The nonprofit organization Beacon announced last week that construction on its housing project, the Beacon Center, will begin this December.

The Beacon Center, at 1201 West Third Street, will provide long term housing for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.

Beacon is an organization which provides support for those in poverty, including housing, daytime and overnight shelters, food, financial services and social services.

Beacon’s Executive Director, Forrest Gilmore, said the affordable housing market is continuing to worsen each year, which creates homelessness.

Gilmore said the Beacon Center will provide affordable housing, especially for people with disabilities, and it will also offer an integration of services which he expects will improve the effectiveness of Beacon’s work.

The housing project will be completed in two phases because of financial challenges.

Phase one, beginning in December, will provide 20 Permanent Supportive Housing apartments and two work exchange apartments. Gilmore said it should be completed and occupied in the spring of 2028.

The start of phase two, a daytime shelter and an emergency overnight shelter, will depend on how quickly funds can be raised, Gilmore said.

The day center will have services from HealthNet, Centerstone and downtown resource officers will have an office in the facility.

Gilmore said the project has funding from many different sources. One of them was anticipated to be the New Market Tax Credit, but when it fell through, there was a $4 million loss of funding.

Beacon received $7 million in grant funding from the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, which is for building the apartments. Beacon also has received about $5 million in donations from individual donors, business donors and faith-based community donors. The total cost of the project is $20 million.

The housing units will be all income adjusted, he said. This means if someone doesn’t have income, they will pay zero, and if they do have income, they will pay a modest percentage of their income.

The work exchange apartments will provide housing to those who do work for the property. That could be security or custodial.

“I think anyone who's struggling with homelessness can be greatly struggling with hope and the belief that their lives can be different,” Gilmore said. “Especially if you're chronically homeless and have been homeless a long time, you can start to believe that your life is always going to be that way. So to see human progress, to see the possibility of hope of something better in their lives, will absolutely serve as an inspiration to people who are struggling and help them recognize that there is hope and that there is an opportunity for them.”

People can get access to the housing through coordinated entry, a system that all homeless providers use to assess who is eligible for housing.

The 20 supportive housing units will be for those who are chronically homeless. The work exchange units will not require individuals to be chronically homeless.

To be chronically homeless means an individual has one or more disabilities, Gilmore said. It also means they’ve been homeless for at least a year or they’ve been homeless four times over three years.

“Most of the people that we serve in these programs have several disabilities, sometimes what we call ‘tri-morbidity,’ which means that they have a severe mental illness, they have a severe substance use disorder, and they have a physical disability or chronic illness,” Gilmore said.

Since the housing units will all be income adjusted, funding to maintain the units will come from the federal government, either through Continuum of Care or housing choice vouchers.

Gilmore said this project has been a dream for more than a decade. He said his inspiration came while attending a supportive housing conference and seeing a building that had a day center, an overnight shelter and permanent housing.

“I just loved how it had those stages of progress built into the building and the actual seeing of human growth, right there in the building, and that design has been inspiring ever since,” he said.