The Concord Coalition to End Homelessness will ask the city’s zoning board for permission to build a cold-weather shelter at its existing location.
The nonprofit would construct an accessory building behind its 238 N. Main St. resource center, where it could house as many as 40 people overnight, if approved.
Its proposal could help resolve a gap in the safety net that has left advocates scrambling the past two Decembers to find a warm place for the city’s most vulnerable residents.
“This is the big plan,” Executive Director Ellen Groh said, referencing the nonprofit’s protracted quest to find a permanent wintertime solution.
“We want to keep our main effort on ending homelessness with permanent housing, but this is just going to continue to be a very time-consuming effort every winter, until we get this kind of squared away,” she said.
This year and last, the city’s cold-weather shelter has been located at St. Peter’s Church, but the church’s owners expect their North State Street property may soon be sold.
Groh said she’s searched around the city for a space that could satisfy the coalition’s criteria: close to the soup kitchen and to downtown, while remaining a comfortable distance away from residential neighborhoods.
“It’s tough in the downtown area,” she said. “You don’t have to go far before you start hitting residences.”
“We’ve looked extensively around, and this feels like the most appropriate and most feasible site for a cold-weather shelter,” Groh said. “It’s not abutting any residential neighborhoods, which is pretty important to people, and it’s in walking distance to the Friendly Kitchen and the city welfare and other downtown services.”
So the group refocused back on its current space, which it has been leasing. Groh said the coalition would have to spend about $500,000 to buy the property and build the accessory building out back.
The project will also require more than a handful of variances from the zoning board, owing in part to the fact that the 0.27-acre lot is “barely 65 to 85 feet in width – one of the smallest and narrowest in the district,” according to its application, which will be heard next week.
Among the challenges is that the new structure would come as close as 2 feet to the rear property line and 5 feet from a side property, where 15 feet is required.
But Groh noted that the property already doesn’t conform to the zoning rules, and she said the plans would bring it closer into compliance in some ways. She noted, for instance, that its two dead-end driveways would be linked into a U-shape that would no longer require drivers to reverse into the busy street.
“It’s an enormous improvement to have the driveway go all the way around,” she said.
Because the new building would be so far to the rear of the property, it would be mostly out of sight from the street. Groh said it would be “basically one big room with bathrooms and a small office space for staff and that’s it.”
Groh said it’s likely that fewer than 40 people would need to use the space, but the ultimate design should be able to hold about that many.
“It’s a big project to take on for a small organization, but we just really feel it’s critical,” she said.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)