THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Kehiew Fox says she And her children, Kingsley And Okimaw, love their new home At Oski Mācipayin. The Affordable housing development opened A few months Ago.
It was hard for single mom Kehiew Fox to find appropriate housing where she and her two children could have their own space and feel safe until they moved into Oski Mācipayin, Quint Development’s newest affordable housing development.
“The units were all brand new when I first moved in, no one had lived in them, so it felt like this was my place. And it still feels like that,” says Fox. “We really love being here. There are lots of kids, I feel safe. It’s a good environment for me and my children.”
Just a few months after opening, Fox said the people living in the townhouse units have become a tight-knit community, where she feels safe letting her six-year-old son, Okimaw, outside to play with the other kids.
“If someone’s walking through here one of the parents doesn’t recognize, then we ask them to leave the property,” she said. “It just makes me feel more safe knowing everyone is watching out for each other’s children.”
Located on the corner of 21st Street West and Avenue O South in Pleasant Hill, Oski Mācipayin — Cree for “new beginnings” — consists of 26 townhouse units: eight one-bedroom, 10 three-bedroom, six four-bedroom, and two accessible four-bedroom units. The housing development is fenced, with a grassy courtyard and benches in the middle.
Cherysse Mackechnie, Quint’s housing co-ordinator, said it was significant for Quint to have a Cree name for the development.
Quint’s executive director, Len Usiskin, said decolonizing some of the names in the neighbourhood is also part of Quint’s ongoing commitment to honouring the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.
Oski Mācipayin was built on five lots; one was previously vacant, while the rest were single-family rental units in poor condition.
“We had already owned one of them that we were renting out, so we said, ‘Here’s an opportunity to do something and change the dynamics of the neighbourhood,’” Usiskin said.
“We have other affordable rental housing and most of it is one- and two-bedroom, but we were getting a lot of demands for larger units for larger families. There’s not a lot of affordable three- and four-bedroom rental housing in the city, so out of the 26 units on the site, 18 of them are three- and four-bedroom.”
Jessica Dufresne has five kids, and was in need of more bedroom space. As a stay-at-home mother living on social assistance, it was hard to find something affordable, she said.
“I was looking for all these threebedrooms, two-bedrooms before and nobody would give me a place because of how many kids I have. It was really frustrating, like I applied everywhere to try and get a place,” she said. “My daughter’s a teenager now — I have one girl and four boys — and she really needs her own space.”
When the new housing development was being built, Dufresne said she would walk by and wonder what it was, until a friend mentioned it was a Quint project building new homes with four bedrooms.
“I was like, ‘Hey, you never know.’ I just went to Quint and applied for one of these places and probably like two, three months after I got a call from them,” she said. “And I was really happy about that because nobody would give me a house that I could afford.”
The Oski Mācipayin townhouse units are home to 30 adults and 61 children. Mackechnie said the majority of the parents are single mothers. On average, each family includes four children and wouldn’t be eligible for smaller units due to occupancy standards (children of the opposite gender who are older than five are required to have separate bedrooms).
“When we first started receiving applications we had a lot of individuals coming to us who were housing three and four children in two-bedroom apartments through various organizations and rental companies in Saskatoon,” Mackechnie said. “It was huge for us to be able to give children the space they deserve. It doesn’t matter what part of life and what path a person’s on, everybody deserves adequate housing.”
In addition to overcrowding, lack of adequate living space can also result in children not being able to live in the same home as their parents. Mackechnie spoke of one tenant living with two children while two others were in care.
“In order to reunite the family as a whole, they needed to find a bigger unit to live in. So when the new builds were almost ready I had contacted my tenants and I said, ‘We have a unit,’ ” Mackechnie said. “They didn’t know at that time that I was reserving a unit for them. To be able to give them that news was life-changing for them.”
They didn’t know ... I was reserving a unit for them. To be able to give them that news was life-changing for them.