A Shelter Is Built Green, to Heal Inside and Out

Although he will not be moving from the dilapidated homeless shelter here for another week, Paul McClendon, 55, has his oversized baby-blue garbage bags packed. Sitting on his bed in a winter jacket, he talked Thursday about the new, so-called green shelter with the central heating that he will be moving into.

For a man who has lived on the streets, the prospect of the new facility was hard to fathom.

“It’s going to be one beautiful place,” Mr. McClendon said, smiling. “It has respect for the environment, global warming and saving trees.”

The facility, Crossroads, which will accommodate 125 residents, may be the only “green” homeless shelter built from the ground up. It has a solar-paneled roof, hydronic heating, artful but practical ceiling fans, nontoxic paint, windows that can be opened to let in fresh air, and desks and bureaus made from pressed wheat.

It will be a big change for residents, who are used to the old shelter with ratty couches, small and inadequate space heaters, floors and walls pocked and blackened with dirt, broken lighting, electrical cords snaking along floors and a leaky ceiling.

The residents are waiting for beds to be delivered to Crossroads so that they can move in.

When Wendy Jackson, executive director of the East Oakland Community Project, began searching for financing for the project, she said some people told her, “ ‘They need a good place, but that’s going too far.’ ” People, she said, “didn’t get it.”

But, Ms. Jackson, a social worker who graduated from Bard College and worked at a homeless shelter for young men in the East Village in Manhattan, said, “There’s a larger issue than just sheltering people.” Most of her residents have asthma, allergies, H.I.V. or diabetes, she said, and they need a healthy environment in which to heal.

Ms. Jackson “had this holistic approach,” said David Kears, the director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. Her attitude, he said, was “ ‘The building has to be healthy to make people healthy.’ ”

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