Over 80 residents in Rapid City gathered at a community event called “Healthy Communities” aimed at addressing immediate and long-term homelessness issues—from the looming winter to affordable housing and communication between entities that provide services.
There’s added urgency as cold weather has already arrived and the heavily utilized Hope Center downtown is set to close Dec. 8.
Amy Richie is administrator with the Black Hills Regional Homeless Coalition and works for Volunteers of America. She said this winter will be different in that homeless individuals won’t have a place to warm up during the day.
“If individuals are blessed to have a place to sleep overnight they’re not going to have a place to go to take a shower and do their laundry and receive their mail in the morning. Making it through the night, a lot of people will walk just to make it through the evening. Then comes daytime and they have no place to refurbish, restart and get ready for the next evening," Richie said at Tuesday's gathering. "That’s concerning.”
Richie said she’s confident an emergency shelter will pop up this year. She said the community can no longer wait until October to think about emergency shelter in the future.
The Rapid City Common Council rejected a proposal to move the Hope Center to a larger facility following neighborhood opposition.
Bill Evans was the lone city council member to vote in favor of allowing the daytime mission to move.
“I think we can solve things instantly without solving all the problems at once. We break it down. What’s the immediate issue? Bad weather is coming. We need a place so people don’t freeze to death. To me, that’s pretty easy to happen,” Evans said. “We’ve got the resources to do it in this town, it’s just a matter of not being so selfish. If we can spend $20 million on fixing an intersection at Corral Drive and Sheridan Lake Road, we can come up with some money to keep people from freezing to death.”
Organizers of the event say they’ll craft suggestions from the event into a report.
Last month, the Rapid City Common Council and Pennington County Commission passed a joint resolution aimed at reducing homelessness.
