Just east of the Rockville city line, 100 men slept through their January nights sprawled on the linoleum floors of three metal trailers.

However, by the time those key nights return next winter, county officials say those homeless men will be able to stay at a new, permanent shelter that may serve as many as 500 men each year.

The overnight shelter will be a 5,800 square foot, single-story building with 100 beds. It will have bathroom and shower facilities, offices for counseling, as well as laundry, kitchen and storage facilities.

Men will not have to walk 20 yards in the cold to reach the toilets, as they are required to do by the present accomodations, said Donald Torr, the volunteer who wrote to county officials two years ago to complain about conditions in the trailers.

“No one should have to live like that in Montgomery County or any place,” said Torr, 73. The new shelter is a joint effort of the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, the Home Builders Care Foundation and the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services.

Jim Heffner of Heffner Architects of Alexandria, VA, designed the shelter. The facility will continue to be located at 600 East Gude Drive, in an industrial district across from Fisher Lumber.
  According to organizers, who broke ground alongside county leaders on April 5, a $530,000 emergency appropriation last fall from the Montgomery County Council will be matched dollar for dollar by donations–totaling as much as $1 million.

More than 70 builders and associate members of the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association have pledged to help. Organizers said they had received about $250,000 by the time the first shovel hit the turf last week.

Sharan London, director of the Homeless Coalition, said that until two years ago, the shelter consisted of two trailers. Then the country supplied a third.

“It didn’t make it any better. Men were still sleeping on the floors,” said London, who has been an advocate for the homeless for 11 years.

She explained that it took months to convince county officials to improve conditions because the trend is to only put public money into programs that have good success rates.

Only about 1 in 10 who come to the shelter is eventually able to find work and afford a place to stay on his own, London said.

She said the number of men who are given shelter in the greater Rockville area reflects national statistics. About 4 of every 10 men who use the shelter are struggling with alcoholism or mental illness, and almost 3 are involved with drugs, she said. The problem for the able men is locating housing they can afford, she said. Even when employed, most are only earning minimum wage. In the warm season the shelter serves roughly two dozen people per night.

“In the winter it increases as far as the walls will stretch,” she said. “At night, it’s wall to wall body.” Those accommodations made it impossible for many of the men to feel good about themselves and go forward to lead productive lives, she said.

Torr began to understand the plight of the men when one homeless man, about 40, told Torr that he would rather sleep outdoors than in the Gude trailers where men covered the floor elbow to knee.

“Blankets were not washed as ofen as you might wish for men who did not shower as often as you might expect. There were rats under the trailer,” Torr said. He wrote to county leaders and spoke with passion on the men’s behalf before the County Council.

He wrote to county leaders and spoke with passion on the men’s behalf before the County Council. By February 1999, London said that she had nagged two councilmen, Steven A. Silverman (D-At large) and Blair G. Ewing (D-At large), both of Silver Spring, to visit and see for themselves.

After stepping out of the trailers, Silverman said he and Ewing both turned and looked at one another and said that they had to do something.

“The men are given two blankets, one to sleep on and one for cover. There are no cots, no beds,” Silverman said. The trailers had heat and the roofs were not leaking. Still, “I was struck by an overwhelming sense of depression that this is inhumane,” he said.

Torr agreed. “With people like that,” he said, “a success is that they are not dying on the street.” One man, London recalled, was named Daniel.

He was 71 when he was found living in a barn at the county fairgrounds. He spent last winter in the Gude trailers while a coalition case manager “kept him sober for 6 months,” London said.

The case manager also helped him apply for his veteran’s benefits, and today he is on a waiting list for Veterans Affairs Supported Housing. That program will give him a voucher and allow him to find his own apartment, she said.

“This building is a validation of the lives of the men who struggle everyday to make ends meet, who deal with demons and diseases you and I will never know,” London said. “It is going to be the building where lives are repaired and men are led out of homelessness and into wholeness.”

Montgomery County Crisis Center at 1301 Piccard Drive in Rockville makes referrals to the county’s emergency shelters for men, women and families. Information in available at 301-315-4000.