REGINA – Homeless advocates are calling for action to bring back social housing to an empty lot where an apartment building once stood.
The advocates, who included various groups and individuals, rallied Thursday at noon on the 1100 block of Wascana St. in front of a former location of 24 units of social housing.
That site is now an empty lot, after the 24-unit building suffered major fire damage in 2024 displacing all of the social housing tenants there.
At Thursday’s rally, volunteer organizer and spokesperson Mandla Mthembu said the building “remained vacant for well over a year with no development or information to the people that live in this neighbourhood to know what was going to go on.”
The same group of individuals had previously staged a media conference and rally in December 2025 in front of the building calling for action. But Mthembu said Thursday that just prior to that December event, the building was fenced off.
“It wasn't initially fenced off,” said Mthembu. “We announced the press conference, and that day ahead of that it was fenced off and we heard murmurs from neighbours that it was going to be taken down and turned into a parking lot.”
He said they later learned online that a demolition company was hired to take down the building. “That leads us to where we are today, in an empty lot where people used to call their homes.”
Mthembu was critical of a lack of action about what was going on with the site.
“They said they were going to revitalize this lot and here we stand. That action was in December, now it is in August and it's an empty lot with rebar and broken garbage all around here. I don't expect anything from the government and I don't ask them nicely. I think we're here to demand stuff, we're here to demand action from the government on housing, and if we don't get those demands met, then people will act accordingly.”
Florence Stratton, well known as an advocate on homeless issues in Regina, lambasted the Ministry of Social Services for having previously released a statement that they would “explore options to revitalize the site to better serve housing needs in the community.”
“This is what revitalizing, revitalization looks like,” said Stratton. “An empty lot. In the meantime more and more people in the city are suffering and dying on our streets.”
Peter Gilmer of the Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry said the situation at the empty lot was “really symbolic of all the unused and demolished and lost social housing in this province.”
Gilmer said there were “three key items” that were needed for affordable housing in the province. One was for social housing, but he also said there was a need for rent controls.
“80 per cent of Canadians live in areas or provinces with rent control legislation, but we remain an outlier on this, and we've seen the highest rent increases in the country over the course of the last three years, so rent control is absolutely necessary.”
Gilmer also pointed to “a crisis in terms of having way too many some substandard ill-maintained properties.” He said they were calling for a “rental registry for the city of Regina and other municipalities to ensure that there's explicit standards for all rental properties and that there's automatic inspection rather than a complaints-based system.”
Another advocate at the rally, Lori Deets, said that the organization End Poverty Now would be launching a letter-writing campaign on the issue. She said they would be asking everyone to “write a letter to the federal government, to the provincial government” to demand safe affordable housing.
In a statement from the Ministry of Social Services, they said the “provincially-owned social housing units at 1138–1156 Wascana Street were demolished as the property was deemed unsafe after portions of it sustained fire damage in 2024.”
The ministry stated the 2026-27 provincial budget had included $500,000 for “planning the development of new social housing units on that property.”
The ministry also stated that over the past year an average of over 40 new households per month moved into provincially owned social housing in Regina.
As of July 10, according to the numbers the ministry provided, there were 2,795 rentable units in Regina. Of those, 192 units were ready for occupancy, 2,453 were occupied social housing units, 132 were units in standard turnover and anticipated to be ready to rent to applicants in 30 days, and 18 units were requiring repair that would take more than 30 days to complete.
