Sleeping bags and belongings of men living inside the gazebo at Memorial Park in Lansdale are seen on Tuesday, July 23 2024. Photo by Dan Sokil | The Reporter.
This challenge is designed for the county to solve.
Lansdale, like every other Montgomery County local municipality, is struggling to find a comprehensive solution to the challenge of meeting the needs of our unhoused population. We do not have the funds the establish our own shelter nor do we have the resources to sustain services. We need the county to take ownership of this challenge and either properly fund local municipalities to meet their community needs or we need them to establish, and operate, a proper shelter as they did in Norristown prior to its closure.
For the better part of a year myself and other council members have been working with the county to identify vacant locations in Lansdale where a shelter or temporary housing could be established and run for the North Penn Area. We presented multiple locations to the County HHS department with them coming and visiting at least one of them to see if it would meet their standards and expectations. We, Lansdale Borough staff, council members, and I, expected that any building would need redevelopment to meet modern standards. However, we were excited at the prospect of having a potential location that made sense with a seller that was interested in seeing the property used for such a service.
As was often said to me when I originally started this conversation with the county, they simply didn’t have a location or a municipality looking to bring this need to life. Well, Lansdale stepped up. We identified the potential location, we brought the seller to the table, and we were prepared to help the county make it a reality because providing a shelter of some kind was better than letting people live in a park or on the street.
And that is when the goal posts moved.
We were told the desired location for such housing would be, ideally, an unused or existing “dorm style” space and that nothing in Lansdale met that expectation. That the investment in redeveloping the property we were presenting didn’t meet the “floor plan” that they were trying to achieve. To be clear, no such space exists in Montgomery County currently to my knowledge (unless Gwynedd Mercy, Villanova, Montgomery Community, Ursinus, St. Joes, or another institution is looking to sell a dorm).
Frankly, I am deeply disappointed in our county’s approach to this challenge. They closed the only facility we had, were given 5 years notice on that closing, failed to find a viable solution in that time period, and now is squabbling over the right floor plan for a building that doesn’t exist while a viable solution gets dismissed, and people remain without shelter or housing. Leaving local municipalities to try and piece together a solution independent of one another.
This challenge is designed for the county to solve. The people who are unhoused are residents of Montgomery County not Lansdale or Ambler or North Wales or Hatfield or Montgomeryville. They are transient and residents of our larger area. For that reason, the county government, who is responsible for connecting and solving inter-municipal challenges, is responsible for finding a real solution that meets the needs of our communities and organizing it with earnest.
To date, they have failed in glorious fashion with not even a hint of interest in finding something rational that meets the needs of, at least, Lansdale (if not all North Penn) who has come forward and asked for their partnership and participation.
At this point, I feel it is prudent to ask all the North Penn municipalities to join Lansdale Borough in petitioning the Montgomery County Commissioners to either allocate funds to local municipalities directly to allow us to solve the challenge of unhoused persons in our community or commit to investing in a local property and ongoing service organization to meet the needs of our entire area in a comprehensive way. If we do not come together as a wider community the County will continue to ignore our pleas for partnership and wait for us to solve it for them.
If the County Commissioners lack the constitution to commit to decisions on this issue, then they should release the funds, that we know you have, to local municipalities so that we can solve it ourselves. If, on the other hand, the County Commissioners are interested in being a partner to the solution, then I beseech them to start developing an actual plan, that isn’t dependent on a dorm-like building suddenly becoming available, to meet the needs and expectations of our community.
Lansdale wants to find a proper solution to helping those who are unhoused. We want to provide shelter and recovery to those suffering from insecure housing. We understand that not every person is unhoused by choice and that many of us are only one catastrophe away from being in a similar situation. But we cannot do it without the aide and support of the county and we need them to either take a more pragmatic approach going forward or, at a minimum, start to show they have some intent to meet the reasonable needs and expectations of their residents.
(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert. The views expressed are his own and are not representative of North Penn Now or Lansdale Borough.)
