An emergency winter shelter at the former Park Elementary school will open Dec. 2.
The shelter’s completion is meant to ensure most people in Wichita experiencing homelessness – including those under the influence of drugs or alcohol – will have access to a bed during the winter months.
“It's truly low barrier,” said Sally Stang, the city’s director of housing and community services. “So, they're not having background screenings, things like that that can typically leave people out. There's no requirements for anybody to have income to be able to come in.”
HumanKind Ministries, a local nonprofit, will operate the shelter. Assistant city manager Troy Anderson said the city anticipates receiving a certificate of occupancy in the next several days, after which it will turn the building over to HumanKind.
The shelter can currently sleep 200 people, Stang said. Once construction on a final room is complete, the facility will ultimately be able to hold 260 people, Anderson said Thursday during a media tour. Last year, the winter shelter saw about 200 people on its busiest night.
Men will sleep in the former gymnasium, while women will bunk in former classrooms. Children are not allowed at the shelter. Adults with children will be referred to other shelters in the city.
“No children … because we're not doing background screenings,” Stang said. “It would not be a safe environment.”
The city has lacked sufficient low barrier shelter beds for years. A 2023 plan detailing how Wichita would spend federal COVID dollars found that Wichita needed more than 300 shelter beds for adults and 16 units for families. Meanwhile, homelessness in the city has risen substantially in the past five years, though 2024 saw a small decline.
The challenge intensified last year, when HumanKind announced the building it had historically used for emergency winter shelter was no longer an option.
The city hurried to find another available site last year, eventually locating the winter shelter near 21st and Grove. But the city promised neighbors it would not return this year.
Instead, the city purchased the former Park Elementary School at 10th and Main for $1 in September.
Since then, the city put $2.25 million dollars worth of renovations into the former school, including adding an ADA accessible shower, portable bathrooms outside and a fire suppression system. The city paid for the renovations using COVID relief funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
The shelter also has a locked room where individuals can store their belongings. The facility does not have a kennel for dogs and cats. Stang said service providers offer some options for people with pets.
“United Way has a program for people to be able to kennel their pets if they're seeking shelter services,” Stang said. “Yeah, there was not time enough to build kennels.”
The emergency shelter’s completion is also the first step toward the city’s multi-agency center, a multimillion dollar project that’s been in discussion since 2022. In addition to the emergency winter shelter, the city plans to build a noncongregate shelter – private rooms – and some affordable housing units on-site at Park Elementary school.
The city also hopes to ultimately create a center in the building with different social services available such as case management.
“Our goal is to try and achieve functional net zero when it comes to homelessness,” Anderson said. “That means we have more people coming out of homelessness than we do having going into homelessness.”
