Shelter to offer long-term housing

For now, David Prince spends some nights staying at the Inter-Faith Council’s emergency shelter — but one day he hopes to be a volunteer.

Prince, a homeless man in Chapel Hill, said he used to turn up his nose at homeless shelters.

The Inter-Faith Council — which combats homelessness, poverty and hunger in Chapel Hill and Carrboro — will close the county’s only 24-hour emergency men’s shelter and replace it with a transitional shelter providing longer-term services by 2015.

“Once you get in, you find out that it’s difficult and people ought not to down people in shelters,” Prince said. “If you spend a week here, you find out the difference between turning your nose up and living here. I hope to come back and volunteer one day.”

The council’s executive director, John Dorward, said the transitional shelter is intended to provide homeless men with a more stable environment to help them move back to independent living.

“We’re trying to give men a long enough period of time to be able to work through whatever problems brought them to being homeless in the first place,” Dorward said.

Right now, homeless men can come at any time and stay at the emergency shelter on the corner of Rosemary and North Columbia streets.

Men who wish to stay in the next shelter on a regular basis will need to apply or be referred to the transitional program by the county’s Department of Social Services.

There will be 52 transitional beds for men in the program and 17 emergency beds for inclement weather or other temporary services.

The current shelter regularly houses about 50 people per night.

Dorward said in the new program, as men stay longer, they will move into smaller rooms with fewer people and will be given more responsibilities. The responsibilities may include mentoring men who are new to the program or helping in the kitchen.

“That way, we can work with them on the job side, we can work with them on the educational side, we can work with them on the medical side. All of those different things, they’ll have time to do.”

He said he thinks the layout of the new shelter, which will be located on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., will make it easier for them to run programs for the homeless men.

“If you’ve been in our building downtown, you know that it’s in kind of rough shape,” Dorward said. “It’s kind of chopped up — the three different floors make it difficult to run programs.”

Dorward also said he thinks the new location, which is in a quieter, residential area, will be helpful.

“Being in a very vibrant, active downtown college town setting is a little bit too much activity for them,” he said. “We want them to have a nice, quiet spot where they can focus on getting things squared away in their lives so they can get back out on their own again.”

Jamie Rohe, the homeless programs coordinator for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, said the transitional shelter is the next step in addressing homelessness in the county.

“Historically, emergency shelters were the first response when homelessness became a huge problem for America — really in the ’80s,” she said.

Rohe said the transitional shelter will help address barriers to self-sufficiency, like helping those who have mental illnesses. Men can stay in the shelter for as long as two years, but most do not stay that long, she said.

“Homeless are often invisible. The problem of homelessness is way bigger than what these numbers represent,” she said.

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