Many residents of the City of Manitowoc gathered in the Council Chambers for the Plan Commission meeting last night (May 22nd) to voice either support or opposition to the proposed warming shelter and transitional housing project at the former McKinnley Academy building.
The project is known as The Neighborhood, and is a collaborative effort between the Manitowoc Warming Shelter, The Haven Men’s Homeless Shelter, and Hope House.
The first person to step up to the microphone was a little girl, who asked that people opposed to the project to not assume that everyone that would use the program is a bad person.
She gave the warming shelter staff a handwritten note, which you can see here.
We sat down with leaders of each of the organizations involved, who explained why this project is so needed in Manitowoc.
For the transitional housing portion, Deacon Mark LeGreve explained that there is a severe housing shortage locally.
“Our community is about 150 apartments short for affordable housing,” he explained. “All the agencies that deal with trying to house people are struggling.”
Brittney Punches from the Warming Shelter noted that during the coldest times in the winter, the current 12-bed warming shelter was packed.
“We were turning away sometimes up to 6 people a night,” she revealed. “Once it got to that point where it’s snowing, its freezing, we were like ‘We can’t keep doing this. We need more space. We need better facilities.”
Jan Graunke from Hope House tells Seehafer News that there are so many people suffering from homelessness that they haven’t been able to even address certain sections of the population.
“At Hope House, we have primarily made families our first mission to house,” she said. “So we have not been able to help the single female and couples, as is in our mission to help, because we made families the priority.”
A concern voiced by some in the community revolves around those who are classified as “chronically homeless.”
These are the people who take advantage of services and yet continue to make poor decisions that send them back to the streets.
Michael Etheridge of The Haven says there are plenty of contributing factors to that issue, including mental health and substance abuse disorder, but at the end of the day, they are still people.
“As long as we have programs to keep them coming back, that means someone won’t go out and die immediately,” he said. “They know they have a safe space and place to come back to. That comes from a trauma-informed way of thinking about that. We don’t know what those people had gone through, why the keep coming back. It’s not what’s wrong, but what happened.”
The City of Manitowoc’s Plan Commission will meet again in early June to determine what specific conditions need to be met for The Neighborhood’s purchase and use of the former McKinnley Academy building.
On June 17th, the Common Council will review the proposal for final approval. Anyone with any concerns or who would like to voice support is encouraged to email their City Alderman or Mayor Justin Nickels.
Their contact information can be found at Manitowoc.org.
