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    • Peace Lutheran will use land to help Austin’s homeless families
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    Peace Lutheran will use land to help Austin’s homeless families

    Pabio Posted on

    This didn’t happen immediately. But finally, the folks at Peace Lutheran Church looked at the worn tan building on the south end of their property — once used for preschool and Sunday school, now stocking boxes of yard sale items unsold items – and saw a space to help people in crisis.

    “You can see why it’s basically doomed,” stalwart Cindy Gust told me last month, pointing to the broken floor tiles and missing ceiling panels as we peered inside. The only inhabitants now are a family of foxes nestled in the crawl space.

    “We can appreciate that this building has been good and has done a lot of things,” added Pastor Carolyn Albert Donovan, always a glass-half-full type. “We can say goodbye.”

    That farewell is planned for next year, when Peace Lutheran plans to demolish this old building on RM 620, just outside the city limits near northwest Austin, and build a center for innovative transitional housing that will help up to 24 families per year quickly exit homelessness.

    It’s a bold faith-in-action plan to dedicate some of the church’s unused space to fighting homelessness. And everyone involved hopes it will inspire other faith communities to consider doing something similar.

    The Peace Family Housing Project will include four units, each with two bedrooms, all aimed at families with homeless children. It is designed to quickly consolidate families who have recently lost their homes, minimizing the trauma of that experience, ideally in a location that allows children to stay in school and parents to continue working.

    Unlike most other transitional housing for families that only accepts women and children, the Peace Family Project will allow husbands and fathers to stay with their families.

    The nonprofit Foundation for the Homeless will operate the facility, which will be a lifeline for its clients, executive director Monte Osburn told me. The foundation helps homeless families facing various obstacles, such as bad credit or lack of money for a deposit, move into an apartment. But that process can take two or three months, and while they wait, Osburn said, “they’ll often sleep in their car or in a tent.”

    However, once the Peace Family Housing Project opens, the Homeless Foundation can immediately place families in these units for that two or three month stay until their longer-term apartment becomes available. If the foundation places one family in each room of some or all of the housing, it could get six to eight families off the streets at a time, Osburn said.

    “There’s something exciting about saying that my church is changing the world,” Donovan told me when we first discussed the project in March. “It’s about connecting to neighbors and the world, about healing and hope. »

    Other congregations offer funding

    Although Peace Lutheran provides the land, vision and leadership, this effort is only possible with a village of partners.

    HomeAid Austin coordinates with contractors and other professionals who want to support projects to combat homelessness, aiming to reduce construction costs by 40% to 60% by matching donations of materials and labor .

    With the help of other faith communities, Peace Lutheran is more than halfway to its fundraising goal of $1.25 million. Lord of Life Lutheran Church, a northwest Austin congregation with a dwindling population that decided to sell everything and invest in causes you care aboutprovided $500,000 to the Peace Family Housing Project.

    The project received several small grants and donations from 131 people. Peace Lutheran also plans to tap into a $100,000 portion of the bequest of Eileen Moe, a congregant who died in 2016, leaving her church with the money and confidence to do something big.

    And on Saturday, members of Christ the King Lutheran Church in Universal City came to present Peace Lutheran with a check for $10,000 for the project.

    “Every little bit helps,” Christ the King pastor Mike Widner told me. “If we can help them get a little bit closer to the construction date, we just want to help them as much as we can.”

    Creating Safety, One Place at a Time

    Although several recent efforts to combat homelessness have been large-scale, consider 300-bed triage shelter Or the city’s hotel conversion projects or the doubling of small cabins at the Esperanza Community — Peace Lutheran’s project represents an effort to make the safety net both smaller and wider.

    Smaller, in the sense that the project involves only a handful of units, making fundraising easier and the plans less likely to draw objections from neighbors. But broader in the sense that this model could be replicated by other churches in the city, potentially making transitional housing available in more areas.

    Former Austin City Council member Jimmy Flannigan, who provided key advice when Peace Lutheran began exploring its options in 2018, emphasized the importance of “smaller solutions that small entities can adopt…and that can be reproduced again and again.

    “I think we’re all concerned that global solutions are now out of reach,” Flannigan told me last week. “And for me, right now, I find clear purpose in finding the small solutions that I can implement multiple times.”

    Donovan hopes his congregation’s efforts will inspire others. Indeed, faith communities are particularly well placed to provide assistance.

    “Churches tend to own really nice real estate that people can’t afford to buy right now,” Donovan told me earlier this year. “Often, this real estate is underutilized. And we have relational capital. We have the confidence to do things in the community that might sometimes be met with skepticism in other contexts.

    Austin has more than 700 religious communities. Not all of them have available land or a suitable location for transitional housing. But in theory, if just a quarter of these congregations found a way to provide two or three transitional housing beds on their campus, the city’s transitional housing inventory (currently 490 beds) could almost double.

    “We hope people will look and see and think, ‘We can do this,’” Donovan said.

    Katie Van Gulick, who attended kindergarten and Sunday school classes in the old beige building years ago, said she was comforted to know the space would now become “a new type of residence secondary for families who need a safe space.

    Now a visual designer, she created the logo for the housing project: an image reminiscent of Noah’s ark, a temporary shelter from the storm until the safety of dry land appears.

    Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. His column, ATX in Context, contains his opinions. Share yours by email at [email protected] or on X at @bgrumet. Find his previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.

    Beyond the church walls

    This is the latest installment in an occasional series about Austin churches taking bold steps to combat homelessness.

    How to help

    For more information or to donate to the Peace Family Housing Project, visit peaceaustin.org/housing.

    Pabio
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