The CEO of Siloam Mission in Winnipeg is weighing in on the recent announcement made by the city regarding increasing affordable housing over the next 3 years.
The Government of Canada and the City of Winnipeg recently announced $25 million in funding which will provide over 1,000 new housing units to the city, including 597 affordable units.
"I'm just so excited that there has been a focus on affordable housing with this money," says Tessa Blaikie Whitecloud, the CEO of Siloam Mission. "We put in an application and weren't successful in this round. We know that housing is the solution to homelessness. So often we're thinking about homelessness as an individuals life story, but in Winnipeg it's literally a lack of social housing stock."
Blaikie Whitecloud shares that currently Winnipeg has three social housing units for every 20 low-income people. Calgary has nine for every 20 and Regina has eight.
"If we're talking about solving homelessness, we probably need in the ballpark of 4-5,000 units. Right to Housing, a coalition of folks who are keeping an eye on core housing needs, that's folks who are living in substandard or overcrowded housing, they say we need about 10,000 units to solve that. In total, we're about 15,000 units behind where we need to be."
Roughly 30 per cent of the people accessing Siloam's services currently are immigrants. Many people moving into Canada from different countries face a lot of red tape before they can move into a home.
"Part of the struggle is that they have to wait so long for the right paperwork to be able to enter into housing."
A particular immigrant was grateful to reside at Siloam while waiting for his housing to be available after moving to Winnipeg.
"We had a gentleman who lived with us. It takes about two weeks to get the paperwork started, so he lived with us for that initial two weeks. He actually lived with us for the next three months until he could get his documentation to start getting housing. There's a legal barrier. He volunteers here every single day in the interim. It's a lot of folks that are engaged and looking to build community but there are those legal barriers that keep them in the homeless serving sector."