Hope For The Homeless

by Manuel Perez-Rivas
The Washington Post

A 100-bed homeless shelter is being built in Rockville and is expected to open later this year before winter.

When completed, the Men’s Emergency Shelter on East Gude Drive will replace a set of old trailers that homeless advocates described as woefully inadequate.

There, men were given two blankets and slept on the trailer floor, shoulder to shoulder. Going to the bathroom meant walking outside in the middle of the night, even in winter. And the cramped trailers had no office space.

“This building will be a respectful place,” said Sharan London, the executive director of the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless, which will operate the shelter. “The trailers were a pretty disrespectful place to house people.”

London said the need for homeless services is rising in Montgomery County, which has an estimated 3,000 men, women and children without homes. She said the county’s homeless population has been growing at a slow but steady pace despite the regional economic boom. The surging gap between rich and poor in the county, which has the second-highest homeless population of any jurisdiction in Maryland, behind only Baltimore City, and has just 17 shelters for the homeless.

The estimated $1 million cost of building the Emergency Men’s Shelter is being paid with public and private dollars. Last year, the county budgeted $500,000 through the Department of Health and Human Services to build a shelter. 

In recent years, the county has shifted its homeless services to focus on specialized treatment. That is why the emergency shelter consisted of trailers; other homeless shelters are being used for targeted services, such as addiction or mental health sevices.

Health and Human Services Director Charles Short said there remains a need to house people who are not particpants in those programs. “The goal is to build a facility that will be safe and healthy,” he said, “but we don’t want this to be a place that will be too comfortable, because we want to encourage people to seek treatment, find jobs and improve their lives.”

The rest of the funding for the project is being provided bt the Home Builders Care Foundation, a non-profit group that is the community outreach arm of the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association. The foundation has raised about $250,000 through in-kind contributions from building industry companies as well as $100,000 in cash.

Chip Merlin, the foundation’s president, said many local builders have contributed services at greatly reduced prices, including architectural design, plumbing, concrete, roofing, siding and electrical services.

“Right now, there’s more work out there than people in our industry can handle, and we asked people to take a day or two and come in to help,” Merlin said. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but people are doing it.

The conditions at the previous shelter, which first consisted of two and then three trailers, were brought to the County Council’s attention three years ago by Don Torr, a Rockville resident who learned about the issue through volunteer work at his church. Torr remembers a homeless man who told him he would rather sleep on the street than spend a night in the trailers.

“That bothered me, and it kept on bothering me,” Torr said last week. He compared the conditions aboard the trailers–with men sleeping in cramped rows on the floor, often with dirty blankets–with slave ship conditions. “Slave ship pretty much described it,” he said.

Torr told the County Council, and county officials added a third trailer to the site to help ease crowding, which was an issue on winter nights when men sought refuge.

Last year, London asked council members Blair G. Ewing (D-At Large) and Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large) to visit the trailers. Silverman said that when they returned to the council offices after their visit, they knew something needed to be done immediately. “I was astonished,” he said. “It was disgraceful.”

By last week, the foundation had been poured and the building’s walls were raised at the
construction site, which was abuzz with activity.

It’s wonderful,” Torr said. It’s going to be a beautiful building. It will certainly do the job.

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