"A good start": Two sites picked for transitional housing in Calgary
Two City of Calgary-owned sites have been dedicated to housing developments to support families with children who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.
The move is part of the City’s housing strategy which was approved earlier this year and seeks to curb the crisis that people have been going through regarding housing.
The sites — one in the northeast adjacent to the Whitehorn CTrain station and one in the southwest near Fish Creek-Lacombe CTrain station — can house up to 240 people and are intended for at-risk families with children.
“Ultimately, the housing continuum is broken,” Chaz Smith, the CEO and founder of non-profit BeTheChange YYC, told Daily Hive Urbanized.
“It is a good start, yet the problem is much worse than we are scaling to deal with.”
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Smith has long been a champion for affordable housing and helping individuals suffering from homelessness in this city.
He said that such situations should end up in home ownership, but that’s not a reality and will still remain out of reach for many.
“I think the solution lies in utilizing technologies to produce cheaper and quicker housing options that people could truly end up owning,” Smith said.
“Housing is a human right.”
Calgary’s housing strategy has 98 actions that address the crisis and create a variety of different types of homes across neighbourhoods in Calgary.
Making use of City-owned sites for temporary housing is a way Calgary can move quickly on supporting non-market homes and affordability, the City said.
As part of this plan, the City released an expression of interest open to all qualified non-profit organizations with experience developing and operating non-market housing until January 15, 2024.
Once housing provider partners are selected through this process, the City will negotiate a lease agreement and support those partners to deliver housing on the sites.
“We committed to take immediate and longer-term actions to ensure Calgarians have access to safe housing they can afford,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek said in a statement.
“The release of these two City land sites to rapidly create homes for families in precarious situations will allow for housing with dignity in a completely overloaded system.”
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