Local project aims at offering overnight shelter to homeless

While the Rev. Larry Rice has recently expressed interest in using the Broadway federal building as a homeless shelter, Cape Girardeau social service agencies have established a cooperative program with churches to address homelessness.

For months, housing coordinator Roy Jones of the Community Caring Council has been working on a project to enlist churches as temporary overnight shelters staffed by volunteers. To be known as "Room at the Inn in Southeast Missouri," the program is aimed at homeless women and children, Jones said.

"We will use as a meeting place the Salvation Army and provide meals and bedding for women and children overnight," he said.

The program is patterned on similar efforts in St. Louis and Nashville, Tenn., Jones said. The final details are still being worked out, but Jones said he expects a pilot program to test the plan will be ready soon.

Maj. Ben Stillwell of the Salvation Army said the extent of homelessless is hard to gauge. The ease of travel to and from Cape Girardeau on Interstate 55 and via the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge to Illinois makes it difficult to keep an accurate count, he said.

But Jones doesn't doubt homelessness is real and growing. According to the Missouri Housing Development Commission, 48 people were homeless in Cape Girardeau County in 2008. Foreclosures and evictions due to job losses will only grow in coming months, Stillwell predicted.

The Salvation Army, which operates homeless shelters in many cities, does not have the resources locally to establish a shelter, Stillwell said. Objections to a homeless shelter based on worries that it will create, rather than solve, a problem are misplaced, Stillwell said.

"The fear is that if you build it they will come," he said. "My fear is that they are already here."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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