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Saturday, Sept. 8, 2012
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Affordable housing, youth shelter proposed
Richmond Hill dad Alexes Barillas Zuniga talks about struggles to find connections and balance while raising children in Canada at a new parenting program aimed at fathers and grandfathers.
BY MARNEY BECK
mbeck@yrmg.com
An application to build a new 10-storey, 225-unit affordable housing project has been brought to the town. To be located on Yonge Street, just north of Crosby Avenue, the application by Housing York Inc. asks council to permit a mixed-use, high-density residential development, which would include facilities for Pathways for Children, Youth and Families. If approved, the Pathway facility would feature a youth centre, emergency and transitional housing, plus administrative offices. While in its early stages and with two public meetings on the project set for this fall, two councillors gave thumbs up to the plan. “We have a desperate need for affordable housing across York Region,” Regional Councillor Brenda Hogg said. “This development is a good step toward meeting those needs, but it will barely scratch the surface. There are now about 6,500 families on the region’s affordable housing waiting list, she added. “Richmond Hill is a great place to raise a family and more people should have that opportunity,” said Ward 2 Councillor Carmine Perrelli, in whose ward the project is to be built. A previous Pathways youth shelter, also in Ward 2 on Centre Street East, was rejected because it was too far from public transit, he said. “This location is far superior to the original residential location,” Mr. Perrelli said. “The See ‘COMPATIBILITY’, page 5.
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Partnership Parenting hones in on dads BY KIM ZARZOUR
kzarzour@yrmg.com
There’s nothing like pizza and parenting to bring folks together. Ed Bader, a parenting educator and Thornhill grandfather, has just placed a platter of pizza in the middle of the meeting room and the cheesy goodness seems to have opened the floodgates. Fathers, mothers and grandparents tuck into the slices while they tap into shared experiences raising children. Clara Mazanegos, a newcomer from Guatemala, talks about how she deals with isolation, raising her two-year-old in a city
without friends or extended family. Markham resident Paul Au compares child-rearing in Canada to Hong Kong, where multiple generations are involved. Nellie and Amin Jutha, of Aurora, share the struggles they’ve encountered trying to parent as a team with each other and their own parents. And Alexes Barillas Zuniga, of Richmond Hill, recalls the time he lost his daughter in the mall and, later, after she was home, safe and asleep, weeping with remorse, wondering if he was doing this whole parenting thing right. It’s something most parents wonder and
Mr. Bader hopes this parenting program will help, especially since he will be tapping into an increasingly important resource: the experience and wisdom of grandparents. Partnership Parenting is his unique new program offered free across York Region to help families — newcomers, fathers and grandfathers in particular. And it begins with Mr. Bader’s theory, “if you feed them, they will come”. It’s only partly tongue in cheek. In these busy, scattered times, he has found food is often the thing that draws a community See MEN, page 13.
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