Columbia won’t get $10M from state for homeless campus, still looking at property for project

The city of Columbia won’t get $10 million it hoped for from the state budget this year to support Mayor Daniel Rickenmann’s goal of building a homeless services campus in the city, but Columbia is still looking at property for the project.

The city has been in talks with the state Department of Mental Health to put property on the Crafts-Farrow State Hospital campus under contract for the city to assess if it would be a good fit for a homeless services campus, Rickenmann told The State. But the terms of that contact haven’t been finalized, and some advocates for homeless residents remain skeptical that the plan is even a good idea.

The Crafts-Farrow State Hospital is located on 800 acres near Farrow Road and Interstate 20. It currently houses incarcerated people with mental health needs. The land the city is looking at would be adjacent the the existing hospital.

Rickenman still hopes for the city to build the campus, dubbed the Hope Center, which he said would ideally have hundreds of beds, addiction services, dental and medical care, vital records support and more for the city’s chronically homeless residents, despite not getting state money for the work this year.

Gov. Henry McMaster in January announced he would support giving $10 million of state money to the project, but that money did not make it into the House or Senate budgets this year, the governor’s spokesperson confirmed.

“To meet the growing demand for mental and behavioral health services, I am recommending an allocation of nearly $10 million to the Department of Mental Health for a public-private partnership with the City of Columbia and Richland County to pilot a comprehensive resource center with wraparound services to reduce homelessness in the Columbia area,” McMaster wrote in the January announcement.

The governor’s office in January also said if the pilot program to launch the Hope Center in Columbia can successfully reduce the number of unsheltered homeless people in the state capital and help connect people with work and permanent housing, the state could pay to replicate the project in Greenville or Charleston.

Rickenmann said he had not seen the state budget yet, but if the city doesn’t get state support for the project this year, it will ask again next year. If the city does get the $10 million from the state in future budgets, it would still have to come up with an estimated $20 million to pay for what was initially estimated to be a $30 million project.

Rickenmann has also said in the past he would like to apply for federal grants and tap private partnerships to secure the remaining money.

But the Hope Center project is still in the very early stages of planning and that even though the city is discussing putting the Farrow Road property under contract, that doesn’t necessarily mean the city will buy the site, Rickenmann added.

The city has 280 days for due diligence after it executes a contract for a site, and Rickenmann said the city would take that time to assess if the property is truly the best fit for the project.

“At the end of our due diligence period, if we can get it under contract and we’ve run the gamut of everything, we don’t have to close,” Rickenmann said. “This is the way development works.”

He referenced attempts to develop the Capital City Stadium property on Assembly Street, which was under contract with a developer, but that developer couldn’t close on the site even after 13 contract amendments.

In January, the state Mental Health Commission received an update on the city’s intent to purchase property on the Crafts-Farrow State Hospital campus.

“The City of Columbia is researching two property sites located on the Crafts-Farrow campus,” and the commission’s attorney “anticipates the City will submit a contract proposal in the very near future,” minutes from that January meeting read.

Rickenmann said the city and the Department of Mental Health have not been able to agree on all aspects of that contract, however, and it’s unclear if they will be able to get the site under contract in the near future. It’s also not clear how much the city would spend on the property.

An item reading “Sale of Surplus Property to City of Columbia” appeared on the commission’s agenda last week but then was removed a day before the commission’s meeting.

Rickenmann also plans to host an information session in June that will allow members of the public to hear the city’s plans and to ensure the City Council has buy-in from the whole community before it spends money on the campus.

He stressed that the city is not closing on any property yet.

Community disagreement

Ahead of the state Mental Health Commission’s meeting last week, when the item regarding the sale of surplus property to the city was still on the agenda, a local legal nonprofit that advocates for low-income people put out a call to action on social media.

“Your Voice is needed!!” a post on S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center’s Instagram page began. “The City of Columbia is pressuring the Department of Mental Health to provide property on Farrow Road for the purpose of moving the homeless population away from downtown, and away from the services and assistance they desperately need.”

The post also went into detail on why the nonprofit disapproved of the Farrow Road site, including questions about how would-be residents would travel to and from the campus, and if the site is too isolated from the city’s core.

Appleseed’s policy director, Sue Berkowitz, told The State she wanted to see more of the city’s plan before it went forward with acquiring a property for the campus.

“The location is not a good location,” Berkowitz said. “All we ever hear about is wanting to move homeless people outside of the city, and out on Farrow Road … is pretty far away.”

Berkowitz also said the city has not publicly discussed how the property would be operated, how it would be paid for initially and how it would be maintained into the future.

Rickenmann disagrees with Appleseed’s characterization of the deal with the Department of Mental Health and said that the site is still in the city limits and that if the site does have full wraparound services, then residents wouldn’t need to still travel downtown to access those same services.

“If the homeless community was getting all the services that they needed today, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they’re not,” Rickenmann said.

He’s also talked about striking a balance between having compassion for chronically homeless residents while also protecting business owners’ properties and other downtown residents’ quality of life.

The campus idea is not new, and the city hopes to model its program off of similar ones in Houston, Texas, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Researchers found that Houston’s recently opened Housing Navigation Center, which is part of longer-term efforts to curb homelessness in Houston, contributed to a 17% drop in unsheltered homeless residents during its first year of operating.

But Columbia-area advocates for homeless residents remain skeptical because it’s unclear how the Hope Center project will be paid for and who will operate it.

Rickenmann said the city does not want to own or manage the campus after it’s built, but the city does want to help develop the site and then potentially hand it off to private management or nonprofit social service providers. But he added that there are not formal plans for the project yet.

“We are at the ground level,” he said.