Mike Lyons, with Pro Coat Inc., paints the awning of the emergency family shelter at the Community Kitchen.Chattanooga’s long-awaited emergency shelter for families is getting near its opening date.
Paul Luikart, the director of the soon-to-open Maclellan Shelter for Families, said it will be the only local facility accommodating families without separating the men, women and children.
“We’re expecting families with infants,” said Luikart, who added that the shelter is supposed to open its doors Dec. 15. “It’s going to be sad. It’s going to be tough, but I’m glad we exist so that it is not sadder.”
Even if a family becomes homeless at 2 a.m., they can come to the shelter and be admitted as long as space is available.
The Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition’s most recent count of homeless people included 73 families comprising 97 adults and 198 children. The Hamilton County Schools system expects its number of homeless students to be at 1,700 by year’s end, and the number of homeless students in the system has doubled since 2008, school officials said.
Luikart spoke about the upcoming shelter after he and Chattanooga Community Kitchen Executive Director Jens Christensen led nearly a dozen Maclellan Foundation officials on a tour recently.
“We want to make sure that families who become homeless, the day they become homeless have a place to go,” said Luikart, a native of Chicago.
“Fantastic,” Maclellan Foundation trustee Chris Maclellan said after seeing the shelter for the first time this month.
The foundation put up $600,000 to transform the old homeless health care center attached to the Community Kitchen on 11th Street into the shelter. The shelter will provide 64 beds and shelter for up to 13 families.
All proceeds from the Thanksgiving Day Grateful Gobbler walk will go toward the shelter. The walk is the city’s biggest fundraiser assisting homeless people.
Luikart and case workers plan to meet with families at least twice a week to help them develop and carry out a plan to get housing. Families may stay at the shelter for 30 days.
If all goes ideal, families should be referred from the emergency shelter into transitional housing and eventually into permanent housing, Christensen said.
Glenda Curtis, 34, said the city needs an emergency family shelter.
Six months pregnant, she was walking along 11th Street on a recent day, pushing her 11-month-old baby in a stroller and trying to keep up with her 3-year-old child running ahead.
Curtis stays at a local shelter, but it requires people to leave at 7 a.m. and not return until 6 p.m. She hangs out at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, the public library and Walmart.
She said she hopes for a shelter that doesn’t force clients to leave during the day and helps them find housing and jobs.
Luikart said that when asked to describe a homeless person, most people think of an alcoholic man with a long, wild beard.
But in fact, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness, more than 1.6 million homeless people are children. That’s 1 in 45 children nationwide.
And families account for a third of the nation’s homeless population, according to the center. Not since the Great Depression have so many families been without homes.
During a recent visit, Mark Stone, a local painter, rolled gray paint on the lobby walls of the shelter while electricians hooked up air conditioners on the roof.
Tower Construction supervisor Scott Poulson talked about plans to synchronize strobe lights to warn deaf people of fire alarms, and his hope that the muted gray and green walls comfort families when they walk through the doors.
“We want it to be soothing when they come,” Poulson said. “We know that they’ve already been through a lot.”
Contact staff writer Yolanda Putman at yputman@timesfreepress.com or 757-6431.