Soon, there will be more rooms with a mission

The one dormitory measures less than 1,000 square feet and is packed with bunk beds. There’s barely enough room to walk between the rows.

Just around the corner, by the main entrance, is a narrow strip of space with chairs and a TV.

During the day, it’s an area for men staying at the Tri-City Union Gospel Mission in downtown Pasco to sit down for a spell, to take a load off. By night, it’s another sleeping area, filled with mats and blankets.

It’s the same story upstairs in the chapel, where men pray and worship during the day and then sack out on the floor at night.

That’s how it goes at the mission’s men’s facility, where space is sardine-can tight and demand for services is soaring.

Soon, the organization will get some relief. The mission broke ground last week on a new men’s facility.

It’ll mean more beds, and more space for additional staff and support services.

More room to do good.

Construction on the $10.4 million project is expected to take a little more than a year.

Andrew Porter, the mission’s executive director, can’t wait.

“We’ve got to do more than just feed and sleep people. And even if we just do that, there’s not enough space here,” he said. “If we don’t do this — and we’re the best-positioned organization to do this, because we’ve been working with homeless since the ‘50s — what’s the community going to do in 10 years, 20 years?”

‘Bumping into people’

The mission serves men, women and children, providing food, shelter and social service help.

The men’s facility is off North Second Avenue, with a women and children’s facility next door.

The mission sees far more men than women coming in for aid, so replacing the aging men’s facility is the more urgent priority.

When the new men’s facility opens near South Third Avenue and West Columbia Street, the women and children’s services will expand into the existing men’s building.

A new women’s facility is envisioned in Kennewick in the future.

The mission formed in the mid-1950s. The men’s shelter on Second Avenue used to be a Masonic Temple; officials bought it for $25,000 in 1958 to begin housing and helping the area’s homeless.

The building is showing its age. It’s neat and clean inside, but there’s cracked paint, wear and tear on the walls, the floors.

Every nook and cranny is filled with stuff. When the men come in for dinner, chapel and to sleep, every bit of space is filled with people.

“At night if you were walking in here, you’d be bumping into people,” Porter said, standing in the lobby on a recent morning. “It’s pretty cramped.”

The men’s facility has 55 beds, plus room for another 50 men on the floor.

Sometimes even that isn’t enough and men have to be turned away.

The new facility, on the other hand, will mean breathing room.

At about 40,000 square feet, it’ll have 154 beds, including emergency shelter beds and rooms for men who are staying longer term while putting their lives back together. It also will have a day room, a large commercial kitchen and dining room, computer lab, classrooms, conference room, large chapel and offices.

It will mean strengthened rescue, recovery and restoration programs, Porter told the Herald.

The project is being paid for largely by donations, plus about $3.3 million in grants.

‘I’ve learned a lot being here’

It’s been in the works for several years. Porter called it “quite a journey” — one he’s glad to see nearing completion.

He became executive director a few years ago, taking the reins from his father, Don, who’d led the mission since 1998.

At the men’s facility groundbreaking, people from around the Tri-Cities came to celebrate the beginning of construction.

Porter spoke, along with local officials and a former homeless man who turned his life around with the mission’s help. He shared his story to hearty applause.

At the men’s facility on a recent day, Juan Aguilar, 32, shared a similar story, talking about what the mission has done for him.

He’d been jailed for nearly a year on a drug charge, and when he got out, “I was pretty much just couch surfing and staying with the people that put me in the situation that I was in,” he said.

One night, he overdosed on meth and was taken to detox. He should have ended up back behind bars, but a police officer gave him a break — offering him the chance to go to the mission instead, he said.

That was in 2009. He’s been staying at the men’s facility fairly steadily ever since.

“I’ve learned a lot being here,” said Aguilar, who’s now clean, debt-free and working full-time. “I’ve been able to utilize what was offered to me here to better myself.”

He said the new men’s facility is greatly needed.

“We’re severely overcrowded. There were times this winter when we had to turn people away,” he said. “It was heartbreaking to have to put people outside during the cold.”

The new, bigger facility will mean the opportunity for more men like him to take advantage of a second chance, he said.

‘The people coming through the doors’

Construction is expected to start in May.

Porter said he’s grateful to the community for stepping up with donations.

“There have been times when I can hardly even speak because I felt so overwhelmed. People have been so good to us. It’s hard for me to comprehend how people can be so giving,” he said.

The mission has a long history in Pasco, and the new men’s facility means it will be able to continue helping people for years to come, Porter said.

“That’s really what this facility is all about — it’s not about the building,” he said, “It’s really about the people who will be coming through the doors here.”

This story was originally published April 29, 2017 at 2:35 PM with the headline "Soon, there will be more rooms with a mission."