Apartment building for refugee families set to open in Toronto's west end

 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 building is opening to refugee claimants at a time when most shelters in Toronto are at capacity, filled with people who are experiencing homelessness and migrants struggling to find affordable and available housing.

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."

A collaborative effort  

She said the project is a great example of how governments can work with existing organizations to provide more housing for newcomers.

The city is working with "a number of partners in the refugee sector to create refugee houses and small shelters offering specialized supports for refugee claimants," spokesperson Elise von Scheel said via email.

"The goal is to add approximately 200 new spaces between all of these programs."

"Once open, the Romero House location will provide approximately 38 much-needed spaces for refugee families. Refugee houses are one critical piece of how the City is working to support stable, long-term solutions for refugee claimants."

It's not yet known which families will live inside the apartments but the environment will mirror the model of Romero House's other homes, where "community building" is encouraged through programmed scheduling and group activities. 

"Refugee claimants are very friendly and they don't have often friends or family here and they're very interested in making connections," Allodi-Ross said. "They really want to give a lot of support to the people around them."

'It's a family forever,' former tenant says

Sana'a Jaber, a refugee from Lebanon who stayed in one of Romero House's homes for 6 months shortly after arriving in Canada, said she was happy to learn the organization was expanding especially at a time when more people are fleeing amid conflict and war.

"It's not about a bed," she said. "It's a family forever."

Not long after arriving in Canada in 2020 "with nothing but a couple of suitcases," Jaber, her husband and her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter were close to staying in a shelter after losing their temporary housing.

She found out about Romero House and workers found them a place to stay within days. 

"I didn't know there were people who just volunteered their time and their energy and their power and their voice to advocate for you," she said.

During her time with Romero House, Jaber lived alongside other refugee claimant families who ate, cleaned, and celebrated holidays and milestones together.

"You learn to coexist and you learn to thrive with the love, the unconditional support that they give you. It's on another level."

Jaber said without their help with the settlement process "the transition without them would have been so much harder."

"You are being taken care of and you're being set up to have the best that you can have in this city or this country."

Romero House will be holding an open house at 2387 Dundas Street West on Oct. 3.