HOT SPRINGS — The staff at Safe Haven in Hot Springs sees women every day who are looking for a place to stay while they get back on their feet.
Many stop into the nonprofit organization’s office on Ouachita Avenue asking for help finding a place for that very night. Some have abusive family situations, some have histories of substance abuse, but most of the women seeking shelter for the night are mothers or single women who have lost jobs or been evicted and might be living in cars, storage spaces or with friends.
There are programs dedicated to battered women and their children, programs for women who are in recovery from substance abuse, but there are no shelters in Hot Springs that just take women and children without those problems, said Janie Evins, Safe Haven board of directors president.
“According to the counts we did last year, there are more than 400 homeless women and children living in Garland County,” she said. “I’ve lived in Hot Springs for 30 years, and this is the worst I have ever seen the homelessness issue.”
Terry Lawler, who works with children at the Hot Springs School District who are in transition between permanent residences, said the school district has 120 students in that category. The school doesn’t like to use the word homeless because of the stigma it could place on a child, but many of the children are living with another family or in weekly-stay housing.
The district provides a bevy of services from food to eat over the weekend to extra homework help, but under federal guidelines it cannot provide help paying for utilities or rent.
One of Safe Haven’s goals has been to start a shelter dedicated to housing homeless women and children because many of the available services address other homeless populations or don’t address the specific needs of homeless families.
The group thought they had the perfect site for the project, a 24,000-square-foot former nursing home in the Whittington Park neighborhood, that a donor - Michael Morton of Fort Smith - was willing to give them for free.
It was single story, eliminating some of the risk if a resident were suicidal. It had an industrial kitchen and laundry facility to handle the number of women and children the group anticipated and an intake room to let people arriving for the first time to shower and change.
It had double rooms separated by a bathroom, perfect for a mother and her children, Evins said. There were parks, schools, a medical clinic and community college with General Educational Development, or GED, classes just a quick drive from the facility. They had even gotten donations from local hospitals and businesses and had enough beds, sheets, towels, plates and kitchen supplies to open the shelter immediately.
“We couldn’t believe the generosity of the donor; we felt like it was literally perfect for us,” Evins said.
Most of the neighbors in Whittington Park did not feel the same way.
They passed around a petition getting several hundred signatures against the shelter opening. They tried to find the shelter spaces outside the neighborhood to move into. They wrote letters to the editor in the local newspaper and showed up en masse at meetings and were vocal about their concerns over traffic and the character of their community.
Some of the alternatives suggested were warehouse spaces in industrial areas, far from many of the basic services the women could use to get back on their feet, such as GED classes and public transportation. Some other suggestions were multistory or separated buildings not ideal for safety procedures. Some didn’t have a kitchen or showers, didn’t have access to parks or schools, weren’t handicapped-accessible and would require a lot of remodeling.
Safe Haven took the nursing home idea to the Hot Springs Planning Commission to apply for a zoning variation to allow the group residential facility to operate under a conditional use in the mostly residential area. The commission voted 4-3 against allowing the facility to open in that location.
“I don’t think anyone who has looked at this is saying the city doesn’t need a women’s shelter,” said Kathy Sellman, Hot Springs planning director. “It was a close board decision, but I think in the end the planning commission found that they had not fully demonstrated that this is a use where the impacts have been mitigated and the requirements have been met.
“There was not adequate information to approve the project, and in addition, the board found that the proposal did not conform to the comprehensive plan.”
Sellman said the city has a comprehensive plan intended to guide future development. Individual neighborhoods also have approved development plans as guides.
Evins said she believed those plans were not meant to be strict rules for neighborhood development. She also said she didn’t understand how a nursing home, which also is a group residential facility, would be approved and a shelter would not be.
Sellman said the nursing home, which has been closed for almost a decade, likely never applied for a conditional-use approval because it began operating before the neighborhood master plan was written.
“Once that stops operating, the rule is for a period of 12months, then the conditional use does not automatically transfer to the next applicant,” Sellman said. “The residents also felt like the two uses were vastly different, since most nursing home residents are largely stationary and the homeless shelter had the potential of increasing the car traffic in the neighborhood significantly.”
Safe Haven officials appealed the decision last Tuesday asking the city’s board of directors to overrule the planning commission vote, but the board voted 4-1 to uphold the decision with one person recusing herself because she works for a company that gave Safe Haven a large grant.
Evins said she feels like the nonprofit group is being penalized for trying to do too much, but she isn’t apologizing for the effort.
“We said we wanted to provide transportation to the medical clinic, they said we were trying to open a hospital,” she said. “We told them we wanted to transport the women to the community college to get their GEDs and to get work-force training, they said we were opening a school.
“We said we wanted to have a space for donated clothing and household items, they said we were opening a retail shop. We said we wanted to offer a training program on the premises to teach these women how to open a business, maybe make spice or cookie mixes and sell them on the Internet, and they said we were opening a retail business.”
Evins said the group has done a lot of research looking at other facilities as far away asSpokane, Wash.
“We wanted a model that would do more than put a roof over their heads, although that was our first priority - a safe place for them and their children to be every night,” she said.
Sellman said the group can appeal the board of director’s decision through the court system. They also could reapply with a revised and specific site plan that better addresses the potential for community impact, but the process would start over and it wouldn’t be a guarantee of approval.
“They do consider community opinions,” she said. “But that is not the only factor and in this particular instance there were other issues that needed to be addressed and weren’t.”
Evins said she and the rest of Safe Haven’s board of directors are considering whether to file a fair-housing complaint, whether to pursue legal action, or whether to move on and intensify the search for a different building.
“We’ve given ourselves a 30-day deadline to make a decision of what to do,” she said. “We easily could file a claim with the Fair Housing authority and say this decision was unfair. It is a proven fact that about one-quarter of homeless people have some sort of mental-health issue, and this decision could be seen as denying them access to equal and fair housing.”
Evins said that complaint process allows for 100 days to investigate the claim, which would set the project back significantly.
A company that operates the duck tour business in Hot Springs also was turned down by the city board of directors when requesting a parking change. The owner turned his parking lot last week into a depot for homeless people, serving breakfast and offering clothing and food drives.
While the effort to help is appreciated, the parking lot does not solve the issue of having a safe place to stay, since city zoning laws would cap the number of days tents could be set up at 10 days, and because of the area of town, temporary camping may not be approved by the planning commission.
In the end, Evins said, the group is left trying to figure out the best and quickest way to get a homeless shelter in place. Volunteers will be counting the area’s homeless for the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Point In Time survey of homeless individuals Tuesday into Wednesday to get a better idea of how many homeless people there are in Hot Springs.
“We will have a plan soon,” Evins said. “Every day we wait is another day these women don’t have a safe and steady place to sleep at night.”
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 01/22/2012