“Any kind of abuse you can think
of, that’s what happened to me,” she said, tenderly holding a kitten she had just found. Nyer Urness House is based
on the “housing fi rst” concept of addressing homelessness. Clients fi rst receive housing and then are provided services, the idea being that stable housing allows those services to take hold. For Jordan, that miracle is hap-
pening. With its on-site clinic, she is now able to control her diabetes, a fi rst. With its case managers, she’s taking small steps away from the mental and emotional edge. “I like little, tiny changes,” said
the house’s program manager, Kim Sather (no relation to Demar Sather), who’s known Jordan for two decades. Also living at the house are veter-
ans whose service-related disability benefi ts are too high for them to qualify for most other subsidized housing and the services they need, like on-site help for substance abuse. Nyer Urness House is in Bal-
lard, a neighborhood not far from Pioneer Square that once was home to Norwegian fi shing families. Today the area is shiſt ing toward high-priced condos. A quarter of residents are Ballard’s own homeless who’ve been caught in the middle. T e Urness house is only the lat-
est project for Compass Housing, an alliance built on member Lutheran churches with a $13 million budget and 35 homeless facilities in greater Seattle. Dekko Place opened in 2012 with 50 units of aff ordable hous- ing. T e Community Resource and Wellness Center will open in 2014, along with Compass on Dexter, a 74-unit apartment building for low- income households. Much of the Compass Housing
Alliance’s dizzying pace of growth has been due to Rick Friedhoff , a
January 2014 39
real-estate lawyer and one-time member of Urness’ previous congre- gation. Friedhoff , who retired as the alliance’s executive director in 2012, said the organization has been able to acquire building sites mostly through partnerships with ELCA congregations. It has drawn from both faith and governmental funds. Mergers that included one with
the Lutheran Alliance to Create Housing helped with growth, as did an ambitious strategic plan and many passionate staff leaders.
No opting in or out During World War II, Urness found himself in a malfunctioning sub- marine at the bottom of the sea. Somehow he survived. “I think that really impacted
him,” said Louise Urness, his widow. Before the Compass Center, he was pastor of Seattle’s Immanuel
Lutheran Church, where he began a basement homeless shelter that continues today. On this day Louise Urness qui-
etly tends her husband’s niche in the columbarium at Bethany Lutheran Church of Bainbridge Island, Wash., where the couple worshiped for years, and where $35,000 was raised to build Nyer Urness House. Watching from inside is her
pastor, Paul Stumme-Diers, once an intern at Immanuel. “Nyer understood that Christian hospital- ity to the homeless is not so much something we opt in or out of, [but] normative,” he said.
Author bio: Pritchett is a retired western Washington newspaper reporter.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52