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| | Issue #20.39 :: 09/26/2007 - 10/02/2007 | City Building Shelters to House the Homeless
Officials Say Structures Will Be Temporary
| BY ERIC K. WARD
| The city of Columbia is constructing two buildings to house the homeless.
Scheduled to be completed in early November before winter temperatures hit, the buildings will sit on city property near Calhoun and Roberts streets next to a city water treatment plant adjacent to the Congaree River.
The undertaking comes amid years of talk and little action on homelessness in Columbia and knee-jerk criticism of the city on the issue. Historically, the city was impugned for not doing enough. Then last year the city was slammed for operating two winter shelters, a task the city traditionally had helped fund but left to private nonprofit groups.
Now some are concerned that the two buildings will be in the vicinity of the CanalSide residential development and the Marionette Theatre for children.
Can the city do anything right on homelessness?
No, Mayor Bob Coble says. “I mean that’s just a fact,” Coble says. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”
In addition, despite years of local talk about homelessness, a blueprint to end it in the Midlands has gone nowhere and neighborhood opposition has scuttled just about every proposed shelter and other bricks-and-mortar ideas that have come along.
But not this one.
Construction of the buildings began Sept. 10. “The city’s doing a good bit of the work,” city engineer Joey Jaco says at the site.
Side by side at 7,000 square feet each, the buildings will cost about $300,000 to $350,000 combined, according to city officials. “They’re probably the quickest and cheapest type of building you can build,” Jaco says.
The money to pay for them is coming out of some $700,000 the city budgeted this fiscal year for homelessness services.
City officials say the buildings will serve as homeless shelters only temporarily — this winter and next — after which they will be used for storage. “The notion is to make [them] capable of being used to house public safety equipment in the future,” says John Dooley, the city’s director of engineering and utilities.
Hard to find, the buildings will sit in a secluded wooded area accessible to vehicles only by a winding semi-paved road that runs from Riverfront Park past Marionette Theatre beside the water treatment plant.
A chain-link fence lines the southern boundary of the site.
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Criticized in the past for not doing enough to address homelessness, the city of Columbia is constructing two buildings near Calhoun and Roberts streets to serve as temporary housing for the homeless.
Photo by Eric Ward
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“I think that’s a little bit misleading,” Dooley says of a report that the location is by CanalSide.
Says Coble, “You can say it’s in the general area but you can’t say it’s by [CanalSide]. It is by the water plant.”
Concerned, the homeowners association of the Governors Hill neighborhood at Laurel and Gadsden streets in the Vista is OK with the buildings being used to shelter the homeless given conditions the city has promised, according to Bill Neglia, a member of the association.
The conditions include that the shelter function will be temporary and that the homeless will be bused to and from the buildings, eliminating foot traffic in the area, Neglia says.
“The shelter is going to be located way in the back of the water department property far away from the Marionette Theatre,” he writes in an email. “I don’t think it is going to significantly impact development in that part of the Vista as it is so far removed from anything.” | |
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