Following nearly four years of planning and community debate, a $1.75 million fundraising campaign and a months-long renovation project, Safe Harbor of Grand Traverse is preparing to open its new emergency homeless shelter at 517 Wellington Street this Saturday (November 4).

Construction crews bustled back and forth across the property Tuesday putting finishing touches on the 9,800 square-foot facility in anticipation of a series of community ribbon cuttings and open houses this week leading up to Saturday’s launch. The 72-bed shelter will operate seven days a week from 6pm to 8am November through April, offering overnight refuge from Traverse City’s wintry conditions for residents with nowhere else to go.

Safe Harbor’s expansion from a rotating network of host churches to one permanent centralized location will allow several new services to be provided to guests, according to organization representatives. The new facility offers three sets of commercial washers and dryers to provide on-site laundry services, separate men’s and women’s sleeping and bathroom areas, personal locking showers, and a commercial kitchen.

While guests previously competed for access to wall outlets to charge phones, the new shelter provides numbered bunks with correlating personal lockers outfitted with individual phone chargers.  Separate dining, television and meditation rooms allow for different types of activities to take place overnight without guests disturbing one another.

But board member and fundraising chair Christie Minervini says the biggest improvement to the shelter will be the presence of year-round, on-site service organizations dedicated to assisting guests in transitioning to permanent housing. “We’re very excited about this being less of a Band-Aid and more of a solution for people experiencing homelessness,” says Minervini. “Our housing and human services resource center will have a regular presence taking housing applications, doing needs assessments, helping with social security and disability applications, and hosting our mentorship program.”

Organizations include Goodwill, Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency and Traverse Health Clinic will operate in the center; the latter will offer wellness screenings, health check-ups and other services three times a week. Safe Harbor’s housing and human services resource center will be open Monday-Saturday from 8am to 11am year-round, with the possibility of expanded hours in the future. The new shelter will also offer three computer stations guests can use to access the Internet and apply for jobs online, with employment and apartment openings advertised on a shelter bulletin board.

“This is a huge shift in our thinking, in terms of really having a housing-focused approach,” says Minervini. “It’s really stressful for people living on the street to be thinking about getting a job and where they’re going to live when they’re just struggling to find their next meal and get to a warm place in the winter. We’re trying to do as much as we can to remove barriers for them to get them back into housing ASAP.”

Two years ago, Safe Harbor’s average length of stay for a guest was 35 nights; last season, that dropped to 25 nights, a decrease Minervini attributes to the renewed focus on connecting residents to housing. While the total number of nightly guests remains consistent from season to season – with a peak average of 62 over the last four years – decreasing the length of stay for individual residents is “really the metric we’re able to use to measure our success,” Minervini says.

Safe Harbor’s long-term plans call for the potential construction of five to six micro-lofts offering transitional apartments in the upper floor of the facility, as well as the eventual development of a supportive housing complex similar to Goodwill’s Carson Square on adjacent land next door. Board chair Peter Starkel says Safe Harbor “is focused for a year on getting this (shelter) going, and then it would be a two to three-year process to get that (housing) going.” As with shelter plans, Starkel says bringing housing to the site would involve outreach to the surrounding neighborhood as well as the community at large to get input on the project. “It’d be going through the process all over again for a different building,” he says.

While the emergency shelter spurred extensive community debate over its location and operations – particularly from adjacent business and property owners – Starkel and Minervini say Safe Harbor worked hard to address concerns about the project. The design of the shelter, for example, locates the guest entrance on the south side of the building from the parking lot to avoid guests congregating in front of the shelter on Wellington Street. New sidewalks and a planned new Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) stop next to the shelter will help direct guests to their next destinations each day without routing them through Boardman Neighborhood. “I think we’ve done a good job on all sides meeting in the middle to make this the best emergency shelter it can be,” says Minervini.

Over 500 individual donors contributed to Safe Harbor’s capital campaign, with multiple local organizations donating over $500,000 in in-kind trade to shelter renovations – a response Starkel says reflects support from a majority of community members for the project.

“I think probably the community dialogue has shifted from when we started from people being complacent and having no opinion (on this issue) to a great number of people in Traverse City thinking about the challenge of homelessness,” he says. “What we’re doing is causing people to think about the issue instead of ignore it.”

The public is invited to tour the new Safe Harbor shelter at 517 Wellington Street at a community open house on Thursday, November 2 at 5:30pm.