The nuns of the Sisters of St. Ann celebrated their 160th anniversary in B.C. Tuesday with a $450,000 donation to the Cool Aid Society to help build 61 units of affordable housing in Victoria.
Sister Joyce Harris, B.C. co-leader of the Sisters of St. Ann, said her order voted last year to assist Cool Aid with development of an affordable apartment building at 210 Gorge Rd. East.
“We believe housing the homeless and helping those who are poor to afford housing is at the heart of Jesus’s teaching,” Harris told reporters.
“Of course, it is embodied in the mission of St. Ann’s.”
The order’s first nuns arrived in Victoria on June 5, 1858, to teach school. The order now has a congregation of 600 around the world, but only 27 members in B.C., Harris said. Land and buildings have been sold off to provide care for the remaining sisters and continue with the order’s mission.
Cool Aid hopes to redevelop the site, demolishing the old Cedar Grove motel, a two-storey, two-building operation with 21 units, and replacing it with a 61-unit building. The site is sloped, so plans call for a building height of four to six storeys.
Kathy Stinson, CEO of Cool Aid, said the 21 residents of Cedar Grove, now operating as affordable housing, will be found accommodation elsewhere and given first shot at new homes in the building.
The proposal will go to Victoria city council in the fall for rezoning, from motel to multi-family residential.
Stinson said it’s hoped demolition can begin by spring 2019, with the new building opened in 2020.
Plans call for 50 units of affordable housing, 10 of which will have two bedrooms. There will also be 11 units of supportive housing, for people who need help and supervision to live on their own.
Stinson said the new building will provide homes for a variety of people: low-income seniors, students, single-parent families and mininum-wage workers, as well as those who have been homeless.
Ground-floor units will house some kind of community service operation, perhaps a clinic. The grounds will be planted with gardens to be named after the Sisters of St. Ann.
“We are going to provide something that is much more suited to the neighbourhood and make for a beautiful presence on the corner,” Stinson said.
The existing motel and site is owned by Cool Aid, which took it over in 2009 after managing it for several years on behalf of Island Health.
Stinson said estimates for the new building are about $18 million to $19 million. She said Cool Aid has already received a number of grants and commitments, including a $600,000 grant from the Capital Regional District’s Regional Housing Trust Fund to $5 million from the Regional Housing First Program, a partnership between the province, the CRD and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp.
The rest of the building costs will be financed with a mortgage to be repaid with rents from the apartments.
Stinson said meetings with the surrounding neighbourhood have led to “mixed reaction” about the new building, with many complaining it is too big.
She said the only way a mortgage can be repaid on affordable housing projects is to make the project sufficiently dense to provide enough rental income.
Avery Stetski, president of the Burnside Gorge Community Association, said his group feels a little cheated.
It recently completed its neighbourhood plan, which calls for a four-storey maximum along Gorge Road East. When design work on the project began, buildings of up to six storeys were allowed.
“The problem with the building is that it’s far too large,” Stetski said. “A lot of the neighbours don’t want it at all and want the whole thing sold to another developer.
“That’s not going to happen, but at least they should conform to the land-use plan.”
