Even though there's still more than $2 million to raise for the Opportunity Center of the Mid-Peninsula, Don Barr is convinced that the new multiservice facility for the homeless will open within the next two years.
“I have complete faith that those in the Palo Alto, mid-Peninsula area who have benefited personally or through business from the tremendous success of the area will feel that the only thing to do is to support this project with capital contributions,” he says. “It will make this community what people want this community to be.”
Barr, MS ’90, PhD ’93, an associate teaching professor of sociology and human biology and a staff physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, has been advocating for the center for more than five years. He heads the Community Working Group, a network of local nonprofit, government and religious bodies. The Working Group, whose board members include linguistics professor Tom Wasow and LaDoris Cordell, JD ’74, vice provost and special counselor to the University president, has soothed community objections so successfully that the Palo Alto City Council in March unanimously approved the $23.8 million drop-in center and its 88 units of low-income housing.
Earlier opposition to the center, Barr says, “was a classic story of crying NIMBY,” (not in my backyard). “But after seven different public hearings, when they finally called for nays, not a hand went up.”
Construction is expected to start in June on the site at 33 Encina Avenue, a side street between the Town and Country Shopping Center and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Separate units will serve single adults and women with children—an estimated 150 clients per day.
“Anybody who comes in safe and sober is welcome,” Barr says. “They can talk to people, have coffee, take showers, wash clothes and register for medical care, mental health services, job training, money management and housing referral assistance.” Apartments also will be available for 71 single adults and 18 families, for periods of up to 24 months. “But the only way into the housing is through registering with a professional social case worker,” Barr adds. “This is not a shelter.”
The center is expected to provide services that area churches can no longer afford to maintain. And Barr sees several roles for Stanford and its students.
“From a compassionate and from a scholarly perspective, there’s a very real potential for the University to be a leader in terms of understanding more about poverty and homelessness,” he says. “And students in service-learning projects will be able to create information about who these people are, where they come from, why they’re unhoused and what happens to them over time.”
