Two little boys dug bright yellow shovels into a hill of dirt on what will soon be their front lawn.
The boys, James and Gabriel, look enough alike to be twins, yet they are from two families which will soon be sharing a duplex on Centre Street in Barrie as part of Habitat for Humanity Huronia’s next building project.
“It was really challenging living in an apartment with drugs and violence. You’re never really comfortable when you live in fear for your children,” Chelsea Pagliei, Gabriel’s mother said.
Holding her nine-month old son Josiah in her arms, she said the second apartment she, her husband Terry, and the boys lived in made them all ill – they believe it was from black mould – so they moved back in with their parents.
After submitting their application to Habitat for Humanity, the couple is still grappling with the news they’ll be homeowners by this time next summer.
“It’s just starting to feel real,” Terry said. “Just knowing we’ll have stability and financial security and we’re not going to be struggling to pay such high rent every month is amazing.
“This time last year, we never would have thought we could own a home.”
Yet owning an affordable home should be a Canadian right, said former Liberal MP and Habitat board member Aileen Carroll at the groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday.
“The (federal) government doesn’t recognize it as such, but affordable housing is a basic human right,” Carroll said, pointing out that a report released by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated it has “concern about the persistence of a housing crisis” in Canada in its March 2016 report.
Little’s been done to improve that situation.
According to a Padmapper report in March listing Barrie as the fifth most expensive place to live in Canada, a one-bedroom rental unit in Barrie is going for about $1,100 per month, or $1,800-plus utilities for a three bedroom, such as the one the Pagliei’s were renting.
Farrah and Jon Flavelle and their son James, who will be moving next door to the Paglieis, were also living in substandard housing, Farrah said.
“We had water coming up through the floor and had to move James’ bed into our room,” Farrah said. “There was no safe place for him to play outside.”
On one hand, it’s hard for young families to find a foothold in the housing market, on the other Robert Cikoja, director of construction for Habitat, said the Barrie, Angus, Innisfil communities are making the effort to help.
“It’s a great feeling that so many people want to give you their time and supplies at great discounts and have helped us expand our reach into the community,” Cikoja said.
Whereas other regions across Canada have struggled, Simcoe County has a reputation for stepping up, he said.
At Wednesday’s announcement, Bayfield Ford’s manager Jeff Ball said after 40 years on Bayfield Street, the large dealership had just completed its own major renovation and understands the anticipation the families are feeling for a newly refurbished space.
Bayfield Ford has made a commitment of donating $250,000 over the next five years in increments of $50,000 annually, to help build homes with Habitat for Humanity Huronia.
“The staff is involved and they’re going to be volunteering at Boots & Hearts Country Music Festival and getting pledges and we’ll be holding golf tournaments,” said Derek Partridge of Bayfield Ford’s nearly 100 employees. “Barrie’s been good to us and we wanted to give back to the community,” he added.
Habitat sells their community-built homes to families with a no-interest, no down-payment mortgage with adjustable monthly payments of no more than 25% of the family’s total income.
Each family must donate 500 hours to their build, or the next build, as time allows.
The mortgage money collected by Habitat is used to purchase land and build more homes.
However, the local organization needs more families and more properties, said Habitat’s board chairperson Helen Robb.
“This is the last piece of land we currently have in our inventory,” Robb said. “We’re currently looking for land in Innisfil, Angus, Barrie and Alliston. We’ll take a single-dwelling lot, but we prefer to do more than one unit at a time if we can.”
Twitter.com/cherylbrowne1