Councillor Loughton kept every promise she made to voters in 2022. Take a closer look at her results by expanding the sections below.
The award-winning OUR DWTN program brought markets, live music, and events to spaces such as Ship Point and Centennial Square. My Great Neighbourhood Grants also supported local initiatives, while community gardens continued to flourish with support from Get Growing, Victoria!, which Councillor Loughton supported to keep in the 2026 budget.
Neighbourhood village development advanced through the adoption of Victoria 2050, the City’s 10-year Official Community Plan update. The plan centres growth around local and community villages and town centres to support economic vitality and complete walkable communities with housing, shops, services, and public spaces close together.
The City’s around the clock street-cleaning program clears litter, empties bins, power-washes sidewalks, and removes graffiti in public places. Combined with downtown foot patrols (Councillor Loughton led reviving this with VicPD’s Chief Constable in early 2023), road maintenance, and OUR DWTN beautification, the majority of Victoria’s public spaces remain safe, clean, and welcoming. Intense focus continues in hot spots around the city, particularly downtown to support the needs of businesses and residents.
Since 2022, Victoria has updated zoning and planning rules to allow more housing types citywide, sped up approvals (especially for non-market and rental housing), and used grants and incentives like tax exemptions to increase housing supply, affordability, and heritage preservation (a full heritage program review and update is coming soon).
As a result, Victoria has surpassed provincial housing targets, approved approximately 9,000 new homes (50% rental and 20% affordable), and adopted the new OCP to guide future growth, protect renters, support families, and ensure our city can meet housing needs sustainably over the coming decades.
The Province’s Community Housing Fund helped deliver new below-market homes in Victoria, including 265 affordable rental homes and 54 supportive homes across projects like Crosstown, The Ferns, and Chown Place.
The City’s Housing Reserve Fund invested $5.4 million to support 475 new homes at sites like 926–930 Pandora, Wellness House, and Village on the Green. The Fast Track for Affordable Housing program helped speed up the application processing time to deliver these projects faster.
Councillor Loughton led the work to support the Greater Victoria Rent Bank with $110,000 annually this term. The Rent Bank provides interest-free loans to help residents pay overdue rent or deposits, preventing eviction, which is the real solution to homelessness.
Mental health outreach expanded this term through the Co-Response Team, a partnership between Island Health and VicPD, and Crisis Response, Community Led (CRCL), a civilian-led mobile team providing trauma-informed care during mental health crises.
Councillor Loughton led advocacy work for the Province to better align outreach teams with housing pathways and recovery supports.
The Allied Health Clinic opened this term and provides team-based care with family doctors and nurse practitioners. The Dowler Place transitional care space housed over 74 people; Johnson Manor, a unit sober recovery-based housing facility, and the Bridge Street Pathways Shelter both opened this spring. These programs are examples that strengthen coordinated care, housing, and recovery making Victoria safer and more supportive for everyone.
Providing housing and healthcare to the unhoused population is critical to solving the City’s number one issue. Persistent advocacy expanded shelter capacity at Our Place Society, My Place, Rock Bay Landing, and the Salvation Army; transitioned St. John the Divine from a winter shelter into a permanent shelter; and pushed for HEART and HEARTH partnership with the Province, which added 248 net new shelter spaces and housing spaces this term.
Councillor Loughton led the creation of the Housing Relocation Support Team, which has housed over 50 unsheltered people and counting. She also encouraged the implementation of the Downtown Street Ambassador Program and both the Cultural & Youth Outreach Transportation Support Programs to help unsheltered people voluntarily travel back to their home communities.
All term Loughton pushed hard for the improvement of Extreme Weather Response planning both in Victoria and the region, and much more advocacy and work is planned for 2026.
Councillor Loughton’s focus aligns with the City’s 2026 budget survey results which showed that poverty and homelessness have overtaken housing and public safety as Victoria’s top issues, highlighting the urgent need for action to get people indoors and expand affordable housing.
This is a snapshot of what she is working on currently:
As mentioned on the home page, regarding homelessness, Councillor Loughton firmly believes that the provincial and federal governments don’t need to build new; they need to make better use of the housing stock we already have.
To achieve this, she is driving initiatives like Positive Flow, a program that provides light support and provincial rent supplements to people in supportive housing who are ready for independent living but priced out of market rents. This creates a chain reaction where people in shelters move into supportive housing, which frees up space in shelters for those on the street, hence the term "positive flow." This practical step could free up an estimated 100 units of supportive housing for those still on the street in Victoria, cutting visible homelessness in half.