The Faith Mission Mirage

It is a testament to my time here that I’ve witnessed the slow changing of this fair (yet cloudy) city from the windows of Grant Medical Center over the past decade.

From the upper floors and looking directly north in my first few years here I could see the backside of a three story nondescript building that I thought was the Faith Mission shelter for homeless folks in this part of the city.  I would see its transient residents in our ER on a weekly basis and even up on the medical floor if their health had deteriorated to the point of needing actual hospitalization.  

A common scenario would be that they’d somehow managed to lose their bed at the Mission for a variety of reasons to include infraction of rules and so find their way to our ER with no other place to stay and the weather making sleeping outside uncomfortable if not potentially treacherous.  This time-honored strategy has as its linchpin the need to insist that one has “suicidal thoughts”, otherwise, without significant physical symptoms, one would be streeted in short order.

So this connection in my mind to the building in question continued even as they started to tear it down, eventually leaving a large hole in the ground after several months.  And that building-sized hole sat empty (except for a sizable pond that formed on rainy days) for at least a year or two before construction began to fill it up again.

I watched the new structure grow over the course of a two year period that started as an obvious parking garage for the first few stories but then transitioned into rooms rising another several stories.  It looked like a giant hive with its hollow spaces honeycombing the building and workers swarming in and out, up and down, with their bright-colored hard hats.

At some point in this timeframe my daughter began taking ballet classes five or so blocks directly north of Grant.  My wife was the usual chauffeur, but on one occasion I took her to her class and made a wrong turn a block south of the ballet facility.  The road dead-ended in front of a building which had people loitering about on the steps and stoop looking fairly bedraggled and bereft of a place to go.  Beside the entrance in large letters was “Faith Mission.”

So I was off by at least three blocks as to where I’d thought this place was located but correct about it being directly north of Grant.  The new building with its red decorative facade has turned out to be yet another swanky apartment building in this part of the city with several others recently finished or in the process of construction.  It seems rather ironic that a homeless shelter exists in the midst of a housing explosion.  I imagine a significant number of these unfortunate folks will continue to migrate down Grant Avenue when the Mission becomes unavailable to them and into our ER telling stories of wanting to “walk into traffic” but really only needing a place to stay.

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