Atlanta Homeless to get new Gateway

After 10 months of renovation the former Atlanta Pretrial Detention Center located at 275 Pryor St. in Downtown Atlanta has been converted to the new $5 million Gateway Center for the homeless. The Gateway Center is designed to serve as a gateway to the continuum of care that helps individuals move out of homelessness and is the centerpiece of the recommendations made by the Regional Commission on Homelessness in its "Blueprint to End Homelessness in Atlanta in Ten Years." The center will offer homeless individuals an opportunity to improve their lives by connecting them to the specific services that encourage self-reliance. Some of the individuals coming to the Gateway Center will be temporarily housed in the Center's 300 bed living space while awaiting access to appropriate housing, admission to programs and access to services at other locations. The Gateway Center has 30 short-term beds for women and children and 270 beds for men, who can stay from one night to several months or, in rare cases of military veterans, as long as two years. The center also will provide food, restrooms, showers, telephones and will house groups offering services such as addiction treatment, job counseling and transportation. The Gateway Center will also include:

• Twenty-three new recuperative beds for homeless people discharged from hospitals;
• Around-the-clock mental health services, funded by a $200,000 grant from the Georgia Department of Human Resources;
• A résumé-writing service provided by the Georgia Department of Labor;
• Forty-five new beds for homeless veterans, paid for by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; as well as
• Many of the service providers who are both on-site and off-site are directly or indirectly HUD funded agencies. They will provide food service, job training, medical services, and counseling for the homeless. They will also provide support for the women and children center, safe haven, recuperative care beds, transitional housing for veterans, pretreatment beds, and beds for referrals from the local criminal justice system.