City homeless shelter to close; expensive upgrades to blame

Under pressure from city officials and hemorrhaging money, the owners of the Hope Community Center will close their homeless shelter by the end of the month.
The shelter has been operating illegally since late 2007, but Charlottesville officials have allowed it to stay open for the upcoming months while the organization sought a permit from the City Council. However, city building inspectors have ruled that to ensure the safety of overnight guests, the center on 11th Street Northwest needs costly upgrades, including a sprinkler system.
The shelter’s operators — Pastor Harold L. Bare, of Covenant Church, and his son Josh — can barely afford to keep the shelter open, let alone pay for an expensive overhaul of the building. The Bares and church members have pumped thousands of dollars of their own money into the shelter, which houses more than 40 men, women and children a night, but have not received enough donations from the community, they said.
There is a “realistic understanding that even if we make the grade with the zoning [appeal], we would need a huge amount of money to do the architectural revisions,” Pastor Bare said Wednesday.
By the end of May it is likely that the shelter will close its doors, forcing dozens of homeless people to look elsewhere for nightly accommodations.
“Without some help, many of these people will go back to sleeping under the bridges and in parks,” Bare added.
The Bares have already reached out to other homeless advocates and shelter operators to help find beds for Hope’s clients. But there is no obvious solution: the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter is at capacity every night and PACEM’s rotating shelter does not operate during the spring and summer.
“From our hearts we’ve been [taking on] the burden of the community and now we need the community to step up,” Josh Bare said.
The Bares have been operating the shelter since December, when the organization that started the shelter collapsed. Besides providing a roof, a cot and a warm meal to the homeless every night, the center has supplied social services such as employment counseling. The Bares estimate that the shelter operates on $7 a night per homeless person, while the state standard is $31.
Following up on a complaint from a neighbor, a city zoning official sent the Bares a letter in February informing them that they were operating the shelter without a permit. Overnight shelters are not permitted in the residential neighborhood.
The city’s zoning board upheld that determination last month, but granted the shelter a reprieve to stay open while it files an appeal with the council. Charlottesville has yet to receive a formal appeal from the shelter, and it now appears that the process will not move forward.
Building officials then inspected the center last week and determined it needed major upgrades in order to house people overnight, and also said that it was not safe for more than 20 people to sleep in each of the center’s two buildings.
“The requirements for a shelter are the same requirements for a hotel or motel, so they are required to have sprinkler systems,” said Tom Elliott, a city building official.
Some nearby residents have been vocal in their opposition to the shelter, insisting that it would cause problems in the Tenth and Page neighborhood.
“Every day that the community center keeps operating the homeless shelter is a liability,” John Baber said during a neighborhood meeting Tuesday night. “I want it closed.”
The Bares counter that they have received no noise complaints since it opened and that the homeless, who are bused in from downtown every night, are very respectful of adjacent neighbors.
The question for both the Bares and the city is where the homeless will go once the shelter closes down.
For now, there are no answers.