David Michael Miller
Dane County is purchasing the old Messner Inc site on East Washington Avenue for a day shelter for homeless residents.
County and city officials have been dragging their feet on selecting a location for a day shelter for our homeless residents for so long that my good buddy Jon and I made a humorous cartoon about the delays.
Luckily, it looks like our pessimistic predictions of a shelter not being built until the 2030s were way off. The county is purchasing the old Messner Inc. property on East Washington Avenue.
I think it is a great location. Placing this shelter alongside some of Madison’s most exciting new developments — Union Corners, the reinvigorated Breese Stevens and the myriad of ugly condo buildings named after celestial formations — sends a powerful message. Our city and county can grow without leaving our citizens behind.
Of course, there are going to be neighborhood residents who are opposed to this. I can’t feel too bad about asking them to take on the burden of a shelter. That part of town is getting at least a billion dollars of development invested in it over the next decade. That means new jobs, restaurants, entertainment and clinics, all within walking distance. For homeowners, that might even mean a bump to the value of their homes.
A letter to the editor in the Wisconsin State Journal calls out the safety concerns for neighborhood children. This shelter is going to be located along busy East Washington Avenue. If you are sending an elementary school student to walk alone down East Wash, the car traffic is a far greater danger to your kid than any person. This isn’t too far from the neighborhood where a bunch of residents freaked out when some tiny houses came in. Now, it is a year later, and the tiny houses haven’t presented a problem.
Letting the core neighborhoods NIMBY this shelter out to the suburbs would doom it. The East Wash location is near a ton of resources — the various overnight shelters and pantries operated by downtown churches, the Tenant Resource Center, the Dane County Job Center on Aberg and Madison College, to name a few.
Even if residents don’t use any of those other community resources, it is important to have this shelter close to places where there are jobs. Simply having a place to take a hot shower and get cleaned up in the morning could totally change the lives of entire families. Our society judges on appearance, and it is just another one of those ways we reinforce cycles of poverty. It sounds simple, and it is no magic bullet, but a shower and a shave might help someone get or keep a job.
Of course, I’m not saying there aren’t some real concerns to keep in mind when running a day shelter. Public intoxication and urination have been problems at the City-County Building and former site of the Occupy Madison tent city. Not as bad as the booze and piss fest that takes place at the class privilege fest known as a Badger football home game, but serious problems nonetheless.
However, a big part of the reason why there were problems is that these hangouts were substandard substitutes for a day shelter. Occupy Madison’s tent cluster was well-intentioned — at least they tried something, and their effort helped kick the county into finally doing something — but they didn’t have adequate resources to do the job. This shelter sounds like it will have the resources to do it right.
When Dane County did operate a temporary shelter closer to downtown on East Washington Avenue, police were called, but many of those calls involved sending people to detox. When someone is so drunk that they need to go to detox, that’s a medical problem, that’s serious addiction. The City-County Building isn’t the place where people are going to get identified for treatment.
A day shelter isn’t going to solve homelessness, but it can do some good if it is in the right location. Dane County has found the right location.
