to residents of a camp in Kelowna as a permanent, mobile memorial.
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“Anyone living in any town connected to any of this is really, really familiar with how many people die, and so any kind of memorial, or any kind of just taking note, bears significance, it matters,” said John, another Lived Experience member.
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The success of the White Cart Memorial led to similar projects being developed in other B.C. communities.
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The documentary has been screened around B.C., including at the Carnegie Centre in Vancouver, where the Vancouver Hospice Society has worked with Laing, her co-director, Joshua Black from the B.C. Centre for Palliative Care, and Carnegie staff to provide support services to community members, including a monthly grief-sharing circle that has been running for several years.
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“That community is experiencing unprecedented amounts of loss and grief,” said Andrea Hernandez, volunteer services manager at the Vancouver Hospice Society.
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Bev Nolan, a counsellor at the Vancouver Hospice Society, pointed to the importance of ritual in processing grief. Even simple gestures, like coming together and lighting a candle, build support in the community and help to release grief.
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“If we don’t take time for ourselves to heal some of that, we run into trouble,” Nolan said.
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In an emailed statement, the Ministry of Housing pointed to “up to $1.5 billion” budgeted in 2023 to deliver housing and services but acknowledged that more work needed to be done.
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“We know there is more to be done, and we will continue working across government and with partners to address the root causes of homelessness,” the ministry said in an email.
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The Ministry of Health pointed to two programs that can help people tap into services in remote and rural communities. The opioid treatment access line provides online access to opioid addiction treatment and support. Access central is a phone service to connect people to addiction support services.
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Baidwan said he hopes to begin collecting more detailed data on deaths that will help policy-makers better assess existing policies and new ones under consideration.
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“We’re a socially aware society. We’ve got safety nets in place. We spend a lot of money, to put it a different way, on ensuring this kind of thing doesn’t happen,” Baidwan said. “But it’s getting worse.”
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