The brutal arctic cold front that froze the city during the first half of January drove the city’s homeless population from streets and vacant lots in search of emergency shelter. Ironically, the freeze also reheated an unresolved controversy over Mayor Ron Littlefield’s still unmet promise to use the former 9-acre Farmer’s Market site to help house the homeless.
The site, long known as a contaminated and empty industrial brownfield, remains generally unused for actually helping the homeless in any direct way, the purpose Mr. Littlefield espoused when he sprang the proposal to buy the site for $775,000 on the City Council his first year in office. Then, he had no concrete plan on how to use the site, no funding to aid the development of services to the homeless, nor even a blueprint for his self-described vision of compassion.
Not much about the mayor’s idea has changed since then. That’s why the independent, donor-funded Community Kitchen that lies on Eleventh Street just across the street from the largely vacant Farmer’s Market again had to shoulder the burden of providing a shelter for the homeless when January’s brutal freeze hit.
For 13 consecutive nights, it housed an average of 116 homeless people a night, squeezing people into spaces on the floor on pads and mattresses throughout its dining-hall area and recently opened, donor-funded day-shelter. The Kitchen was stretched to its limits. On one night, it housed 139 homeless people, including women and children as well as men. Overall, it recorded 1,515 stays and served a total of 287 individuals, many of whom stayed for most of the deep-freeze nights.
There were few other places to go. The Salvation Army gave shelter only to women and children. The Chattanooga Rescue Mission typically accepts 40 to 50 in its night haven, but within its mission framework. Union Gospel Mission itself remains still without a building, and no prospect of funding for one. And the smallish programs at St. Paul’s St. Katherine’s shelter and Second Presbyterian’s St. Matthews basement shelter, both run by the Community Kitchen, were already full.
Still, no homeless people received night shelter from the freeze on the city’s Farmer’s Market site, where old and vacant buildings and a lot of vacant land still stand unused.
Indeed, the only tangible building now on the mayor’s site that actually helps a few homeless families — though it does not serve as a night shelter — is the Interfaith Homeless Network’s modest new headquarters building, which about the size of a large house.
A handful of homeless families (usually not more than four or six at a time) that are being helped by the Interfaith Network use the new building as a day shelter and center for coordinating social services. But it was not designed as a night-shelter and was not used as such in the deep freeze. Rather, the Network, a church-based endeavor in which participant congregations use their churches as night shelters on a rotating basis, arranges transport and meals at host churches for temporarily homeless families.
The dearth of shelter space underscores the city’s demonstrable need for an emergency shelter, which could be used for storm and flood emergencies as well as for the homeless during brutal cold. A row of buildings at the Farmers’ Market site along Eleventh Street, repainted through a summer jobs project for youths, remain unused and would seem to be available. The mayor, after all, never made good on his initial promises to let the Community Kitchen use those buildings to expand its recycling, thrift store and employment training programs in them.
The barrier to an emergency shelter, said mayoral aide Richard Beeland on Tuesday, is a lack of funding, either for renovations of existing buildings or new buildings. Mr. Beeland said city officials still see the Farmers’ Market site as an ideal location for homeless services. But, he said, “the city’s not building a building for anyone.”
It is understandable that the city would not advocate public funding for parochial missions like the Union Gospel Mission and Chattanoga Rescue Mission. Yet the mayor had earlier hoped that both missions, as well as the Salvation Army, would move to the site.
In any case, Chattanooga Rescue Mission already has bought and is renovating the former National Guard armory and Senter School building on Holtzclaw Avenue, and Salvation Army has elected to stay on McCallie Avenue. Thus the vision that Mayor Littlefield once espoused for the site as a place for actual homeless services remains as barren as it was when he announced it.
Current plans for the site call just for the Salvation Army and United Way to co-sponsor a furniture bank, and for the Southeast Tennessee Human Resource Agency to relocate its bus transportation hub. The former may provide a few jobs, and the latter a useful mode of transportation, but that’s so incremental and tangential to homeless issues it hardly would be visible.
A more aggressive effort at arranging shelter, aid and job services for the homeless on the Farmers’ Market site could still be fruitful. But that would require some city funding, as well as concrete goals and leadership. Creating an emergency shelter, a lesson from the cold, could help kickstart the promised work. It’s past time that happens.