Back to square one on city shelters

The City of Philadelphia had big plans for the shuttered nightclub at 229 W. Allegheny Ave. just west of Kensington.

It was going to convert the building into a new style of shelter, a smaller alternative to the massive 300-bed men's shelter on Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia.

But the project ran into one big problem: Neighbors didn't know about it.

And when they finally learned the details in December, they rallied against it.

Last month, officials for the city's homeless-services office took the project off the table as they try to start fresh with community leaders to find an alternate site.

It is the latest in a string of failed attempts to add shelter space in the city. In the last two years, neighborhoods in West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia and Mount Airy also have blocked shelter projects.

In an interview Friday, Mayor Nutter said the city had to explain better to communities why it had to place certain facilities in certain locations.

"There has to be more outreach and greater discussion with neighbors," he said, adding that the process also should include more data collection and analysis of where to put facilities.

"The more work that you do early on and up front, the more decent your chances of getting support," Nutter said.

Dainette Mintz, director of Philadelphia's Office of Supportive Housing, said the facility near Kensington was going to be the first of several small shelters to eventually replace the one on Ridge Avenue. "This is a setback," Mintz said.

Community leaders and residents near the site have complained that they were brought into the process too late. The city had been working on the shelter for about two years, but many didn't find out about it until a few months ago.

"We have to proceed in a way that people feel their voices are heard," said Maria Quinones-Sanchez, the newly elected City Council representative for the Seventh District, which includes the site.

Guillermo Salas Jr. first read about the shelter on a zoning board notice pasted on the building's front door a week before a Dec. 13 hearing.

Salas works a block away at the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises (HACE), a nonprofit developer that has built hundreds of affordable-housing units in the immediate area.

"There had been rumors, but I never knew what it was until a week before a zoning hearing," said Salas, president of HACE. "People who live across the street didn't even know about it."

The project was a victim not only of an information vacuum, but also a political vacuum in the Seventh District.

When the city began exploring turning the closed Club Adrenalin into a shelter, the district's Council representative, Rick Mariano, was jailed on corruption charges.

That left the job of informing neighbors to a Democratic ward leader, Carlos Matos. Matos' first meeting on the project attracted 14 people, only nine of them residents, Quinones-Sanchez said.

A year later, Matos was out of the picture: He was jailed for bribing three Atlantic City councilmen.

The second meeting to enlist community support, last May, drew two people, Quinones-Sanchez said.

She said it was unfair to call this another case of NIMBY-ism - shorthand for a "not in my backyard" stand.

She said residents were being asked to support a shelter even before they knew who would operate it.

Only after the community backlash did the city engage Ready, Willing & Able, a South Philadelphia shelter that also operates a work program for homeless men, as a possible operator.

Given the difficulty of finding sites, Mintz said, it is not always possible to know up front who the operator will be. "We are not in a position to have a provider on standby, while it takes two years to find a building," she said.

Quinones-Sanchez has told the city's homeless-services office that she does not think the neighborhood can absorb another shelter. She said before the city selected an area for a shelter, it needed to map out what was already there.

"Let's do this in a way that is thoughtful," Quinones-Sanchez said.

"We didn't shoot down the program," she said of Ready, Willing & Able. "It's the site that's not appropriate."

Within one mile of the West Allegheny Avenue building, she said, there are already 1,000 beds of supportive housing - everything from shelter beds to transitional housing to halfway houses for prisoners and ex-offenders.

Directly across the street from the proposed shelter, Impact Services runs an apartment house for formerly homeless military veterans, and it has another facility a few blocks away on Indiana Avenue.

Mintz said replacing the city's biggest men's shelter on Ridge Avenue with several smaller ones was critical. The population living on the streets is growing, with many individuals refusing to enter Ridge because of its size and reputation of being unsafe.

Said Mintz, "At what point do we say that housing for people who need to be housed is a higher priority than not housing them at all?"