Dylan Brogan
Former Fleet Services Building for city of Madison
The city's former fleet services building now serves as a temporary men's shelter. The site is slated to serve the future public market.
Let’s start out by giving Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and County Executive Joe Parisi some well-deserved credit. The relationship between the city and county has always been a contentious one, and yet they came together and worked out a deal to cost share on a new homeless shelter for single men at the vacant Gander Mountain store at East Towne.
That was a good deed. Now it must be punished.
The city council is balking at the arrangement, having now kicked it down the road to a meeting in May after the new council settles in. While it would have been nice if this could have moved forward, the opponents of the new site have some valid arguments.
The site is a long way from downtown, where many homeless men want to be, and it’s a long way from the social service agencies that might serve them.
Frankly, it’s in the middle of nowhere. But it’s a place that aspires to become somewhere. A developer has proposed a large mixed-use project that would end up being a neighbor to the new shelter. The development proposal was there first and now the developer is threatening to pull out if the shelter goes forward. The area’s current alder, Samba Baldeh, and the future alder, Gary Halverson, strongly oppose putting the facility there. They argue that it will hamper the redevelopment of the aging mall.
It didn’t help that there was a shooting at the temporary shelter at the city’s old fleet services building on First Street. The timing could not have been worse, coming just before the council was set to vote. Never mind that this is the only shooting and one of the very few violent incidents at the shelter whether at the current site or previous ones downtown.
But if you don’t like East Towne, then what’s the alternative? A homeless shelter just isn’t going to be a popular neighbor no matter where you try to put it. It may prove to be a fine neighbor over time, but it’s not a use any neighborhood is going to be eager to volunteer to host. On the other hand, the temporary site is slated to become the public market. If everybody just says “no” to relocating it in their neck of the woods, where does it go?
One idea that has been floated is to have a few smaller shelters rather than one big one. This would diffuse the argument that one side of the city gets picked on and smaller facilities would have less impacts. It could also have the effect of getting more of the city invested in the idea of finding solutions to homelessness.
Still, on balance, more than one shelter probably means a lot more real estate expense, more difficulty in providing services to spread-out clients and more cumulative neighborhood opposition.
So, here’s another idea. Leave it where it is. The shelter is already there, the First Street location is better than East Towne and the city already owns it.
And I’ve never liked that site for the market anyway. A much better location for it would be on the Brayton surface parking lot on East Washington Avenue, a block off the Capitol Square. In fact, that was the original preferred site of the first consultant the city hired to look into a market.
I was mayor then and I didn’t like the site so much at the time, but that was because it was separated from the Square by a dead block courtesy of the awful GEF I state office building. Now, the plan is to demolish that building and replace it with a new state historical museum and probably other uses. All of a sudden, Brayton looks like a perfect site for the market.
There are no bad guys in this story. I’m sympathetic to everybody involved. The mayor and county executive are cooperating on trying to get a humane facility sited and funded. The alders who represent East Towne have valid concerns about the redevelopment of the mall. Homeless men need a place to go. Any neighborhood that had concerns about a shelter would deserve more than to have those concerns dismissed as “NIMBYism,” especially by those in the rest of the city who aren’t being asked to host the facility.
Given all that, it’s likely that the mayor and county exec will just push ahead with East Towne, figuring that it’s the least of the bad options. But, in truth, I think leaving the shelter where it is and moving the market to the Brayton lot makes a lot more sense.
