KENORA — The addition of 20 new affordable housing units marks significant progress, the Kenora District Services Board’s chief administrative officer says.
Henry Wall was at 10 Matheson Street on Tuesday as the services board hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new housing complex. Kenora-Rainy River MPP Greg Rickford was also at the event.
“We’re seeing a real increase in need for access to affordable housing,” Wall said afterwards.
“You know, part of the challenge in the North is just housing stock,” he added. “And so that’s why today’s official ribbon-cutting ceremony to 20 new affordable housing units in the downtown of the city of Kenora is such an important day.
“It’s making a difference for 20 families and individuals to have access to affordable housing.
“It’s also, I think, a demonstration to the community that by working together as partners with the province of Ontario, we can address the housing crisis that I think so many communities across the North are facing right now.”
Rickford described the housing complex’s grand opening as “a celebration of the progress in our community that can be achieved when partners in the Northwest come together.”
The district services board works with communities “to complete the continuum of housing, from (temporary) shelter right to independent living in housing that’s affordable,” Wall said.
The Matheson Street complex demonstrates that “when communities in the North are empowered we can actually get housing done and build relatively quickly,” he said.
The district services board, All Nations Health Partners and Rickford announced the Matheson Street project on April 1, 2022. The lot was “a pile of sand” at the time, Wall said Tuesday.
“And so to be there today, just over a year later, having 20 new affordable units was quite an amazing feeling — and, I think, a demonstration that we can actually build fairly quickly in the North if we are given the resources to do so.”
There’s a long and growing waitlist for affordable housing in Kenora, but the waitlist’s pace of growth has slowed down in the last year or so, Wall said.
“Today 20 units were added. If we can keep adding units year over year, we can get that wait list down,” he said.
“The 20 units today is, in isolation, not that many units,” he said. “But, my goodness, in a community the size of the city of Kenora, to add 20 affordable units is going to be a big game changer.”
Four of the units are “barrier-free and fully accessible,” according to the district services board's website.
