Feb. 2--Interviews with City Council and mayoral candidates for the March elections confirm a still common belief -- one held by many Chattanoogans -- that the city of Chattanooga, under Mayor Ron Littlefield's guidance, is engaged in building or planning a "homeless complex" on the old Farmer's Market site, which the mayor purchased not long after he took office for $775,000.

Yet there is no such plan. And in reality, it's hard to foresee any homeless-related project occurring on that site with city funding for the simple reason that, despite his continuing talk about helping the homeless, Mayor Littlefield has never initiated a plan to spend any city funds on any specific homeless-related projects on the Farmer's Market site.

The only homeless-related building now planned or underway on the 9-acre site is the Interfaith Homeless Network's new Day Center, which is funded entirely by private donations and foundation gifts.

One day-only service on site

The IHN center, now under construction, will provide a safe day-only shelter for the homeless families -- usually from 8 to 12 families at a time -- for whom the IHN arranges night shelter on a rotating basis in the roughly 45 area churches and synagogues that participate in the program.

The IHN congregations share the burden of housing these homeless families in their own places of worship while they help the families work their way out of homelessness. The new, 5,000 square-foot IHN day center will provide a common room and smaller rooms for a laundry, counseling services and the small IHN staff. These are all wonderful services, but no homeless people will be sleeping there overnight.

In fact, the two large night shelters that Mayor Littlefield earlier said he envisioned putting facilities at the Farmer's Market site have no plans to do so.

Night shelters go elsewhere

The Chattanooga Rescue Mission rejected the idea. It recently bought the old Senter School building near 23rd Street and Holtzclaw to house its relocated shelter.

The Union Gospel Mission, long located at the intersection of Main and Market Streets, sold its building for redevelopment to RiverCity in 2007 and moved out last summer. After a brief stint at the then-vacant former Senter School building on Holtzclaw, it has been homeless itself. The Salvation Army on McCallie Avenue has allowed it to use some space on a temporary basis, but the mission's director has said the former shelter doesn't have enough money to build or buy a new building.

Mayor Littlefield, who encouraged donors to help the IHN raise money for its new facility, has not done the same for the Union Gospel Mission. Mr. Littlefield told this page last week that he would like to see the Salvation Army move to the Farmer's Market site, but he said he has not offered it any city money to facilitate such a move.

In addition, the mayor's office has failed for more than a year to act on a request from the Community Kitchen to use some of the vacant buildings on the Farmer's Market site -- directly across 11th Street from the Kitchen's block-long multi-purpose facility -- for its recycling/work training program and its thrift store operations. The Kitchen needed an affordable long-term lease contract before it could reasonably invest in remodeling any Farmer's Market buildings for those services, but its requests went unanswered. Mr. Littlefield said last week he was not aware of a pending request.

After getting no response, the Kitchen last year began a $1.5 million capital campaign to raise money to expand its current buildings. The new building, now almost complete, will house: respite care rooms for ill and hospital-discharged homeless people; a night shelter for employed homeless workers; a day center with showers, mail and phone service for the homeless; and a modified thrift store. It had to pass up an opportunity last summer to participate in an income-producing/worker-training recycling business with a private entrepreneur for lack of a contract with the city for new space.

Kitchen the unsung mainstay

In addition to serving three meals daily, 365 days a year, to the community's homeless and impoverished, the Kitchen also houses an array of homeless services of the sort that many people wrongly believe are housed, or are to be housed, in the ballyhooed but nonexistent "homeless complex" on the Farmer's Market site. The Kitchen's other services include a health clinic, counseling, employment aid, foot care, learning-center apartments for families, donations of clothing, winter coats and shoes, and a laundry.

Taken together, the Kitchen's new and existing services provide nearly everything the mayor's often-touted "homeless complex" might have provided on the Farmer's Market site, save one: An actual night shelter for homeless individuals. But with the two major night shelters -- the Chattanooga Rescue Mission and the Union Gospel Mission -- out of the picture, a night shelter is not on the horizon for the Farmer's Market site, nor are any public housing apartments for the homeless.

The mayor's failed vision

This confirms what has long been obvious: that Mayor Littlefield bought the long-available Farmer's Market site without a predetermined plan for homeless services, and without any subsequent attempt to develop a workable plan or community consensus to serve the homeless on the site -- a polluted and restricted-use site at that.

The failure of the idea owes largely to the mayor's lack of planning, leadership and follow-through. That's a shame, both for the city and, mostly, the misunderstood homeless population. Fully a quarter of the homeless are children; most homeless adults are homeless due to bankruptcies, illness, job loss and other extenuating circumstances. Barely 10 percent are chronically homeless, and most them have mental or substance abuse issues that require a longer-term solution.

But for all the need, and all the talk, there is no "homeless complex" plan for the Farmer's Market site. That unstudied, ill-fated purchase took much money, and raised needless controversy, for a cause that would have been better served by more wisely planned investments in genuine care-giving and existing service providers.

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