Multifaith Housing Initiative Veterans’ House
Canada’s first housing community built specifically for veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Forty apartments on a section of the former Rockcliffe air base, welcoming their first residents in February 2021.
A building that has to read as home, not as a facility
The Housing First model this building runs on is straightforward: give someone a permanent, private place to live first, and the support that helps them recover becomes possible. Residents have access to services from partner agencies on site.
That puts an unusual demand on the lighting. Supportive housing is institutional in how it’s funded, maintained and staffed, and every one of those pressures pushes toward the flat, uniform light that makes a building feel like somewhere you are processed rather than somewhere you live. Forty people call this address home, several of them after years without one.
Flux supplied the lighting for the apartments, the shared rooms and the entrances, specified to hold that domestic register in a building maintained to institutional standards.
The name on the building
The building honours Squadron Leader (Ret’d) Andrew “Andy” Carswell, AFC, CD — a Second World War veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force who was stationed at CFB Rockcliffe after the war, on the same base the building now stands on.
In October 2023, ownership transferred to Veterans’ House Canada, which is using the Andy Carswell Building as the model for more veterans’ housing across the country.
This project was designed by CSV Architects. Photography by Krista Jahnke.
