On Monday, Chapel Hill’s Town Council is poised to remove a key protection in the land use management ordinance. The current ordinance caps homeless shelters at 25 beds per facility. Removing this cap will enable any organization to locate a homeless shelter of any size on any property by rezoning the site during a special use permit process.

Removal of this limit is set to pave the way for construction of a new men’s shelter, the third large at-risk facility to be located around Homestead Park as well as other future shelters.

As Chapel Hill grows from a small town into a larger community it should establish land use management ordinances for the location of homeless shelters and other at-risk facilities to minimize land use conflicts. Planning commissions in similar sized communities such as Winston-Salem have crafted thoughtful and deliberate guidelines that document all facets of shelter siting, shelter approval, and operating limitations as part of responsible growth.

Well-defined ordinances provide equal knowledge for all members in a community and serve to reduce future conflict. This lack of definition has created the current conflict surrounding the removal of the 25-bed limit.

Chapel Hill’s Planning Department has recommend removal of the 25-bed limit to the Town Council. It appears they did not explore other municipalities’ ordinances when considering the change. The newly proposed shelter site would be prohibited in many jurisdictions such as Iredell County due to its close proximity to schools, neighborhoods and other shelters.

The Planning Department has overlooked crime at the current men’s shelter and has not considered crime statistics for neighborhoods near the proposed shelter site. The current men’s shelter has the second most number or arrests, according to data since 2003.

Neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed site such as Parkside and North Forest Hills already have significantly more person and property crimes than any of the other 20 suburban neighborhoods I could identify. There are already more robberies, assaults, involuntary commitments, and trespassing in the square mile around Parkside and North Forest Hills than any other suburban neighborhood in Chapel Hill. This is according to the 53,000 incident and 16,000 arrest reports provided by the Chapel Hill Police Department.

See www.nccrime.us for this and more data about crime in Chapel Hill.

The Planning Department did not consider the magnetic effect of Freedom House, a drug detoxification and rehabilitation center, whose counseling programs are drawing halfway houses to neighborhoods around it. The town government does not track these homes and has no clue where or how many there are.

Nor did the Planning Department consider the more than 200 white flag nights that the IFC discloses where the shelter can greatly exceed normal capacity limits and requires men to leave first thing the next morning. This creates a much larger shelter that is much different than the exclusively transitional facility than has been discussed.

If Chapel Hill’s Town Council votes to remove the 25-bed shelter limit on Monday night it will have made this decision without consideration of all the facts. Please keep the “management” in “land use management.” Send this change back to the drawing board by creating a comprehensive shelter ordinance that considers the impacts of crime, proximity to schools and neighborhoods, proximity to other at-risk facilities, and white flag nights as part of a its guidelines.

Mark Peters has been a resident of Chapel Hill for 25 years. He can be reached at knock@thepeters.org