‘Quite a journey’: dozens move into transitional housing downtown

Dozens of residents have moved into transitional housing units in a former university building in downtown Winnipeg.

Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith said 42 residents have moved into suites on the third and fourth floors of a seven-storey building previously owned by Providence University College and Theological Seminary. There will be space for as many as 118 people who were in encampments or otherwise homeless.

The remaining units under renovation are expected to be ready and occupied in the coming weeks, Smith said.

“This has been two years in the making,” the minister said at a media event with residents, staff, neighbours and supporters. The building cost the province $24.4 million to purchase and renovate.

The 87,000-sq.-ft. Webb Place project is part of the province’s Your Way Home strategy to end chronic homelessness. The transitional housing provides people with a stable place to live while accessing the supports needed to move toward permanent housing.

One of its first residents, Robert Liddle, 78, said he’s grateful for the warm welcome he’s received since arriving in Winnipeg by train from Montreal when it was bitterly cold two years ago.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do, where I was going to go,” he told a crowd gathered on the building’s third floor terrace Friday. When the train station was about to close, Downtown Community Safety Partnership team members picked him up and helped him connect with N’Dinawemak. The Indigenous-led organization experienced in supporting homeless helped Liddle, who now has a room of his own at Webb Place with 24-hour, on-site supports.

“I can’t say enough positive things about what the staff does — everybody that works here on every shift,” Liddle said.

“Thank you. It’s just been quite a journey and I’m looking forward to what the next journey’s going to be.”

The supports offered at Webb Place include case management, crisis response, life-skills development, medication supports, Indigenous cultural and spiritual programming, and connections to mental health and addictions services. The province has provided additional funding to N’Dinawemak for a community connections team that will work in and around the building, promoting public safety, conducting wellness checks and providing crisis intervention, if necessary.

Smith said that six people who stayed there have moved on to permanent housing.

So far, a total of 263 people have successfully been housed through the province’s the Your Way Home strategy, the government said.

Ending chronic homelessness requires a multi-layered approach that the NDP government is taking, she said. She noted the province set up a supervised consumption site, a protective care centre for intoxicated people that pose a danger to themselves or others, with co-ordinated shelter beds, transitional housing and permanent housing units — with a broad range of services and supports.

“We knew right from the beginning and talking with families, folks who are unhoused, medical experts and front-line organizations, that we couldn’t just build more housing,” the minister said.

“It had to be a wraparound support model that had access to mental health care and access to people who believed in them and they could see, through other people with lived experience now in positions of being employed and helping others, to it is possible.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca