Tacoma needs shelter as much as homeless do

If sheltering the homeless depended on good will alone, no one would ever want for a place to lay his head.

But the best of intentions does not pay the bills, something the people involved in trying to save Tacoma’s largest homeless shelter know well.

The 117-bed shelter on Tacoma Avenue South needs more money, possibly as much as $360,000 a year by the estimates of its current operator, the Martin Luther King Housing Development Association.

The housing association is bowing out after operating the shelter for seven years and subsidizing it to the tune of $2.1 million, according to executive director Felix Flannigan. The association’s exit follows the expected loss of $135,000 in federal grants administered by the City of Tacoma.

But even if that money had not been at risk, MLKHDA officials say they could not have continued to let the shelter be a drain on their primary mission of developing low-income permanent housing.

Fortunately, two credible and capable agencies – the Tacoma Rescue Mission and Catholic Community Services – are in talks with the city about taking over the shelter.

Both agencies have experience serving the homeless population and the institutional depth to assume the shelter’s operation. They also innately understand the importance of those 117 beds to the greater social safety net.

But neither organization should be expected to underwrite the cost of running the shelter at the expense of their existing programs. The bottom line is the shelter will need more funding from the city, Pierce County and the state – and perhaps the community.

There is a lot at stake for Tacoma, a city that can ill afford to evict men and women from their refuge of last resort.

Compassion alone dictates that a community care for the least fortunate in its midst. The homeless seeking emergency shelter include veterans, the mentally ill and the handicapped. Some are just down on their luck. None has much of a shot at improving his or her life while sleeping in a doorway or under a freeway overpass.

Nor does Tacoma have much chance of realizing downtown’s potential if more homeless are wandering the streets at night. Economic development, and to a lesser extent public safety (or at least the perception of public safety), compel the city to take in those with nowhere else to go.

Tacoma has made progress over the last couple of years in cleaning up homeless encampments and getting some former campers into decent transitional housing. But the city has not come so far that the loss of such a large emergency shelter wouldn’t be felt profoundly.

The upfront costs might loom large now, but they are nothing compared to the consequences of ignoring the problem.