Homeless organization gets OK for property lease
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

The Hospitality House of Boone has cleared one more hurdle in its goal to centralize operations and move out of the downtown area.

The Watauga County Board of Commissioners gave tentative approval for the homeless shelter to lease property in the Bamboo area. The 1.96-acre site was originally transferred to Caldwell Community College & Technical Institute for its business center. According to county staff reports, CCC & TI is willing to transfer the property back to the county for Hospitality House use.

The property is next to the county-owned Hannah Building, which previously served as the county’s health department before a new facility was built in Boone. The site is now used by the Hunger Coalition and also houses a free pharmacy and medical clinic in addition to hunger-fighting efforts.

According to a letter to the commissioners from Kay Borkowski, chairwoman of the Hospitality House board, the current shelter opened in 1985 and also operates a community soup kitchen.

In the early 1990s, two more housing facilities were opened on King Street. These shelters, called the Sleeping Place and the Rock Annex, are for transitional shelter for people in crises. Between the three facilities, the Hospitality House can shelter 35 people at any given time.

“The mission of Hospitality House is to help folks get back on their feet,” Borkowski wrote. “In order to accomplish this mission, Hospitality House provides shelter, meals and supportive services to the homeless, which includes single men, single women and families with children. Hospitality House staff work closely with each individual to identify issues that contribute to the person’s homelessness and to develop an individualized service plan to address identified issues.”

An estimated 1,069 people each day are without homes in the seven-county area that the agency serves. Last year, Hospitality House provided 11,800 nights of shelter and has been at capacity most nights. It also served 63,500 meals in 2006 out of a residential kitchen.

Hospitality House director Lynne Mason said centralizing operations would allow the shelter to expand to 70 beds and said several funding areas would be explored, including grants through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She said the agency might mount a local capital campaign, but also plans to sell the three downtown properties to invest that money in the new building.

“We’re real excited about this,” Mason said. “We’ll have a real commercial kitchen to serve meals, expand the number of beds and include permanent housing.”

Mason said being a neighbor of the Hunger Coalition might help streamline some services and help people in a crisis get the food and health care they need. The county’s original vision of the Hannah Building was as a consolidated site to house a variety of community agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Mason said CCC&TI could collaborate on vocational training and high-school diploma programs that could help people making the transition back to the job market.

Borkowski wrote, “The location of this parcel of land would be ideal for Hospitality House to construct a new shelter facility due to its close proximity to the Hannah Building...This location would facilitate better coordination of services for those in need in our community, including continuing education.

“It is our hope, should it work out for us to build on this site, that we could enter into a partnership with Caldwell Community College to address the unmet educational and vocational needs of the homeless as well as those in need in our community such that they can obtain employment that provides a living wage and break out of the cycle of poverty. In addition, this site is on the bus route, is accessible to the Greenway and is in a location that is compatible to surrounding uses. Although a portion of this land is in the 100-year flood plain, we have brought out an architect and engineer who have determined that our project can be built on this site.”

Several years ago, some downtown merchants had expressed concern about the Hospitality House clientele, saying the shelter’s clients sometimes panhandle, block sidewalks or cause shoppers to feel uncomfortable.

The town of Boone’s legal review of a panhandling ordinance suggested that such a ban would violate free speech rights, though in response to the concerns the town enacted an ordinance prohibiting obstruction of sidewalks.

The commissioners took no formal action Monday because the deed has not yet been transferred back to the county. However, they discussed a long-term lease arrangement that would keep the lease active as long as the property was used as a homeless shelter. County manager Rocky Nelson said it would probably take 60 days to transfer the deed.

Mason said, under an optimistic view, construction could begin by next summer and open within the next two or three years.

She said the current properties downtown might be sold to help raise money for construction, but said the Hospitality House would need to be able to rent back the property until the project was finished.