City moves toward providing transitional housing to homeless
By LESTER R. DAILEY
Article published on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007  |
CLEARWATER – Real estate agents may be crying the blues these days, but at places like the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project, business has never been better.
“The real estate market has priced many out of homeownership,” according to Clearwater police Chief Sid Klein, who doubles as the president of CHIP. “At the same time, affordable rental units have reached an all-time low. As a result, programs like CHIP are seeing an increase in the homeless population and increases in the needs of the working poor.”
Accordingly, CHIP found itself at a crossroads. It could either maintain the status quo, sheltering 68 clients on an overnight basis and providing counseling, laundry facilities, restrooms and other outreach services to approximately 95 people a day, or it could expand and provide the additional transitional housing needed to mainstream clients instead of putting them back out on the streets.
It chose the latter course and decided to expand its transitional housing program, which currently has 10 beds in eight apartments.
“Envisioning what would become a first step in this expansion process, CHIP is under contract to purchase the “Car-Pro property located at 1359 Cleveland St.,” Klein told the City Council in its role as the Community Redevelopment Agency. “If purchased, the Car-Pro property would become the first in a series of modular components that would include transitional housing on the second floor with commercial and retail fronting on Cleveland Street on the first floor.”
The police substation, now located in the current CHIP shelter, would move into one of the first-floor offices, and the CHIP administrative staff, currently in rented offices offsite, would move into the space vacated by the police substation. The remainder of the first-floor spaces would be rented to provide income for CHIP.
The council members worried that the so-called NIMBY syndrome, an acronym for Not in my Back Yard, might lead some East Gateway residents to oppose the CHIP “campus,” but they said that similar projects had worked in other cities and they could work here. Educating the neighbors that the expansion would provide transitional housing for people well on the way to improving themselves, and not a soup kitchen for down-and-out drunks and drug addicts, would do a lot to quell the criticism, they said in agreement.
Because the Car-Pro site once housed an automobile detailing business, there is a good chance that it could qualify for state or federal “brownfield” grants, which are awarded to improve polluted and under-utilized industrial sites.
CHIP hired Nina Bandoli of Turnstone Properties to coordinate the design and funding of the $1.8 million project and assess its impact on the neighborhood. On Jan. 16, the City Council authorized spending $50,000, half from the Community Redevelopment Agency and half from the city’s Department of Economic Development and Housing, to begin the process by assessing whether the site qualifies for brownfield status.
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Article published on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007
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