09/06/2026
🇨🇦 An empty university building in Winnipeg is now home to people who were living in tents. Here's how it happened.
Last month, 42 people moved into a seven-storey building at Webb Place in downtown Winnipeg. It used to be Booth University College. Today it's transitional housing — and when renovations finish this fall, it will hold up to 118 people.
The Manitoba government spent $24.4 million to buy and renovate the 87,000-square-foot building. But the money is not the interesting part. The design is.
📌 WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT
Most housing programs hand someone a key and wish them luck. This one doesn't.
The building is staffed 24 hours a day by N'Dinawemak, an Indigenous-led organization with years of experience walking alongside people who have lost their housing. Residents get case management, crisis response, life-skills support, medication support, Indigenous cultural and spiritual programming, and direct connections to mental health services.
There's also a community connections team funded to work in and around the building — doing wellness checks, supporting neighbours, and keeping the surrounding blocks safe for everyone.
📌 WHY "TRANSITIONAL" MATTERS
Transitional housing isn't meant to be forever. It's a stable place to live while a person rebuilds — health, documents, income, confidence — before moving into a permanent home of their own. As people move on, new people move in.
That's the part most headlines miss. This isn't 118 beds. It's a doorway that keeps opening.
📌 THE BIGGER PLAN
Webb Place is one piece of Your Way Home, Manitoba's plan to end chronic homelessness, launched in January 2025. Two things about it are worth knowing:
1️⃣ It gives itself a deadline. Seven years. After that, the goal is that anyone who becomes unsheltered is housed in weeks, not years.
2️⃣ It has a rule that changes everything: an encampment is only cleared once move-in-ready housing has been secured for every single person there. No one gets swept into nowhere.
So far, 263 people have been housed through the strategy.
📌 A REAL PERSON
One resident arrived in Winnipeg by train after losing his job and his apartment in Montreal. He had no idea where he'd sleep. He was among the first to move in. His words: "I've got my own space again."
He also had a suggestion for the country: look at all the empty schools and empty buildings sitting unused. Use them.
📌 THE HONEST PART
Advocates say it's not enough yet. The CEO of End Homelessness Winnipeg called the progress encouraging but said the province needs to go deeper and faster. Demand still outpaces supply.
Both things can be true. Something real is being built, AND there is much further to go.
📌 WHY I'M SHARING THIS
Canada doesn't always get credit for the quiet, practical work — repurposing a building instead of demolishing it, partnering with Indigenous-led organizations instead of talking over them, refusing to move people until there's somewhere to move them TO.
That's not a slogan. That's a blueprint. And other provinces and cities can copy it.
