Fortunately, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this past weekend provided excellent training for the hours of sitting on the couch in front of the TV that watching Monday night’s Town Council meeting required. The public hearing began for whether to approve a special use permit for the IFC shelter. And for all IFC director Chris Moran’s pains to refer to “Community House,” Phil Mason, in presenting the application for the town, repeatedly referred to the proposal and labeled his slides as “the IFC shelter.”

The petitioner’s team went first. Note to IFC: Be selective about who you give the mike to when you are paying a lawyer easily $300 an hour to be present as a highly charged issue is being aired. Instruct all participants in the advisability of an economy of words to avoid, say, the architect from imparting such words of wisdom as “the windows are scaled to human height and size and admit light,” and a real estate appraiser, who read her resume to the council before specifying that MLK Jr. Boulevard is a highway and clarifying that residential property is “not close, that is, far away.”

The proposed facility is attractive and well-landscaped and has green features. And of the more than 45 people signed up to speak, no one disputed the need to help break the cycle of homelessness.

The rub seemed to be the 17 cots for white flag nights and other instances as needed. The IFC expects to serve 500 to 600 people annually with the new facility. Either the program will transition the homeless back into the community at an astoundingly brisk pace or there will be more emergency guests at the shelter than the 17 cots belie. As a former shelter resident revealed, when the need arises, men sleep shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor.

Bless their hearts, the council listened. Due to the lateness of the hour, Jim Ward said he would e-mail the bulk of his comments, and they’ll be available from the town clerk later this week. He supported the idea of making the Good Neighbor Policy part of the SUP and working proactively with the police to avoid surprises. He also wanted to make sure that a plan was in place to preserve the cross-property agreement between IFC and United Church of Christ if the relationship between the two ever soured.

Ed Harrison also urged strengthening the Good Neighbor Policy and having an advisory group weigh in regularly. Matt Czajkowski challenged the developers to find alternatives to the emergency shelter beds and, as shelter site opponents could not come up with $450 to pay half the fee to hire the Dispute Resolution Center to mediate with IFC, suggested the town pony up financial assistance for such counsel, peanuts compared to the $25,000 council had approved for a consultant to help with a Neighborhood Conservation District process. Donna Bell stressed the need for clarity of specific behaviors that would be tolerated at the shelter and transparency in how many emergency guests the IFC honestly expected to serve. Mark Kleinschmidt suggested a mechanism be put in place that allowed for changing the specifics of the Good Neighbor Policy as the town grows.

The meeting adjourned at 11:20 p.m. Kleinschmidt announced at the start of the meeting that Gene Pease and Penny Rich were away on business and town manager Roger Stancil was away on a personal matter.
– Nancy Oates

Tonight Town Council begins the IFC shelter special use permit process, which council members Sally Greene and Donna Bell promise will be rigorous and thorough.

One of the contentious issues that may come up is the fact that the siting of the shelter precludes housing any registered sex offenders, even on white flag nights. Some people have objected to taxpayer funding for a shelter that excludes a segment of the population who might need shelter at times. Others have protested that there is no sure-fire way to determine if someone is a sex offender. Some have proposed that people asking for shelter have a valid ID, which may not be feasible. Debate has railed about whether Chapel Hill should shoulder the burden of housing the homeless, when the county has just as much responsibility to provide a site.

IFC director Chris Moran has gone back and forth about whether the Rosemary Street shelter houses registered sex offenders. Common sense dictates the likelihood that a registered sex offender has stayed there on occasion. Moran has gone to great lengths to distinguish the services that the IFC offers on Rosemary Street from what it will offer at the proposed Homestead Road site. The Homestead Road site, Community House, will be a transitional housing facility, accepting only a certain number of men, who will abide by certain behavior rules, including working toward reintegrating into the un-homeless community.

Except on white flag nights, and then it will be an emergency shelter.

Moran has pledged that Community House will be a good neighbor and has come up with guidelines of how it will keep that promise. But no sanctions are in place if IFC doesn’t live up to those standards.

Working to transition homeless men back into the community is a laudable goal and much-needed service. To make it happen on Homestead Road, IFC should consider a compromise: Keep Community House as a transitional housing facility, and do not act as a shelter on white flag nights.

As long as IFC offers emergency shelter, the county has little incentive to spend its tax dollars in contributing to this much-needed service. My sense is that property owners close to the proposed Homestead Road site who object to a shelter in their neighborhood would not object to a transitional housing facility, any more than they have objected to the Women’s Shelter and Freedom House.

Too much animosity has built up between supporters and opponents of Community House for this issue to go gently into the night. Compromise will be required of both sides. IFC could make a giant move toward mending fences by agreeing not to use Community House as an emergency shelter. Find a different spot for homeless on white flag nights – the Rosemary Street building comes to mind – or pressure the county to do its part.
– Nancy Oates

Mark Peters of ABetterSite.org writes:

Town Council will discuss homeless shelter regulations again tonight after last month’s requests for additional information.

Planning department staff has provided detailed information from the American Planning Association to address Council questions, and staff has also addressed the timing conflict the proposed shelter guidelines present if passed the week prior to the Interfaith Council’s application to relocate Community House men’s shelter.

If the shelter guidelines are passed tonight, this could indicate the town is clearing the decks for quick approval of the IFC’s men’s shelter application. This application has long been rumored as a “done deal,” and this meeting could be the beginning of this done deal.

The planning director and town manager both recommend that the town should not approve shelter regulations and consider the IFC SUP at the same time. Supporters of a better site for the new men’s homeless shelter agree.

The town manager recommended two choices: 1) Defer a decision on the guidelines until after the currently pending SUP process is completed, or 2) Complete the review and adoption of the shelter guidelines and defer action on the SUP until the guidelines are available (or are rejected).

ABetterSite.org recommends option 2. The site for the publicly funded IFC project was chosen behind closed doors with no public shelter siting guidelines, no publicly vetted site selection criteria and no public selection process.

Approval for requested and committed taxpayer funding may increase for this project by $500,000 on April 25, the same day the shelter SUP application could be approved. Approval could bring the total to $2.3 million in likely funding for the shelter relocation. At this rate of taxpayer contributions, the facility may be 100 percent taxpayer funded in a little more than four years.

Below we have provided videos to address each of the Council Members questions. You can read the full recommendations by Planning Dept Staff in this link, http://chapelhillpublic.novusagenda.com/AttachmentViewer.aspx?AttachmentID=6538&ItemID=186.
• In this video, Council Member Greene wonders if other towns with specific shelter siting ordinance go through an SUP process for approval. APA research shows the majority of towns that have ordinance also have an SUP approval process.
• In this video, Council Member Gene Pease asked how the quarter-mile distance was created. We provide audio from that meeting.

Here are useful links from the Jan. 19 hearing:
• We gave this presentation, outlining issues with the shelter guidelines.
• We provided this markup of the proposed shelter guidelines to point out important issues.
• The town published this video of the meeting.

See ABetterSite.org’s shelter guidelines page for up-to-date information. The town has posted materials for the March 14 meeting on its website, including the shelter guidelines topic.
— Mark Peters, ABetterSite.org

The current iteration of Community House on Rosemary Street is a homeless shelter. It provides some of the

services of a rehabilitation center, but the primary purpose is the provision of meals and a safe place to sleep. It does offer some counseling and medical services, but the limited space in that facility restricts the ability to offer comprehensive services. One single 25’ x 10’ room is currently used to provide medical treatment, mental health, disability counseling and neurological support; it is the pharmacy and the one-on-one counseling area for the VA representative and social workers; and it is the shelter manager’s office.

During the 2009-10 program year, the current shelter has served 417 men, about 10 percent of those who meet the definition of chronically homeless. Chronic homelessness is long-term or repeated homelessness. The federal guidelines define someone as chronically homeless if they have a mental or physical disability and have been continuously homeless for 12 months or four or more times in the past three years. Sadly, many of these individuals are veterans.

The mission of the new Community House is to promote independence and self-reliance through a service-enriched housing program that ends homelessness and transitions residents back into the community. To meet that mission, IFC has proposed a new facility that will offer transitional housing accommodations for 52 homeless men, a resident dining room, staff offices, counseling rooms, a meeting area and a free clinic for Community House and HomeStart residents.

Emergency Shelter Characteristics
• Serves the immediate needs of the chronically homeless (street people) as well as those who are temporarily down-on-their-luck;
• Receives referrals from hospitals, police and social service agencies;
• Provides a safe place to sleep during bad weather nights;
• Offers temporary overnight accommodations, showers, mats, and snacks; and
• Requires cooperation and good behavior by residents while on the premises.

Transitional Housing Characteristics
• Provides long-term skill training for those people who are considered to be chronically homeless;
• Motivates compliance through resident/staff agreements, goals and objectives;
• Provides vocational training, physical fitness, health and nutritional counseling to help these individuals transition out to independent living;
• Offers social networking and peer support; and
• Requires residents to stay free from drugs and alcohol at all times.

The local debate over siting the new transitional housing facility arises from the decision by IFC to include 17 temporary cots to serve the needs of those individuals who do not qualify for the transitional facility. These men may not have reached a point in their lives where they can commit to a program, or they may only be temporarily down on their luck. Without the IFC, there is no other organization in Orange County, at this time, that provides for the emergency shelter needs of those individuals.

Is it IFC’s responsibility to provide both emergency shelter and transitional housing? Its mission statement states that it “provides shelter, food, direct services, advocacy and information to people in need.” It does not say that IFC provides the homeless shelter needs for all of Orange County. However, since the Rosemary Street facility opened in 1985, IFC has become synonymous with the Orange County homeless shelter. As a 501(c)(3) organization, it has the freedom and the flexibility of defining its own mission. And that is what it is doing with the proposed facility.

Currently, IFC and several local faith organizations are working through plans that will provide emergency shelter services at sites other than Community House. No one wants to risk the success of the transitional program by introducing noncompliant individuals into this new environment. But from a humanitarian perspective, how can they simply walk away and leave these men without protection?

With one of the highest rates of poverty in North Carolina and year-after-year of budget cuts for social services, Orange County could face a massive human services deficit in the next few years. Tomorrow it could be you who needs a place to stay. Should we limit our options for how to meet this very human need, or do we keep those temporary use options open, defined by hard and fast guidelines about how and when they can be used?
– Terri Buckner

An article in Sunday’s News & Observer mentioned that the Triangle doesn’t have enough shelter beds to accommodate all the registered sex offenders who are homeless. Once the IFC men’s shelter moves to Homestead Road, Chapel Hill washes it hands of the problem. The proposed shelter site is too close to a preschool and public park where children play to allow homeless registered sex offenders to go there, even on white flag nights, much less for transitional housing help.

Yet another example of how our town that would like to be known for its liberal values shows its true colors.

Several Town Council meetings ago, Matt Czajkowski asked how many homeless men the shelter needed to serve. Penny Rich claimed that the IFC could not be expected to know. Many of the homeless preferred to live under bridges and in the woods north of I-40, she said. By her reckoning, homelessness was a lifestyle choice. But registered sex offenders who do not choose the homeless lifestyle do not have a place to stay or even a place to go to be transported to a shelter run by more compassionate towns nearby.

Who could blame us for shrugging off our responsibility? For those of us who have children or were once children ourselves, the idea of sex offenders gives us an icky feeling. We would prefer they live somewhere else.

Yet the humane and responsible course would be to establish a separate homeless shelter for registered sex offenders, and tie that to the approval of relocating the IFC shelter. IFC and the town needn’t look far – the current shelter spot at 100 W. Rosemary is not near any parks or schools and can legally accept registered sex offenders. And it has enough beds to accept overflow from other parts of the Triangle. Rather than shrug off the problem of homeless sex offenders with a Not In My Backyard attitude, Chapel Hill could be part of a compassionate solution.

For a short video on the problem of where to shelter registered sex offenders, visit:
http://abettersite.org/SexOffendersatShelter.aspx.
– Nancy Oates