By Michael Bushnell
Northeast News
January 25, 2012

Dan Doty’s Family Shelter at City Union Mission is, in a word, crowded.

“Whenever we have large scale volunteer operations, everyone is tripping over each other and it’s very crowded,” said Doty, City Union Mission’s executive director and chief executive officer.

That overcrowding is what led the mission to purchase the old Forklifts Inc. building at 1700 E. 8th Street, just east of Admiral Boulevard and the Paseo. The building will be home to City Union Mission’s Community Assistance ministry as well as be a staging area for volunteers and a warehouse for all of the Mission’s equipment and transportation vehicles.

Doty was quick to interject that the new facility will not be used as a shelter.

“As a member of the Paseo West Neighborhood, we’re keenly aware of the impact that social service agencies and shelters currently have on the community. It’s something we’re currently working through,” Doty said, adding that the Community Assistance ministry would not be a high traffic operation with people lingering outside the facility.

“That ministry centers on 20 to 30 families per week coming to the facility during specific hours during the day,” Doty said. “We very much want to be a contributor to the community, which is why there won’t be a shelter at that location.”

Another agency, Kansas City Rescue Mission, cut the ribbon yesterday on a new facility at 2611 E. 11th Street, the site of the old St. Aloysius Parish. That site will operate as a site for single, homeless women with dual diagnosis, according to Development Director Julie Larocco. Construction is slated to begin in mid-February.

Independence Plaza Neighborhood Council President Lee Lambert said his neighborhood welcomes the new facility to the neighborhood because of the positive impact it will have in the community.

“It seemed like a good fit,” Lambert said. “They agreed to the neighborhood’s conditions that there be no constant coming and going, no loitering around the building and the neighborhood, and that the building not look like a shelter.”

Other Northeast neighborhood association presidents, however, expressed concern, citing the growing number of social service agencies already in Northeast, or at its doorstep, that cater to homeless, mentally ill, addicted and sometimes criminal clientele.  

“Concentrating social services in one area of the city is not healthy for the clients or the neighborhoods,” said Jessica Ray, president of the Pendleton Heights Neighborhood Association. “An urban neighborhood should be both culturally and economically diverse; this requires individuals with vision to develop housing and employment opportunities for the poor that will also attract middle class residents, thus raising the sustainability of the entire neighborhood.

“Too many service organizations are busy meeting immediate needs without ever addressing long-term solutions. The mission of any charitable organization should be to improve the quality of life for everyone around them and to eventually put themselves out of business in that area by accomplishing what they came to do.”

Both operations will go live later this year and according to spokespeople for City Union Mission and Kansas City Rescue Mission, the operations plan to be positive contributors to the surrounding community.

Shown above are two architectural renderings of Kansas City Rescue Mission’s new facility to be housed in the former St. Aloysius Parish, located at 2611 E. 11th St. The facility will act as a 20-bed facility for single, homeless women, many with dual diagnosis of addiction and mental illness. Submitted art