CLEARWATER – Now that it has received a federal grant to clean up the site of a former automotive repair shop, the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project will close on the plat of land on Cleveland Street and find a contractor to begin the process of converting the brownfield into a suitable place for an expansion of its transitional housing program.
With the $200,000 grant, CHIP intends to ready the site of the former Carpro property, which at various times in the past half-century has operated as an automotive station and then a vehicle repair and welding business.
Its next life will be as a two-story building with retail office space and a police substation on the bottom floor and transitional housing with four apartments on the second floor, said CHIP executive director Ed Brant.
Careful of the community’s concerns about that the organization is really opening a homeless shelter, Brant said the facility is really just mirroring its function as a transitional housing complex like what it operates on Park Street in the city’s downtown.
It should take about a year for the cleanup to be completed and then about nine months for a construction company to erect the building for the nonprofit which helps the less fortunate make the move back into society as self-sufficient individuals.
The CHIP grant comes at a time when the EPA also awarded the city a $400,000 grant to begin the process of inspecting and rehabbing two other brownfield sites. An example of a parcel the city might clean up is the Mediterranean Village, now a cluster of homes on Cleveland Street. Another example is a former automotive shop on Greenwood Avenue that was contaminated with oil-based products.
The city’s brownfield area is generally bounded by Sunset Point on the north, Missouri Avenue to the east, Belleair Road to the south and Fort Harrison Avenue to the west.
