Shelter challenge

The Lawrence Community Shelter needs the community’s help.

OK, now is the time. It’s time for anyone who criticized the Lawrence Community Shelter’s plans to locate in an industrial park on the east side of Lawrence to step forward with a better plan.

Although shelter officials investigated dozens of possible sites before focusing on the vacant warehouse near the Douglas County Jail, many local residents continue to contend that better sites are available. Now is the time for the community to step up and help the shelter find one of those sites.

Shelter officials have decided to reopen their search after Douglas County District Judge Sally Pokorny dismissed a lawsuit designed to clear up questions about whether covenants on the industrial park property would allow the warehouse to be converted to a shelter. The judge didn’t rule on the covenant issue, but her dismissal of the lawsuit creates enough uncertainty to send shelter officials looking for another location.

The shelter can’t stay at its current location at 10th and Kentucky streets for long. The facility isn’t large enough, and the willingness of city commissioners to allow that special use of the property is wearing thin. Commissioners had hoped the shelter would be well on its way to moving by the time its current special use permit was due for renewal in April.

It’s a discouraging situation for local residents seeking to provide services for Lawrence’s homeless population. What does the future hold? Is the community going to find an acceptable location for a homeless shelter or simply hope that those who need these services will magically disappear?

A report issued by Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center this week offers an interesting snapshot of the homeless in Lawrence. The Bert Nash outreach team served 692 people in 2010. About a third of those people were chronically homeless; another third were “precariously housed” with a friend or relative but without homes of their own; the other third were somewhere in between.

Of those served by Bert Nash, 50 percent presented with a mental illness and 38 percent with a substance abuse disorder. There were 269 children, almost half of whom (48 percent) were 6 years old or younger.

How will the community meet the needs of its homeless population? This issue is not going away. We have well-motivated people ready and willing to move forward on a new facility aimed at helping homeless people get control of their lives and become contributing members of society. Unfortunately, officials have run up against one roadblock after another in their search for an appropriate location for a new shelter.

They need some help. They not only need a suitable location for a shelter; they need a community attitude that will support their plans. They need a community that will try to find ways to make a facility for the homeless work rather than focusing solely on what’s wrong with whatever proposal shelter officials put forward.

Let’s show we’re up to that challenge.