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The social services nonprofit Blanchet House is set to open a 75-bed overnight women’s shelter in a vacant bike shop in the Slabtown area of Northwest Portland.
The shelter, Bethanie’s Room, is funded entirely by private donors and not with money from either the city of Portland or Multnomah County.
The neighborhood newspaper NW Examiner first reported the shelter’s new location.
Scott Kerman, executive director of Blanchet House, says his organization hopes to open the shelter in the fall.
“This is one piece of a holistic approach to helping people stabilize, be safe, and connect to resources,” Kerman says.
Blanchet House initially planned to open the shelter at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Southwest Portland, but Kerman says the nonprofit pivoted earlier this year after realizing that “some things about that property were going to make it difficult to do the shelter the way we wanted to do it.”
Blanchet’s board of directors will vote to close on the purchase of the building at its next meeting. Should the nonprofit buy the building, Blanchet House will have to obtain city permits to make a number of improvements to the space.
Kerman says if the shelter can open in the fall as he hopes, it would represent a significant private investment to boost Mayor Keith Wilson’s effort to greatly increase the number of overnight shelter beds in the city.
Blanchet House operates a soup kitchen and a residential program in the Old Town neighborhood for people living on the streets. (It operates a second residential program in Carlton, Ore., on a farm.)
Kerman says his organization is not seeking any funding from the city or the county for the women’s shelter, but is talking to Portland Solutions, the city office tasked with overseeing the city’s shelters, about “making sure the neighborhood isn’t affected in a negative way.”
“That’s so important to us, to do everything in our power, but to lean on the city and its tools to make sure that we can address things that might otherwise upset the neighborhood,” Kerman says.
Blanchet will host an information session at the Triple Lindy pub across the street from the building on Saturday from 10 am to noon.
“We plan to hold a series of these [meetings],” Kerman says, “and this is the first one.”