|
Awards honour groups who have helped alleviate homelessness |
|
|
|
Written by Sherri Gallant
|
|
Friday, November 20 2009, 9:47 PM |
When Doug and Ryan Davidson bought the historic old Van Haarlem hospital a couple of years ago, the father-and-son team planned to evict the tenants, gut the place, renovate and create apartments for students.
“We were going to kick everybody out, but after about a month we got to know them and realized they were pretty good people,” Ryan said. “We realized if we asked them to leave that they’d probably have nowhere to go, so that changed things a little.
“It was a nice, old historic building, but it was quite run down when we took it over, and there were 18 tenants living there. Now there’s 30 tenants. There were always that many rooms, but not all of them were in good enough shape to rent. Now we’re pretty much full. One woman’s been there for 16 years. There’s a lot of transition there, but some tenants have stayed for years.”
The Van Haarlem Housing Corp. was born, and before long the Davidsons began working with Pathways to Housing, an outreach team devoted to helping people with mental illness and other challenges find housing. Together, they were honoured Friday with the Innovative Partnerships Award at the fourth awards luncheon on National Affordable Housing Day, organized by the city’s Social Housing in Action (SHIA) committee.
Next on the drawing board for the Van Haarlem Housing Corp. is a possible partnership with the YWCA to provide second-stage housing for women and children living in Harbour House, the city’s emergency women’s shelter.
The Lethbridge Housing Authority received the Award of Merit for ongoing work matching disadvantaged residents with affordable housing.
The Aboriginal Housing Society was presented with Outstanding Leadership in the Housing Sector. The Koh Koonan housing complex for aboriginal families, recently opened on 5 Avenue North, is the society’s most recent project.
Dennis Pahara received the Excellence in Neighbourhood Building and Design award for the affordable housing conversion at the old Alec Arms Hotel downtown. Pahara’s company Pahara Enterprises served as general contractor for the building’s owners, the Park family of Medicine Hat.
“The building has 44 units and they’re full right now,” Pahara said. “They’ve got quite a few older retired people who are just making it and they’re very happy there.”
Pahara is hoping a bistro of some sort will move into an unfinished 1,000 square feet in the lobby.
Wayne Stewart, chairman of the Provincial Secretariat for Action on Homelessness, was guest speaker at the awards luncheon, who spoke about how for years agencies were content to manage homelessness, not obliterate it.
“No longer will we be content until everyone has a home,” Stewart said. “It’s remarkable how a commitment to end homelessness energizes people. I can’t count the number of people who’ve moved from skepticism, from saying ‘we’ll never change that, there is no end to this problem,’ to people who say ‘yes, we can.’”
|
