Acting to help homeless
The nonprofit City Care posted a tweet recently: “Plans on paper turn into reality in just a few months.” It was promoting, in the middle of summer, a new shelter that will be particularly important during the frigid winter months.
The building at 531 N Villa became available a year ago. In short order, Rick Cooper, president and CEO of W&W Steel, bought the building for City Care (closing was in December), and the Inasmuch Foundation provided an $850,000 grant to help fund renovations and operations.
City Care staff spent the first several months of this year working on the design. The result is a building that will be able to house nearly 200 people. It includes four family suites and will be pet friendly.
Adam Luck, City Care CEO, had hoped the building would be open by late fall. But crossing all the t's and
dotting all the i's in the permitting process can be time consuming, and it looks as though it will be at least the first of the year before doors open.
Whenever that does happen, City Care will be filling a huge need. This will be an emergency or “lowbarrier” shelter, one that doesn't require patrons to commit to rehabilitation programs. A few years ago, two of the city's largest homeless outreach organizations, Jesus House and City Rescue Mission, shifted away from the emergency shelter practice to focus on recovery programs for clients.
“Two years ago, we had probably 750 low-barrier beds,” Luck says. “We went from 750 to zero.”
Advocates for the homeless say that change likely contributed to more people living on the streets. The 2018 Point-in-Time count showed a decline of 13.5 percent in homelessness overall, but the number of unsheltered homeless (those living outdoors) grew by 47 percent over the previous year.
The location of the new shelter is a perfect fit for City Care, as it's in the same area where the nonprofit operates 115 units of supportive housing for people in recovery.
The shelter will be open from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Once word begins to spread, Luck said, “I think we'll be at capacity fairly quickly.”
Eventually, he said, if the need continues, City Care might want to consider opening another low-barrier shelter. For now, he and his staff are looking forward to getting this one opened and contributing to the city's ongoing efforts to confront homelessness.
“We're opening a night shelter, but there's also a much broader conversation happening in the community about what we need,” Luck said. Kudos to City Care and its benefactors for their willingness to lend a hand.