Four Corners jump-starts debate

Columbia has a rare opportunity this year to find a communitywide solution to homelessness.

That’s the consensus of many charitable groups, business leaders and city officials who have been meeting for several months to develop a strategy that gets people off the streets, helps them deal with problems like substance abuse and mental illness and finds them housing.

Estimates of the city’s homeless population have ranged from 1,000 to 3,000, but a lack of precise data has made measuring change difficult or impossible.

Soon, providers will have a better picture of the homeless population in Columbia, thanks to a federally mandated census, and a blueprint for how they can tackle what they believe is a growing problem.

“It’s rare that you have providers, businesspeople, political leadership talking about these things at the same time,” said Anita Floyd, the United Way’s vice president for food, shelter, safety and transportation.

When a group of business leaders got together last year and pitched a plan to convert a Shop Road warehouse into a consolidated, one-stop homeless shelter, they turned a community spotlight that has yet to dim on homelessness.

Their specific plan did not take off. But the idea of a one-stop center is still on the table, and the project, dubbed Four Corners of Hope, referring to the multiple services it would provide, has had other unplanned consequences.

• It jump-started a community discussion in the form of the mayor’s ongoing summit on homelessness.

• It helped lead to a one-year extension of the lease on the city’s winter shelter.

• It backed the 116-year-old Oliver Gospel Mission into a corner,leading it to ultimately reaffirm its decision to stay put and expand its Assembly Street location.

• It placed a focus on a lack of affordable rental housing in the city.

Joe E. Taylor, owner of Southland Log Homes and a member of the Four Corners board, said the group’s intent was never to simply start a discussion. They presented a real plan backed by real money, he said.

“Nobody feels good about something that didn’t work out,” he said.

But if another substantive plan comes out of the discussions, they will be satisfied, he said.

“One thing that the Four Corners did, it has people thinking in terms of the entire homeless situation in Columbia, not just individual providers,” Taylor said.

The convergence of community involvement, political backing and federal pressure to have better information on the homeless population may have created enough momentum to lead to some progress, Floyd said.

“The momentum is there to address this comprehensively,” she said.

Still, some of those most affected are doubtful.

“They do things like this every year and nothing happens,” said Howard Smith, a 52-year-old homeless Columbia man. “You know how many years we have been hearing this?”

Most agree that it will take money, political fortitude and an uncommon cooperation among the city’s dozens of service and shelter providers to see any plan through.

FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL PRESSURE

At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is requiring local groups like the Midlands Area Consortium for the Homeless to count and provide better data on their homeless populations. That led to a statewide count in January and plans to develop a database of homelessness cases that can be integrated with other databases in the state.

At the same time, the S.C. Council on Homelessness has released a 10-year blueprint for addressing homelessness. Gov. Mark Sanford created the council, with leaders across the state in mental health, corrections and community service groups.

The council called for: increasing state funding for affordable housing, helping people transition from jail and mental institutions to permanent housing and helping local agencies access federal grants.

But state and federal efforts do not always translate into local momentum on social issues.

The local pressure seemed to begin with an appeal to the business community to help secure a site for the city’s winter shelter.

‘CRISIS’ IN THE CITY

In April 2004, Mayor Bob Coble accepted the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce’s Ambassador of the Year award. In his acceptance speech, he called homelessness a “crisis” in the city and called on the business community to take the lead in the effort to find a site and money for a permanent homeless shelter.

Four months later, the Four Corners of Hope plan emerged. It called for buying the old Colonial Stores Warehouse, a 14-acre campus on Shop Road, for $7 million and leasing space to providers to create a one-stop center.

Many city leaders lauded the plan. But many nearby residents and business owners complained that the facility would burden their community.

Others questioned whether the location — away from the center of town — would be viable, or whether a centralized facility was best. They asked whether the homeless would simply be warehoused in one location.

And Oliver Gospel Mission, whose participation Four Corners said was critical, would not commit.

In October, Four Corners allowed its option on the site to expire, essentially abandoning the effort.

Oliver Gospel Mission officials — who had tried unsuccessfully in 2003 to move to a site on Barnwell Street — later said they were not interested in participating in a joint project. Instead, they would go forward with plans to renovate and expand their site downtown along Assembly Street.

CONTINUING PROGRESS

Bob Hill, a businessman who was on the board of the Four Corners of Hope, stepped in to help when the city found out the agency that runs the city’s winter shelter was about to lose its lease.

Hill worked with the Cooperative Ministry’s Art Collier and set up a meeting with developer Ben Arnold, who owns the building. They came away with an arrangement for the shelter to keep its lease through the 2005-06 winter.

Later, soon after the opposition to the Four Corners plan emerged, Coble called for a summit on homelessness in the city to discuss the possibility of a consolidated site.

The first meeting, in November, brought together about 40 representatives of local service providers and governmental agencies. The process is continuing in individual meetings, but a date for another large-scale meeting has not been set.

Part of the solution, several officials said, needed to include more affordable rental housing in Columbia. That led Coble to call for the creation of an affordable housing trust fund to finance rent subsidies and new construction.

“Locally, things are really pretty exciting,” Floyd said.

Coble said the city of Columbia has done a better job over the past five years in responding to homelessness, pointing out that the city now funds the winter shelter.

But he acknowledged the city has failed to find a permanent location for the winter shelter or to help Oliver Gospel Mission in its previous efforts to move.

“You can have all the plans you want,” he said. “But we have to get a location, and we need to get as many folks as possible to go there.”

Reach Drake at (803) 771-8692 or jdrake@thestate.com.