Jets owners consider helping build transitional housing in Winnipeg

Gabriel Velardi looking for his first career hat trick. And here it is, he scored. The Winnipeg Jets are playoff bound this season, but outside Canada Life Center, there aren’t many success stories. Signs of homelessness and addictions have become more prominent since the pandemic started. Two years ago, Jets co-owner Mark Chipman described it like this. It’s gone a long past just being heartbreaking. It’s become, in my humble opinion, a humanitarian crisis. Hey man, how’s it going? Mark Chipman responded to that crisis by funding downtown St. patrols. He helped open this homeless shelter in South Point Douglas and is taking on a massive downtown revitalization project. True North Real Estate Development is close to exercising its option on a $650 million purchase and renovation of Portage Place. The plans include affordable housing and a medical tower. I sure don’t think we’d be exercising the option in June if I didn’t see and feel a real commitment from our public sector partners to once and for all engage the root causes of of the crisis we’re in right now. Chipman is not stopping with Portage Place. He and Jets co-owner David Thompson, one of Canada’s most affluent people, are thinking about doing more. What we lack desperately in the city right now is the ability to transition people out of that type of living arrangement into a more independent circumstance, and it just doesn’t exist. Thompson and Chipman are now considering providing transitional housing, that is housing tailored to people with a history of homelessness or addictions who need help finding a home and keeping it. When people talk about, you know, about homelessness, it it’s a it’s a very complex subject that requires a range of of different housing options for people to move through. And we’re stuck. So we’re stuck with a lack of transitionary housing. Thompson and Chipman brought their idea last fall to the mayor and Premier. If we can tap into the expertise on acquiring and renovating housing to bring new units online or standing up new housing units to help us meet the needs of addressing homelessness and to respond to the needs around social housing, I think that would be really welcome. What this is is all about is everybody coming together. It it takes the public sector and the private sector and the nonprofits to be in partnership to really address our our issue of homelessness and the need for housing. While it’s not unusual for NHL owners to engage in commercial development near their arenas, this economist says Chipman and Thompson’s interest in the social welfare of Winnipeg is unusual. It’s really hard to come up with another example of an owner who’s made such a large commitment to not-for-profit investment to kind of building up the civic space. As a result, it’s become hard to separate the success of true north downtown development efforts from the success of downtown itself, your business and your work. How do you feel about that being inextricably linked with the health of the community overall now? Well, I mean it’s some days it’s a real daunting responsibility, other days it feels somewhat natural and that it’s just what we’ve been doing. I I don’t think we set out to be that or to have that responsibility. But it’s it’s we’ve kind of fallen in that path and so, you know, it is what it is. Bartley Kivas, CBC News, Winnipeg.