A crowd gathers every night shortly before 7 p.m. in the alley below the 1100 block of Tacoma Avenue South. Homeless men and women stand in the shadow of a rising condominium building, awaiting entry into a low-ceilinged former floral warehouse stuffed full of metal bunk beds and mattresses.

Every few minutes, a shelter worker steps out and invites another 10 or so people inside until everyone gets through the showers and finds a bed in one of Tacoma’s largest overnight homeless shelters. Men are on one side. There is room for 92. Women are in a separate space, with room for 25.

There is no television. Snacks are not permitted.

“It’s not the Holiday Inn,” one man remarks.

But it’s warm and dry.

For how much longer is unclear. After 39 years – 10 years in its current location – the shelter faces an uncertain fate following a recommendation from a citizens commission to not award crucial grant funding to its operator, Martin Luther King Housing Development Association. Combined, the grant requests totaled $135,000 of the shelter’s roughly $300,000 operating budget.

The City Council is expected to make a final decision on the distribution of funds at its May 6 meeting. Councilman Mike Lonergan said he wants to use a council contingency fund to distribute $10,000 each to MLKHDA, Centro Latino and The Salvation Army to soften the blow for three agencies that have previously received funding.

Felix Flannigan, executive director of MLKHDA, said he and his staff feel blindsided by the grant recommendations. One of the grant requests received a score of 80 from the city’s Human Services Commission, one point shy of the cut to receive funding. A second grant seeking money to extend the shelter’s hours during bad-weather months missed the cut by two points.

Commission members criticized the MLKHDA grant applications, saying one of the applications didn’t answer a question and it showed a “confusing budget.”

“Unclear about whether program is sustainable,” the comments state. A comment on the other grant application reads: “Encourage to seek outside grant writing assistance.”

Flannigan disputed the commission’s scoring and comments, and defended his staff. “We feel like we’re being taken advantage of,” he said.

Flannigan said the nonprofit’s board of directors will decide soon how to respond to the funding crisis. Every option will be considered, including shutting down the shelter, Flannigan said.

“We’re re-evaluating whether this is something the community really wants us to do,” he said.

Even before the failure of the two grant requests, Flannigan was pondering potential changes in the shelter’s operations. Downtown is gentrifying, Flannigan said, and he believes property developers no longer want a homeless shelter in the middle of the city. That sentiment is what’s behind a lawsuit, he said.

A downtown property owner is suing the nonprofit association, claiming the organization has not done enough to stop the homeless who congregate outside from harassing people who use a nearby parking lot. The plaintiff, BRC Associates, also blames people drawn to the shelter for vandalism, trafficking drugs, and urinating and defecating in a parking lot.

A trial was scheduled to start Monday, but was postponed at the last moment. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Rosanne Buckner recused herself because she has a view of the shelter from her office, said attorney James Krueger.

Flannigan said he has come to believe the shelter is too large to operate efficiently in the city’s urban core and should be split up into five smaller shelters, one in each City Council district. Churches could operate the smaller shelters, he suggested.

Flannigan and Brian Ebersole, the former Tacoma mayor who now lobbies for MLKHDA, met with City Manager Eric Anderson last week to discuss the shelter’s future. Anderson said afterward that he doesn’t have a solution.

“We certainly are going to have to find one,” he said. “We can’t just let that go.”

David Curry, executive director of the Tacoma Rescue Mission, said his organization can take in more people during an emergency, but could not pick up the slack for an extended period of time without expanding. The Tacoma Rescue Mission has 75 beds at its men’s shelter, and 450 beds total.

If the MLKHDA shelter closed, “there would need to be a strategy to make sure we could find beds,” Curry said. Tacoma would feel the loss of that many shelter beds, he added.

Edwina Magrum, chairwoman of Tacoma’s Human Services Commission, said commission members were concerned that their recommendation to not award grant funding to MLKHDA would impact the downtown. As a result, the commission recently created a subcommittee to examine Tacoma’s homeless services to determine if there is a better way of doing things.

The Housing First model that concentrates on getting people into permanent housing is attracting attention and money these days, Magrum noted. The City of Tacoma employed the model in its drive to wipe out homeless camps in the city.

“Politics as usual is kind of falling apart,” Magrum said. “What’s the best way we do this? That’s the mind-set that’s driving this.”

Lonergan, former executive director of the Tacoma Rescue Mission, suggested the city may play a role in helping find another organization to take over running MLK’s shelter.

Amid the criticism and uncertainty, Flannigan is angry. He notes that MLKHDA is primarily a real estate development organization that runs the shelter only because the previous organization, the King Center, fell into money problems.

Even when the shelter received city funding, it has required subsidizing from the association’s other projects, Flannigan said. With the downturn in the housing market, money is tight.

“We’re housing development,” Flannigan said. “It’s no different for us than any other builder in the region.”

As officials ponder what to do next, dozens of homeless arrive outside the shelter’s doors each night. Many of them said they don’t know where they would go if it closed.

“The rescue mission is full,” said a one-time teacher who gave only his initials, C.L.H. “Last year, the city decided no one could sleep outside. It makes me wonder what would happen next. People have been saying since the condos are going up, they’re going to knock us out.”

“If I paid $200,000 for a condo, I wouldn’t want to look out the window and see an alley full of homeless,” added Seth, a former Boeing worker who wouldn’t give his last name.

Ten years ago, Seth said, he had a job, a house, two cars and a boat.

“All the toys,” he said.

He lost everything because of a gambling problem, and has stayed at the MLK shelter for the past nine months, sleeping in a bunk bed and rising at 4:30 a.m. to catch a bus to his job at a plastics plant. He just started working full-time and hopes to get back on his feet soon. He doesn’t know when he will be able to move on, or where he would go if the shelter closed.

“I’m pretty sure everyone here don’t got no place else,” said Joseph Velez, a shelter resident for the past year.

Jason Hagey: 253-597-8542

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