In 1984 there was an evident need in Dayton for emergency shelter. SVdP sometimes allowed men to stay the night in our downtown thrift store during extreme weather. Led by Tony Staub and Jim Butler, we came up with the idea of a “hotel” for homeless men.
The City of Dayton formed a committee, and in 1985 a former fire station at 212 W. Fifth Street was designated. With many Dayton residents against the project, this news organization quoted City Commissioner Pat Roach: “If we don’t have the St. Vincent de Paul Society doing this, we’ll end up having to do it ourselves.”
On December 15, 1985, SVdP began its focused ministry of emergency shelter for men, which we expanded to include women and children. That first year we sheltered an average of 60 people per night, costing $300,000 for the year, with only 1% government and 99% private funding.
Within a few years, the shelter was already operating at or near capacity. In July 2005, we closed the Fifth Street shelter and opened the Midtown Apple Street shelter, a former furniture warehouse for Elder Beerman department stores. In December 2009, pressure from Midtown neighbors led us to open the Gettysburg Shelter for Men in the long-shuttered City of Dayton prison (euphemistically known as The Workhouse). It sits on Prison Road, surrounded by prisons, near the Waste Management Landfill and the City wastewater treatment plant – not a place any person can reasonably expect to heal, recover, or feel valued as a human being.
Recently, I announced that SVdP will cease operating the Gettysburg Shelter on June 30, 2025. Though the decision was driven by the reality that we can no longer afford it, the hard truth is that our homeless men deserve a better environment of care.
In forty years, our sheltered homeless population has increased nearly 1,000% and our costs to serve them have increased over 2,200%, even though the overall population of Montgomery County has decreased over that time.
The good news is that for the past fifteen years we have always had “room at the inn” for our homeless brothers and sisters; we have managed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter everyone from frigid wind and searing heat. The bad news is that all these years we have been alleviating symptoms of an ever-growing problem without addressing its primary causes: separation, division, resentment, bitterness, unforgiveness, selfishness. Yes, the choices that you and I make in pursuit of our own pleasure and individual desires are the same choices others struggle to manage to the point of homelessness.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
What can you and I do? We need to love one another at some basic level. A level that shows dignity for each other, respect for humanity as a social enterprise, and honor for the social fabric that makes us human and not objects of each other’s desires. Listen to a chronically homeless person, and you will hear a story of unwillingness or inability to love relatives and friends through suffering, theirs and ours. Show up. Love your family members. Accompany them through their sufferings, and yours. Reconcile. Kindly acknowledge a stranger. Join 1,000 other Daytonians who volunteer with us to love your homeless neighbors. Love one another.
Michael Vanderburgh is the executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Dayton.