The Denver Rescue Mission recently broke ground on their new Lawrence Street Community Center, located next door to their shelter facility at Park Avenue and Lawrence in the Arapahoe Square district.
The new Community Center will provide a safe place for the homeless to gather and receive needed services during the daytime before the Denver Rescue Mission’s shelter opens for the evening. The one-story facility will feature a kitchen, a 216-seat dining area, showers and restrooms, and an enclosed courtyard. For more details about the project and the services that will be offered at the Lawrence Street Community Center, the Denver Rescue Mission’s website has a nice bullet-point summary.
I’ve outlined the project location on this Google Earth image from October 2014:
This rendering, courtesy of Eidos Architects, shows the one-story facility and courtyard. The two-story building on the left is the existing Denver Rescue Mission and the two-story building on the right is an unrelated property across the alley on Arapahoe Street.
Ryan and I were at the site around the end of January when the project officially broke ground:
The Lawrence Street Community Center is expected to open Fall 2015.
This is great! Not only will it provide better services for the homeless, but will ease the growing tension caused by the existing shelter in a gentrifying neighborhood. I look forward to its opening!
I have a feeling this is going to create a lot more tension rather than provide any relief. It seems like a very nice facility which in all likelihood is going to drive more homeless to the area. I know the Ballpark neighborhood association was fighting this pretty hard. I guess we’ll see what happens
It will definitely be a more dignified manner to wait for nighttime shelter. Plus, area residents won’t need to step over so many people hanging out on the sidewalks during the day.
I wish the volume of “shelters” weren’t completely centered in this one part of town, but at least this provides an option to a unenviable problem.
Yeah, get away poor people. These “shelters” are such an inconvenience for us housed folk.
This is a really thing to say.
I don’t think anyone objects to building housing for this population; but a few people, such as myself, question what purpose is served by placing all of them so central to downtown. Ostensibly, these services could be provided anywhere, so why is it they need to be so concentrated in one particular area, where many of the problems of the homeless can be perpetuated?
Why can’t these facilities be located where cheaper transitional housing can be built, away from large networks of substance abuse? If you’re worried about adequately serving the downtown transient population, then why not operate a free shuttle?
This is a complex topic of discussion, and there’s no reason to be flippant with people who most likely agree with you.
In most cities, higher concentrations of homeless populations tend to congregate in downtown areas. Putting resources for the poor were they can most easily be accessed makes the most sense. It would be unwise for non-profits to risk investing millions in developing centers offsite, at the risk of having an ineffective shuttle program. Building a community center outside of it’s target community hardly makes sense. I also don’t understand how this would perpetuate the homeless problem. Your solution (assuming it works) merely shifts the concentration of the population elsewhere. Is your concern that the shelter would actually worsen conditions for the homeless, or simply that they are in your neighborhood?
I bet you donate your time and resources helping out the homeless every night, don’t you..? Predictable faux outrage.
This argument is both a tu quoque and an ad hominem. Both of these are logical fallacies.
I believe the services the center will provide are much needed.
However, I do have an issue with the location.
The Ballpark neighborhood has a disproportionate share of services for the homeless. High concentration of services brings crime concentration and other issues.
Denver has a limitation of how many homeless beds are allowed per neighborhood, and Ballpark is already at its limit. However, by creating a “Day Center” in the same neighborhood, and given the limited beds available for the homeless at night, it will eventually be a way to override the Denver limitation and make more beds bringing more homeless to the area and making it more of a “no go” zone and increasing tensions with the neighborhood.
While I agree that more services should be located near transitional housing versus having all of them in the Ballpark, this center is a solution to the issue of what to do with all of the people that used to hang out on the “island” across the street from the shelter. That wasn’t a good situation as you routinely had people illegally crossing the busy streets. This will keep the people waiting on the shelter in a more secure place and offer them better shelter from the weather and services, like the bathrooms. I don’t view this as something that will attract more people as the number of overnight beds is fixed and presumably camping won’t be allowed in the Day Center; hopefully, it will be a better resource for the people already there.
I don’t see many downsides to this project. The reality is that homeless are going to congregate downtown because a) our transit system converges downtown b) the large number of workers provides more money from begging c) just as the urban infrastructure makes it easier for us to work/live downtown, it also makes it easier for the homeless. We need to accept that homeless are going to be more prevalent in the urban core and it only makes sense to provide resources to the population where they live.
DRM isn’t increasing the number of beds so there is no going around the rules about beds. All this provides is a safe place where homeless can go during the day where they are not ostracized and stigmatized. I used to work in a small business downtown and would have to send homeless away when they asked for bathrooms or whatever. I am glad to know that there is a specific place where homeless can go for the basic necessities of life. This facility will not only be better for the homeless, it will be better for all of downtown.
I agree wholeheartedly, Julio. My college town built a homeless shelter out of town (next to the jail, no less), and it did very little to reduce the number of homeless people around the downtown area. Building the shelter close by would have eased the strain on local businesses and their patrons.
I would love to know what Ian Harwick thinks about this topic… I might have to stop by the Urbanist Meetup to find out
Maybe the question is,
“Why are there so many Americans living on the street in the first place?”
I’m all about implementing the Utah method, which involves giving homeless people apartments along with a social worker. It was pretty effective (and actually cost effective in the long run) in Utah, but not sure if it can be implemented here.
Homelessness is obviously a very complicated problem with no easy solutions. Projects such as this are steps in the right direction, in my opinion.