Our Guest Speaker last week -Ted Greenberg is President of Pathway Community development of Peel, Board member of Path Way house, passionate volunteer; Roman Spector the General Manager of Pathway house and John Rowell member of the Unitarian congregation in Mississauga and President of Pathway Housing Services (PPHS)
Ted provided a history of affordable housing initiatives in Canada, looking at its origins to provide housing for veteran to later having homes with costs geared to income. He looked at the varying government housing initiatives until the lead up to Pathway’s incorporation in 1988. They own and operate 288 units and runs via cultivating partnerships with faith-based community members. The goal as a housing provider is to provide safe clean housing that assist in building communities that support families and children via various community programs, food safety, cooking, breakfast and senior s. Targeting relationship building, tools to assist with budget management, better nutrition and social programming initiatives that help the users to stabilize their lives, and this has led to subsidized tenants moving up to market rent and eventually home ownership
The speaker showed a video of the 3 buildings under management with their associated staff. Arbor Mills, Forest Ridge and Norton Park in Brampton.
Roman Spektor – General Manager – responsible for operations and property management spoke about the technical infrastructure of the buildings under management. He gave an overview of what is involved in the management of the buildings, including the management of budget, the capital spends, the BAS and sustainability. Special mention was made of the team’s competence in managing the work.
John Rowell President of PPHS, retired teacher and avid volunteer focused helping families in peel- 3 churches involved in the board and John thought that the operation was well run but there was little expansion, this led to the exploration and status of the team expanding service to pursue contracts to manage other affordably housing units. This new income stream led to acquiring and managing an additional 40 units. The prices of land has increased quite a lot this team its looking for partners to buy land and build new units.