FORT SMITH — Efforts are under way toward turning a closed furniture-factory building south of downtown Fort Smith into a campus for providing services to the homeless.
The Old Fort Homeless Coalition, consisting of 26 member organizations, plans to apply for a loan to buy the former Riverside Furniture Inc. Plant 1 at 301 S. Fourth St. The coalition wants to renovate the 127,000-square-foot building into a central location for providing various services to homeless people in Fort Smith and the region. The facility would be called Riverview Hope Campus.
“In the next year, we hope to have some good things happen,” said outgoing coalition President Marshal Sharpe.
The building was appraised at $620,000, and Riverside has signed a letter of intent to sell it to the coalition for that amount, said coalition Vice President Ken Pyle, who also is executive director of the Fort Smith Housing Authority. He said it probably will cost at least another $1.3 million to clean up the building and make it habitable.
Plans are for the Next Step Day Room, a daytime refuge for homeless people, to move its offices from 123 N. Sixth St. as an anchor tenant on the campus, Pyle said. Other agencies also may move their main offices to the campus or set up satellite offices there, he said.
Coalition members include federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations, churches, the city of Fort Smith and the Salvation Army.
This will be the second time the coalition has applied to the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas for a loan to purchase the property. The bank has an Affordable Housing Program that provides grants and loans for such facilities, Pyle said.
Sharpe said bank officials were supportive of the campus plan and wanted to participate. But, Pyle said, the bank rejected the coalition’s application last year because of a lack of various information.
The coalition’s new application - expected in the spring - will be for about $500,000 and will be more comprehensive, providing information like the property appraisal, property survey, results of an environmental study, schematic design plans and Riverside’s letter of intent to sell, he said.
The purchase of the Riverside property would allow the Salvation Army to firm up plans to build its own emergency shelter there for more than 80 homeless families and individuals, Salvation Army chapter commander Capt. Carlyle Gargis said.
Gargis said the plans are “in limbo” until the property is purchased.
He said the Salvation Army would conduct a campaign to raise money for the shelter’s construction if the land becomes available.
PRIORITIES SET
The campus is one of nine priorities in a 10-year plan toward the coalition’s goal of ending homelessness in the River Valley region.
The Fort Smith Board of Directors endorsed the plan in a resolution passed earlier this month. The plan also was endorsed by the city of Van Buren and by Crawford, Franklin, Logan, Polk, Scott and Sebastian counties.
A count in January 2011 found 235 homeless people in Fort Smith, Pyle has said.
Among other priorities, the plan calls for hiring a full-time coordinator, identifying the scope of homelessness in the area, creating a job corps that would give priority to hiring the homeless, and undertaking a community education campaign.
“Overall, I think the plan is good,” Fort Smith Police Chief Kevin Lindsey said. “I hope it doesn’t take 10 years to get everything into place, but I think the city is taking the right steps by publicly supporting that with the resolution it passed.”
A task force on homelessness was formed in 2009 after opposition surfaced to a request by Community Rescue Mission at 310 N. F St. to build a 12-room dormitory for homeless families and single parents with children. The mission, on the edge of downtown and the Belle Grove Historic District, later withdrew its request to the Fort Smith Planning Commission.
Residents in the area complained that the mission and other organizations for homeless services with offices downtown - such as the Salvation Army, Next Step Day Room and the Good Samaritan Clinic - drew homeless people to downtown and the historic district and thereby hurt tourism.
The task force recommended that a central campus be set up just outside downtown to draw homeless people away from the disputed areas.
“I was real excited they will be able to move some of the organizations out of the historic district and concentrate over in that area,” said City Director Steve Tyler, a task force member. “I think that’s going to be better service and free up that area around the downtown area where they now gather.” OTHER PLANS
The coalition has already identified other funds that can help establish the homeless campus in the Riverside building.
A $400,000 Department of Housing and Urban Development grant awarded to the Next Step Day Room in February can be used to set up a 25-bed residential unit. The Safe Haven program would provide services for homeless people with chronic mental illnesses, Pyle said.
Next Step Day Room will need to come up with $300,000 to match the grant, Pyle said. Some of the match money will come from two Community Development Block Grants from Fort Smith totaling $240,000, he said.
The Fort Smith Housing Authority Commission voted earlier this month to loan the Next Step Day Room the additional $60,000 if it could not otherwise find the money, he said.
The coalition also is applying for a $700,000 HUD grant for acquisition and renovation costs for the campus, Pyle said.
As for hiring a full-time homeless-facilities coordinator, the position’s salary would be split, with the authority and the city providing $30,000 each, Pyle said.
Fort Smith Director of Development Services Wally Bailey said the city’s share is included in his department’s 2013 budget.
The coordinator will ensure that the property is kept up and will work with the facility’s services tenants, Pyle said.
The lack of a full-time coordinator has been an obstacle to development of the campus, Tyler said. The coalition members’ representatives are volunteers, most of whom have to juggle working with the homeless and their fulltime jobs, he said.
“You didn’t have somebody to keep things churning,” Tyler said. “Now you do, and that’s going to be a big difference, I think.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/31/2012