Asooahum Crossing offers fresh start for tenants

An affordable housing project recently completed by the Red Deer Native Friendship Society is already changing lives.

Asooahum Crossing officially welcomed its first two tenants earlier this month.

The housing complex features an eight-plex with six current openings and another soon-to-be open eight-plex. Each building features two accessible units with a wheelchair lift and oversized doorways.

Darren Tootoosis, Society President, explains the project has been in the works for a very long time.

“It’s important to note that the Friendship Society is not exclusive to Aboriginal people — we’ll help anybody, but the vision for the affordable housing project was to provide assistance for Aboriginal people because as a group of people, they seem to fall between a lot of the service cracks,” he says.

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The project was made possible thanks to funding from the provincial government and the City of Red Deer, as well as assistance with mortgaging from Servus Credit Union.

Tootoosis says there are important criteria to becoming a tenant, including employment, total income and engagement in Aboriginal culture and services to ensure stability.

“We’ve known for a long time that Aboriginal people in Red Deer fit within certain high-risk categories and housing is one of them. There are a lot of hard working Aboriginal people in this community — a lot who obtain employment that maybe doesn’t pay well enough to achieve a standard of living comparable to others. This helps stabilize that — it really helps to level the playing field for members of our Aboriginal community,” he says.

“There was a time before we got shovels in the ground where we didn’t think it was going to happen. Once we could see work starting to be done, it became very exciting and now that the [phase one] buildings are both near completion, we’re ecstatic. This is so amazing for us, but it’ll be short-lived because our next project is phase two.”

Phase two involves a pair of additional buildings which will mean 20 more units and office space for the society located just south of the current buildings on Riverside Drive. Tootoosis says the target for raising the necessary money is sometime next year.

One of the first tenants of Asooahum Crossing is Ryan Jason Allen Willert, a local artist. He says if it weren’t for the work of the Native Friendship Society, the place wouldn’t exist and he’d be forced to stretch his resources much further.

“To me, this is what the community needs. This gives people a chance to have a safe place to be sober and not have other tenants around them using, because sometimes when you’re in the process of sobriety, having other people around you in your living area — they may not share the same suite as you, but they’re in the same building and they sometimes talk to you — sometimes it is a bit tempting,” he says. “It’s a really nice place to live, it’s pretty high-class this place and it’s more than what I expected.”

The 33-year-old adds, “This has given me a chance to have something beautiful and something that I normally wouldn’t be able to get. I’m very lucky and I’m very grateful and I hope to be a good tenant and live here in a very kind and gentle way.”