Apartment building for refugee families set to open in Toronto's west end
CBC
A west-end refugee settlement centre is set to open an apartment building for newcomers starting later this month.
Romero House has been providing transitional housing to refugee claimants who have arrived in Canada without private or government sponsorship since 1991, its website reads.
It's now leasing 2387 Dundas St. W. with the help of city funding, and will house nine refugee claimant families and three house coordinators sometime in mid-October.
Romero House executive director Francesca Allodi-Ross told CBC Toronto that the 100-year-old building was recently renovated, but for a time it was largely vacant, purchased previously by a buyer as an investment.
She said her team is grateful "to be able to offer this beautiful space… to families fleeing horrible, horrible things from around the world in this housing crisis."
The opportunity came about when the building's current owners, a refugee family from Bulgaria, offered Romero House the chance to lease the building.
Owner Nikoleta Tchepileva said when she first came to Canada, no one helped her at first.
"And then my Bulgarian community helped me. And then I found the Canadian friends and they build they've been to me like a family," she said.
"So I told them, if someone help us, we have to help and and do what is correct to live here in Canada."
She said she and her husband want to use the building as a way to give back to the community. They previously leased the space to Eva's Initiatives for Homeless Youth and once that agreement ended they went searching for a new tenant and came across Romero House.
"This is the perfect organization to help, to work with them, to see anything what we can doing in our possibilities to help the refugees, people like us. We are all the same."
About 12,100 people are in city shelters and emergency accommodations, with approximately 53 per cent of them being refugee claimants, a City of Toronto spokesperson told CBC News in a statement. Every day more people land in Toronto needing support.
Allodi-Ross said the past few years have been tough for organizations like hers because resources are stretched thin.
"It's been hard on frontline staff to have to tell people, 'I don't know where you're going to sleep tonight. Try the airport lounge, try the subway.' It's hard."
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