City council recently approved a plan to have a non-profit group, HomeSpace, develop a new kind of supportive housing facility. The goal is to get a roof over the heads of people who are chronically unhoused and are considered "high-complexity" individuals.Bernadette Majdell is the CEO of HomeSpace, a charity that builds, maintains and manages affordable housing units for vulnerable Calgarians.
As a result, they are frequent users of emergency and crisis-response services and present public safety concerns. There will be a lot of staff supporting this building and so we'll need health care workers, social workers and that piece. So it will be fairly heavily staffed and access to transit will be critical.Central is not as important, and some would argue that some of the folks that'll be living in a high-support building maybe shouldn't be central.
We don't know all the city sites that are available throughout Calgary, so that will be the next step. Once we have them, we've already done some community consultation within the sector on design, with elders, so we really have a good sense of what it'll look like.