photo by: Shawn Valverde

The Lawrence Community Shelter, 3655 E. 25th St., is pictured on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023.

The tiny houses that are providing shelter for the homeless in Lawrence aren’t growing any bigger, but they are set to grow in number.

As we’ve reported, the Lawrence Community Shelter has been discussing the idea of placing some of the small structures behind its homeless shelter in eastern Lawrence. Now, the organization has filed plans with City Hall to do so.

The Lawrence Community Shelter is seeking a special use permit to allow 24 Pallet shelter homes to be erected just south of the main shelter building, which is at 3655 E. 25th St. in eastern Lawrence.

If you recall, the Pallet shelters are 64-square-foot prefabricated cabins that give people without a home basic shelter. The city earlier this year opened its shelter Village project at 256 North Michigan St. that includes 50 of the small structures.

The Lawrence Community Shelter provides the day-to-day operation at The Village, and there has long been talk that the community shelter should have some of the structures near its main shelter. That talk has been spurred, in part, by the fact that the city purchased 75 of the shelters but installed only 50 of them at the North Michigan site.

We reported in June that the board of the Lawrence Community Shelter agreed to move ahead with the engineering work for the project. Originally, the project was expected to be before the City Commission by August. However, it has taken a little longer to get to that point than expected, and it now likely will be a couple of months before it works its way through the entire approval process, which will require hearings at both the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission and the Lawrence City Commission.

The cost of the project remains to be finalized, but the shelter board in June sought about $700,000 in additional funding from the city. A portion, but not all of that money, would help create the new Pallet project.

The city spent $2.2 million constructing The Village project on North Michigan Street. There aren’t any indications the Lawrence Community Shelter project will cost nearly as much. A big difference is that the Community Shelter project won’t require the purchase of any additional land. That was not the case with the city, which paid a little more than $700,000 for the North Michigan site.

The project may revive questions of why the city didn’t locate The Village on that LCS site instead of buying private property on North Michigan Street. As the city has noted, though, LCS had different leadership at the time of that project. The change in leadership seems to have brought more confidence in the shelter being able to successfully tackle such an expansion.

The project also comes forward at a time when the city just announced a change in its policy toward the homeless. On Tuesday the city announced a new policy that will prioritize providing homeless services to people who are residents of Lawrence. Nonresidents who seek assistance will receive short-term assistance while the city works to return individuals to their place of origin.

It is unlikely, though, that the new policy will cause city leaders to think that there is a lesser need for additional structures. City leaders have long said the number of nonresidents who come to Lawrence seeking homeless services is a minority of the city’s overall homeless population.

As we reported in July, LCS leaders told the city via a report that it already was enforcing its own policy of not providing services to people who don’t have a connection to the community.

“Staff are instructed to inform individuals/agencies seeking services that we do not accept individuals that are not Douglas Co. residents or cannot demonstrate an adequate connection to Douglas County,” LCS wrote in its report to the city.

The report indicated that adequate connections could include proof of past residence in Douglas County, a unique connection to a social service provider in the county, or evidence of familial or other such support existing in Douglas County.

Even with that policy in place, the shelter served 785 different individuals during the course of 2023. The shelter operates at a normal capacity of about 125 beds. The new Pallet project would get the number closer to 150, and it may grow from there. There are 12 larger, existing cabins behind the LCS building, which were built by a KU architecture class in 2021. Previous leadership at LCS had not used those cabins frequently. However, the plans that have been submitted to City Hall show those cabins remaining in place, which raises the prospect that they will be refurbished and put to use.

As for the plans filed with City Hall, they are pretty straightforward. The cabins would be just to the west of the existing cabins, and would be on unused parking lot that is directly south of the main shelter building. Plans call for the 24 cabins, one office and two hygiene units. The site plan also has set aside space for a future expansion of six additional cabins.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

James Chiselom, the executive director at the Lawrence Community Shelter, stands at the edge of a parking lot behind the shelter on May 7, 2024, where a group of around 30 Pallet cabins could eventually be installed for additional emergency sheltering space.