A Shelter Is Built Green, to Heal Inside and Out
By Megan • Jan 28th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives (archives)Carol Pogash reports for The New York Times:
“The facility, Crossroads, which will accommodate 125 residents, may be the only “green” homeless shelter built from the ground up. It has a solar-paneled roof, hydronic heating, artful but practical ceiling fans, nontoxic paint, windows that can be opened to let in fresh air, and desks and bureaus made from pressed wheat.
It will be a big change for residents, who are used to the old shelter with ratty couches, small and inadequate space heaters, floors and walls pocked and blackened with dirt, broken lighting, electrical cords snaking along floors and a leaky ceiling.
When Wendy Jackson, executive director of the East Oakland Community Project, began searching for financing for the project, she said some people told her, “ ‘They need a good place, but that’s going too far.’ ” People, she said, “didn’t get it.”
Ms. Jackson spent 10 years, seven of them raising money from government and private agencies, replacing the decrepit facility with a state-of-the-art $11 million building. It is about a mile from the old shelter, in one of the poorer parts of town: there are more than 6,000 homeless in Alameda County, nearly half of them in Oakland.“
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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