A non-profit group is looking to refurbish the Old YWCA building in Calgary\u2019s Beltline, which has been vacant since September 2025.<\/p>\n
Staff at the Arusha Centre have submitted a proposal to the City of Calgary to manage the property along 12 Avenue SW as a non-profit co-location hub to pay for operational costs.<\/p>\n
This means that retail tenants will also be in the new building, and the organization says it plans to work with the Beltline Recreation Centre to make it an affordable housing building and multi-purpose space.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe city owns both of these pieces of property, and so the opportunity for affordable housing is there in order to meet the unmet objectives that the city has set for affordable housing in the city,\u201d Gerard Wheatley, the manager of the Arusha Centre, told reporters on Monday.<\/p>\n
He says the Arusha Centre has spent 40 of its 50 years in the building.<\/p>\n
Community groups had to leave the building at the end of September because the lease between CommunityWise Resource Centre, the landlord, and the city ended. Since the building closed, 65 community groups have been displaced. <\/p>\n
The city said that because the Old YWCA is a heritage building, it cannot be demolished. It said in September that it\u2019s focused on attracting a tenant who can operate the facility in accordance with its heritage status.<\/p>\n
City council also gave it a lifeline in December, voting to spend $1 million to support a scoping report for the 115-year-old building.<\/p>\n
The Old YWCA was originally constructed as women\u2019s housing in 1910 and remained in use until 1971 before it became a space for several non-profits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A non-profit group is looking to refurbish the Old YWCA building in Calgary\u2019s Beltline, which has been vacant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194293],"tags":[49,2798,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-511991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-calgary","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-calgary","10":"tag-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}