Twelve years on, the Pilsen clinic that took forty-one closings sees 60,000 patients a year

The Pilsen Community Health Centre marked its twelfth year this month with a figure its founders did not dare to predict: 60,000 patient visits in the last twelve months, three-quarters of them from families within a mile of its doors on 18th Street.

The building sits on what was, in 2012, eleven separate parcels owned by nine different people, two estates and one very reluctant retiree. Assembling them took two years and forty-one separate closings, a process led by Thomas Lindqvist, a real estate partner at Hale & Mercer LLP who did the work largely on a pro bono basis.

"Every piece of land has a story, and eleven pieces have eleven," Lindqvist said. "One of them was a man who had lived on that block for fifty years and did not see why he should move for a building that did not exist yet. He was right to ask. It took a long time to answer him."

The retiree, who asked that his name not be used, eventually sold on the condition that the centre's waiting room be named for his late wife. It is. He volunteers at the front desk on Tuesdays.

The centre's executive director said the land assembly remains the hardest part of the project's history. "People think the hard part is the money. The hard part is forty-one people agreeing, one at a time, that a thing that doesn't exist yet is worth more than the thing they have."

Hale & Mercer has been a founding supporter of the centre since 2014. Lindqvist, who grew up on a Minnesota dairy farm and says he reads plats "the way other people read the news," still walks the block when he is in the neighbourhood. "I count the fences," he said. "Old habit."