Liam Beran
The shelter at 1902 Bartillon Drive, still a work in progress in September, will not open until late spring.
The hope for Madison’s first permanent men’s homeless shelter has always been that residents would not have to hit the streets first thing in the morning and could stay during the day to access services. But that is a dream deferred for now.
Due to a lack of funds, the shelter, which is expected to open in late spring, will not immediately operate as a 24/7 shelter, Jim O’Keefe, Madison’s community development division director, wrote in a March 10 memo to alders.
“The shelter will open as an overnight shelter, though the goal remains to operate it 24/7,” O’Keefe wrote.
O’Keefe added later in the memo that keeping the building open will require more than the $3.5 million currently allocated to the shelter: “Initial estimates put the cost of a 24/7 operation at $4.2 million but that number is currently under review and is likely to rise.”
In 2022, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and then-Dane County Executive Joe Parisi announced a collaboration between the city and county to build a 24/7 shelter at 1902 Bartillon Drive. An interim shelter operated by nonprofit Porchlight opened at Zeier Road in October 2022. Conditions in that shelter are subpar, O’Keefe wrote in the March 10 memo, and repairs would likely be needed to continue its use.
Porchlight staff is distributing notices to users of the Zeier Road facility that it will close when the new shelter opens. “We are sharing this information now so you have time to understand what is changing and plan ahead,” the notice reads. Users were also provided information about the intake process for the new shelter.
Proponents of the 24/7 model have noted it would reduce strain on residents and staff alike.
“The day-to-day toil and exhaustion from having to ‘Get here. Get there. Get in on time. Get out on time,’ is dehumanizing, and it’s not a good way of serving folks,” Dane County Supv. Heidi Wegleitner, who chairs the county’s Health and Human Needs Committee, told Isthmus in August.
Other new details about the shelter were also included in O’Keefe’s memo. The shelter will not operate as a drop-in model, as is the case at Zeier Road. Instead, users will register for entry through Porchlight and “and, once registered, retain their access from night to night.”
O’Keefe added that the shelter will have a 250-person capacity and “its design prevents it from exceeding its capacity as Zeier and other temporary venues routinely did.”
“This means it does not have room to serve everyone currently using the Zeier facility,” O’Keefe wrote. Porchlight will determine prioritization using such factors as age and medical needs; there will be a waiting list for those who do not immediately get in. Residents are allowed to stay indefinitely but will be “asked to leave” if they’ve stayed for longer than 90 days and are unwilling to work with case managers.
Initial budget projections estimated it would cost $3.2 million to operate the shelter as a day shelter and $4.2 million to operate it as a 24/7 shelter. The city is contributing $1.7 million and the county $1.5 million, O’Keefe wrote. Smaller amounts of funding have come from the state and Porchlight itself, bringing the total to $3.5 million. There is at least a $700,000 gap for the funds needed to operate the shelter 24/7.
Several community members began a friends group in October to gather donations with dual goals: providing immediate stopgap dollars to permit the shelter to operate on time and funding an endowment to support the shelter's operations in perpetuity.
It is unclear how much money the friends group has thus far raised. Spokesperson Kristin Rucinski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nearly 800 people were recorded as homeless in a volunteer-conducted January 2025 “point-in-time” survey, compared to 630 people in 2020. People of color accounted for 58% of those recorded as homeless in 2025, even though they make up 16% of Dane County’s population.
A new point-in-time survey was conducted in January. Torrie Kopp Mueller, continuum of care coordinator for the Homeless Services Consortium of Dane County, tells Isthmus in an email that results will likely be publicly available in “late spring,” once they have been submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
