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Nonprofit Set to Buy Shelter Site $2.6m Funding
Cleared for Purchase, Renovation

By John Laidler - Boston Globe Correspondent
Source: The Boston Globe
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Edition: 3, Section: Reg, Page 1
GLOBE NORTH 2 / PEABODY

A Peabody nonprofit group plans to purchase and overhaul its Washington Street family shelter building, a move the group says will ensure its future presence there and allow it to serve more people.

Citizens for Adequate Housing cleared its final funding hurdles for the $2.6 million venture in the last two weeks when it received separate financing awards from the state and the Federal Home Loan Bank.

"This has been a great moment," Nancy Crowder, Citizens' executive director, said last week, observing that the project "will definitely be very important to the stability and long-term growth of this agency."

Citizens for Adequate Housing has been renting the three-story brick building at 42 Washington St. that houses its Inn Transition Shelter since it began the program in 1990. For the past year, it has also rented an adjacent single-family house for its administrative offices.

The Inn Transition Shelter serves families from the region that are homeless due to drug or alcohol addiction. The agency also operates the Inn Between Shelter, a 22-year-old emergency shelter for homeless families, in a building it owns at 25 Holten St. In addition, it owns and manages five apartment buildings in Peabody with a combined 16 rental units for low-income people.

The agency has an agreement to purchase the 42 and 40 Washington St. buildings, together with a parking lot and a small playground on the property, for $1.1 million from a private trust, according to Crowder.

Upon taking ownership of the property - the closing is set to occur before January - Citizens plans to invest $1.5 million in renovations to the 68-year-old building.

"It's very exciting, something we've been wanting to do for a number of years," said Kim Brengle last Friday, her final day as Citizens' director of development.

Crowder said the acquisition will stabilize the agency's finances by making its long-term costs for the site more predictable. And she said it clears the way for the renovation project, noting that it would not have been financially prudent to proceed with major work to a building it did not own.

The overhaul will include replacing the building's aging mechanical systems, as well as its stairway and fire escape. It will also mean new doors and windows. With those improvements will come an interior space realignment that will allow for an increase in the building's occupancy from the current 11 units to 14.

The Inn Transition Shelter currently serves eight families. But for the past year, the Washington Street building has also housed three of the nine families served in the Inn Between Shelter program (The two programs are funded by separate state agencies). The three additional units created through the renovations are expected to be used for the Inn Transition Shelter program.
The renovation budget includes the cost of temporarily relocating the families sheltered at the Washington Street building, most likely to a hotel or motel, during the estimated six months of construction.

Crowder said Citizens learned June 14 from the office of state Senator Frederick E. Berry, of Peabody, that it had been awarded $1.45 million from two funds administered by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Then last Friday, it learned that the Federal Home Loan Bank had awarded it $700,000. Both awards are in the form of loans that do not have to be repaid as long as Citizens continues to provide shelter to its clients free of charge.

The state on June 14 also awarded Citizens $160,000 from the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Trust. Previously, the project received $225,000 from the North Shore HOME Consortium, which seeks and dispenses federal funds for affordable housing projects in the region; $50,000 from Peabody, drawing from HOME funds the city received from the consortium; and $75,000 from a state program that supports substance-abuse recovery programs.

Peabody Mayor Michael J. Bonfanti said the city is supportive of Citizens and its efforts.
"It's one of the great programs in the city, and it fills a tremendous need," he said of the agency. Bonfanti said the planned investment allows Citizens to "control their own destiny. ... It stabilizes what they are doing."

Erected in 1939, the 42 Washington St. building served as a Jewish community center until the 1970s, according to Crowder. For a while after that, it housed a day-care center. It was converted into studio apartments in the early 1980s, and changed hands several times before Citizens began its lease in 1990.

Crowder said the agency's two shelters between them serve 40 to 50 families a year. The average stay is six to eight months in the shelters, both of which are staffed around-the-clock.
The Inn Transition is one of only three state-funded family sober-living facilities in Massachusetts, according to Crowder.

"The homeless families that we provide care for need a period of time to stabilize and learn skills," she said, predicting that there will be a continuing need for a facility to serve that population.