Plan to turn parking lot into ‘queer village’ advances

A housing development could soon offer a safe refuge for members of the LGBTTQ+ community.

Levi Foy, executive director of Sunshine House, said Queer Village would include emergency shelter spaces, transitional housing and independent living.

Sunshine House and 2Spirit Manitoba plan to offer supports to LGBTTQ+ tenants at the proposed site on Notre Dame Avenue, pending a final city council vote.

Foy told the Free Press that 24/7 supports would be available at the site. They might include cultural ceremonies, counselling, addictions treatment and health services.

“(We would be) working with existing health-care facilities … to do things like (sexually transmitted and blood-borne infection) testing, to do trauma-informed care, when needed, and then to perform all of the other kind of necessary supports folks might need in those types of situations, like rape kits,” he said.

Foy noted support services would also focus on life skills such as cooking classes and employment training.

The proposed facility would create six emergency residential shelter units with 11 beds, 14 transitional housing units and seven social housing units. The new four-storey, mixed-use multi-family building would replace a surface parking lot.

It would feature a rooftop garden on a second-floor terrace. All housing units would have rents of no more than 30 per cent of the tenant’s income.

This type of affordable housing is needed because crimes against members of the LGBTTQ+ community appear to have increased over the past five years, Foy said. Eighty survivors of gender-based violence are taking part in one support program connected to Sunshine House, he said.

“(This project) can provide us the space to create community and safety on our own terms,” Foy told members of the city’s Lord Selkirk-West Kildonan Community Committee on Thursday.

The committee cast the first vote of approval for the project.

“This … represents not only a safe space but a lifeline for 2SLGBTQIA+ (LGBTTQ+) persons, particularly those experiencing or at risk of gender-based violence,” committee chairwoman Coun. Vivian Santos (Point Douglas) said.

Santos and Coun. Sherri Rollins, chairwoman of council’s property and development committee, said the development would address an important housing need.

“There are multiple barriers to adequate housing for two-spirit, non-binary people … it is a core housing need, and it is a priority,” Rollins (Fort Rouge- East Fort Garry) said. “Historically, (LGBTTQ+) people are at risk, they’re present in shelters and they’re at risk of becoming homeless.”

Lauren Lange, a planner for the project, said funding is in place to support construction, which is estimated at $13 million, though the cost is still being determined, she said.

Proponents hope to start construction this spring, Lange said.

joyanne.pursaga@freepress.mb.ca

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Joyanne Pursaga
Reporter

Joyanne is city hall reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press. A reporter since 2004, she began covering politics exclusively in 2012, writing on city hall and the Manitoba Legislature for the Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in early 2020. Read more about Joyanne.

Every piece of reporting Joyanne produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.

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