Finding good and affordable housing is hard enough
locally. But add seven kids and landlords can become less than accommodating.
Joe and Kelly’s dilemma has proven just the
ticket for Holy Family Parish. Faced with a large and vacant rectory, the
church was looking for somebody to fill the space.
Call it a match made in Heaven.
“It’s a pretty long story,” Joe said Tuesday. “We
were pretty down on our luck, as far as we can get.”
Both natives of the Buffalo area, Joe and Kelly
were living in Arcade until a few months ago, when they and their family were
evicted from the place they’d resided for the previous six years.
The family was facing about year’s wait until
they could get a home loan for military vets — Joe had served in the Marines —
and their outlook wasn’t brightening.
They moved to a small place in Delevan in
Cattaraugus County briefly, while one of their daughters stayed with Kelly’s
mother. They also spent a few months in a hotel, always looking for suitable
new housing.
“We were so freaked out,” Joe said. “We lived in
this place six years, and we were given 29 days’ notice. Seven kids, we were
like, ‘How is this going to work?’ We were concentrating on moving our stuff
out, but where the hell are we going to go?”
Kelly said there’s a lot of ignorance, and they
wouldn’t get calls back, after telling prospective landlords how many kids they
had. They reached the point of saying they had four children, but didn’t want
to lie.
“We were close to moving in with family members,”
Joe said. “Hers or mine, and I was close to moving in with my brother.”
Enter Holy Family Parish, whose advertisement the
couple saw in a local pennysaver.
“We wouldn’t believe how excited we were when we
saw that,” Joe said.
The rectory had been vacant for about 10 years,
during which the parish was shut by Buffalo’s Roman Catholic Diocese, and was
later resurrected by the Polish National Catholic Church.
The building’s office was used occasionally for
meetings in recent years, but it was otherwise unused. And its size made it a
good choice for larger families, with six bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms, a
kitchen and more.
Thus the parishioners wanted the old rectory to
be used. It was rehabbed last summer, including significant repairs by inmate
work crews from the New York State Department of Corrections.
The rectory first hosted a nearby family burnt
out by a fire in 2012, and then a single mom with six children until last
August, when it became vacant again.
“We don’t want it to sit empty because there are
people who can use it,” said Karen Wilson, who belongs to the parish’s building
committee. “I put an ad in the paper, and Joe and Kelly were the first ones to
answer it. Then I had three or four phone calls. I showed to three more
families, but most of them didn’t qualify, because we won’t allow any pets or
smoking.”
And it proved perfect for the couple and their
family.
North Java is close to Arcade, where Joe works at
his longtime API Air Tech job. It also provides relatively easy access to
Attica Central School for the couple’s younger children, along with East
Aurora, where their oldest children still attend.
“We could have gone South Buffalo way, but we
both decided the schooling out here is safer,” Joe said. “Our kids grew up out
here. That was a big point of staying in this area.
“My daughters basically went to school since
kindergarten out here,” Kelly added. “We lived out here, and I like it out in
this area too.”
Joe and Kelly looked at the rectory early last
month. They received approval from the parish, and moved officially on March
16. They pay a basic “user fee” to cover the utilities and basic upkeep.
The couple have proverbially “hit it off” with
Karen and their new neighbors, and are planning to stay awhile. And the full
rectory helps fulfill the parish’s own mission.
“So far the family is ecstatic,” said Rev. Matt
Kawiak, the parish pastor. “They’ve got some stability, and the parish s elated
that after six months of renovation ... that they’ve found somebody who needed
a place to stay. It’s a win-win for both, the community as well as the family.”
“It’s like God answered their prayers in my
feelings,” Wilson said. “It’s like God sent them here, and they’re supposed to
be here. The house is now alive with children. It’s a big house with a lot of
bedrooms, and it’s going to keep everything alive.”
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who open their homes to family and friends in distress. May the spirit of hospitality bring our family closer together during the Easter Season.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who open their homes to family and friends in distress. May the spirit of hospitality bring our family closer together during the Easter Season.
