A huge thank you to all of you for your generosity. A total of $2,299.25 was collected at our Christmas Eve service for Sacajawea Non-Profit Housing. This was on top of the $6,060 raised at the Fall Festival for Sacajawea. In total, this congregation has contributed more than $38,000 over three years to help Sacajawea create, equip and furnish a culture room for the tenants in the 23 rooms of its newly opened building at 18 West Avenue South.
All of the 23 rooms are now occupied, the culmination of years of hard work by Sacajawea to create new, badly-needed affordable housing units for Indigenous residents of Hamilton. A naming ceremony for the building will be held in the near future and our Affordable Housing Team will let you know when that is to happen.
Designing houses that young families can afford.
The Affordable Housing Team is supporting the efforts of the Carnegie Gallery in Dundas and the Hamilton Burlington Society of Architects to come up with design ideas that might make home ownership more affordable for young families.
The program has three parts. On January 30, Alex Bozikovic, Globe and Mail architecture critic, speaks at the Dundas Town Hall at 7 pm on The Missing Middle: Millennial Housing in the 21st Century. The next day, teams led by local architects will hold a charrette or brainstorming session to come up with ideas for lower-cost starter homes. And in March, the results of their work, including drawings, will be shown at the Carnegie Gallery.
Many millennials are priced out of the market for home ownership as prices have increased far more rapidly than the incomes of the vast majority of Canadians.
An opportunity for governments to do more to create affordable homes
The Affordable Housing Team sent a letter to Ahmed Hussen, the federal minister responsible for housing, urging broader and deeper investments in affordable housing. It is on the church website at https://uuhamilton.ca/affordable-housing-letter-nov-28-2019/