New Shelter House offers so much more

Driving past, you might not even notice the beige two-story at 429 Southgate Ave. in Iowa City.

It sure doesn't look like a hotbed of iniquity, a harbor for criminals, with its tidy parking lot and immaculate exterior.

That image doesn't change when you walk in to the lobby and you're greeted by Gina, sitting behind a sweeping front desk strewn with children's hand-drawn holiday cards. Where David is dry mopping an already spotless floor. At a table, a man reads a newspaper.

A few days before Christmas, every bed in the Shelter House was full. They've been open a month now at this new location, after years of planning and battling neighbors who said moving the homeless shelter to this southside street would put their children, their property at risk.

Five long years, owners and residents of the nearby Hilltop Mobile Home Court fought the shelter, taking their case to the courts, the city and the public. They even protested at the shelter's groundbreaking ceremony. Their message: Sure, local homeless need a place to sleep, but not in our neighborhood.

You can't help but think of another story about a young family without a place to stay, who ended up in a stable after being told there was no room at the inn.

Families turn to the Shelter House, too, when they've run out of options. In the old place, a 110-year-old single-family home, they'd likely share that refuge with strangers. Twenty-nine people on beds, couches and floor mats, crammed in to a space suited for cover and little else.

Here, there's room for 70 and a separate wing for families, with its own lounge and common rooms for playing and for studying. There's laundry downstairs and up, a nurse's clinic, a commercial kitchen and private offices for counseling.

There are men's and women's dorms, with privacy rooms in each to house especially vulnerable residents and long-term quarters for homeless military veterans in a special transition program.

Just one of the programs made possible by the new 14,500-square-foot shelter, programs designed to help shelter residents beat homelessness once and for all.

Staff did what they could in the old house, but in the new digs they'll be able to do much more:

Workshops to teach job and life skills, financial literacy help and an ambitious culinary training program - who knows what else they'll come up with to help people into permanent homes and stable lives. And all because Shelter House finally got an adequate roof overhead.

Welcome home.

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