Asylum seekers at Ottawa’s first office-to-transitional-housing conversion credit the new facility with getting them out of the city’s shelter system and providing them with opportunities to find permanent accommodation and employment.
A former movie theatre turned office building at 230 Queen St. welcomed its first residents this summer after being retrofitted to provide transitional housing for 140 people. Eighty-one asylum seekers have already moved into the facility, which is operated by Catholic Centre for Immigrants (CCI) Ottawa.
“The place is amazing, clean, proper, safe,” Djiboutian architect Abdourahman Hassan told CBC during a recent tour of the facility.
Hassan came to 230 Queen St. from the city’s shelter system and said he was extremely grateful for his private sleeping pod, after previously sharing rooms with people who were using drugs and experiencing mental health crises.
Three floors of offices that had been vacant for five years — nearly 30,000 square feet — have been converted under the design supervision of Ottawa’s CSV Architect.
