Herb Paul
The Inter-Faith Council for Social Service (IFC) has been providing food and emergency housing to the homeless for almost 50 years. Twenty-five years ago, the town of Chapel Hill offered the IFC the Old Municipal Building for use as an emergency shelter. Throughout these many years, the IFC has been blessed with the services of thousands of volunteers and the support of more than 60 local congregations. Nearly 90 percent of IFC’s operating funds are from private sources – foundations, civic and religious groups and many Orange County citizens.
On May 5, 2008, UNC offered to lease a tract of land to the town for the purpose of building the new Community House at 1315 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (1315 MLK). The IFC staff and board of directors began work with GGA Architects to navigate the town’s approval process in 2009. In June 2010, we submitted our special-use permit application to the Chapel Hill Planning Department. The IFC is delighted to report that four town advisory boards have unanimously recommended that this application be approved by the town council.
This move will result in significant changes. The Community Kitchen will not move to the new location. The new facility will operate as a step-up program designed to transition 52 men from homelessness to self-sufficiency, which rewards residents with more privacy as they take on more responsibility and make progress on their goals.
The new Community House will be next door to the United Church of Chapel Hill. The two-story building will encompass 16,250 square feet. The first floor will be used for program space, offices, clinics, a large meeting room and storage. The residents will live on the second floor, where there will be a kitchen, dining facilities, storage for personal belongings and restroom/shower facilities.
Men enrolled in the program will be required to maintain sobriety and commitment to our philosophy. They will have individual treatment plans based on their specific needs and goals and will receive job coaching, medical care, mental health services, social services, assistance in applying for disability benefits, etc. It is our aim to promote independence and self-reliance through a model that empowers residents, develops skills, renews lives and reduces homelessness.
Also, until the community is able to provide other emergency housing for homeless men, the IFC will continue to provide up to 17 cots in the first-floor meeting room on bad weather nights when it is unsafe for homeless persons to sleep outside. Homeless men seeking emergency shelter will be screened offsite and transported daily to and from the new Community House. Strict no-visitors/no drop-in policies and an 8 p.m. curfew for all residents will be in effect.
The road to 1315 MLK has been difficult. The public search for a suitable and permanent location focused on dozens of properties and took more than 10 years to complete. However, once the new location was announced, some residents expressed surprise and skepticism about this news. The IFC welcomed all comments and sought dialogue with concerned individuals, neighborhoods and community citizens. Last spring, we conducted three community discussions for this purpose. As the IFC presented its plan for a new transitional-housing program, we listened to community concerns and recommendations and incorporated a number of changes and improvements not only in the building’s design but also in the program that will be used at 1315 MLK.
At the suggestion of community residents, we have added onsite recreational facilities, including an exercise room, a garden, patio space and a half-court basketball court. The men will learn gardening skills and cooking skills as they manage their own kitchen.
In response to residents’ concerns about safety, the Chapel Hill Police Department suggested landscape changes that would provide improved sight lines to our new facility and better monitoring of activity at Community House and the surrounding grounds. The police have also made a commitment to increase patrols in the area and will enforce trespassing violations for persons in Homestead Park after sundown or before dawn.
The IFC has communicated the clear distinction between transitional housing and emergency shelter. We continue to collaborate with local congregations to assess whether other facilities can be made available for emergency shelter in southern Orange County. Finally, the IFC is preparing a Good Neighbor Plan and will submit it to the town manager for approval prior to building the new Community House.
The board of directors, staff, volunteers, donors and recipients of IFC services look forward to the public hearing to be held on March 21. We are so grateful to our supporters and confident that we will provide even better services for those in need throughout our community if we gain approval for Community House to relocate to 1315 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Herb Paul is president of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service board of directors.
Few things to note:
Regarding “The police have also made a commitment to increase patrols in the area”:
-Where is this commitment documented? What exactly does this commitment entail?
-Why do the police feel that there is a need to increase patrols?
Regarding the “Good Neighbor Plan”, you need to watch “Good Neighbor plan has no teeth” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDu3hI2sH3c – This video contains footage from the town council meeting showing that there are no enforcement provisions nor defined mechanisms to mitigate impacts with teeth in this plan. The SUP needs to be delayed until any proposed “Good Neighbor Plan” plan is documented enough to approve with the SUP. This is one of those feel-good names given to a document that HAS YET TO BE CREATED.
The neighbors who formed http://www.abettersite.org believe that a public process should have been used to site this facility which is poised to receive $2.3M of taxpayer support to date and could be 100% fully funded by taxpayers in 4-5 years at the current rate of requested funds ($500K requested last month).
Abettersite.org has documented issues with the shelter guidelines and the process used to create them on our website.
This site was chosen with a backroom deal. There were not publicly vetted search criteria nor any public search for this site. You can talk about discussion and public process and other past searches that have no bearing on how this site was selected all you want, but process only counts if the process occurs before the site is chosen.
If your wife wants to help pick out the new family car and you call her into the loan approval meeting with a car picked out, then you are sleeping in the doghouse because she is not buying this “oh honey, the loan approval is a process, we can discuss the loan all you want”.