Rent increase forcing homeless clinic to close

Monday, Jan. 10, 2005 | 11:04 a.m.

A free clinic for the homeless -- one of only two in the Las Vegas Valley -- will be forced to shut its doors in three weeks because Catholic Charities, owner of the downtown campus where the clinic is located, asked for a 70 percent increase in rent, a health care official said.

"Our program budget won't support that kind of increase," said Steven C. Hansen, chief executive officer for Nevada Health Centers Inc., which runs the Healthcare for the Homeless clinic.

"More money toward rent means less (to spend) toward care," he said.

The clinic -- one of two in Las Vegas that Hansen's organization runs -- served an average of 325 people monthly during its busiest times in the nearly four years it has been on the Catholic Charities site.

The rent increase that Catholic Charities announced to Hansen in mid-December was the second in two years. In October 2003, the rent went from $500 a month to $1,350. From Jan. 1 on it would have been $2,250.

Catholic Charities spokeswoman Sharon Mann said, "We did raise the rent and have every year. We have been subsidizing the utilities and can no longer afford to do so."

Hansen said he asked Catholic Charities for permission to stay at the site until Jan. 31, at which point he said the clinic for the homeless will be homeless itself, perhaps for as long as three months while another site is sought.

This would mean up to 1,000 homeless people "either would have to go without or go to the other clinic," Hansen said. The Catholic Charities campus, at Las Vegas Boulevard and Owens Avenue, is a little less than a mile and a half from the organization's other clinic at Bonanza Road and F Street.

Hansen said he didn't know if the second clinic could handle the entire patient caseload from the Catholic Charities clinic in addition to the people it is already serving.

Mann said Catholic Charities would provide transportation to the other clinic or to University Medical Center "for as long as it's needed."

As for whether the second clinic could treat the additional patients, she said, "I don't have anything to say about that."

Hansen said the latest rent increase caught him by surprise. His organization, which has about $500,000 in federal funds to run the homeless clinic, opened at the downtown campus in June 2000.

"I assumed going into the relationship (with Catholic Charities) that it was going to be one of many decades," Hansen said.

Since then, however, changes in management at Catholic Charities brought with them a change in focus, the official said.

Those changes included Monsignor Patrick Leary becoming executive director in February 2003.

In July 2004, Catholic Charities' chaplain, Rev. John McShane, was transferred out of the organization after he criticized it for being too "business-oriented."

Mann said the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, otherwise known as W.I.C., would become a program of Cathlic Charities in February.

She said a needs assessment study was done by the state to determine that the W.I.C program was needed in the downtown area, and that the federal program would be able to pay the rent.

Hansen said he understood the organization's need to focus on the bottom line.

"I respect their need for more revenue," he said. "We're just not the ones who are going to be able to pay it."