Long-awaited Georgetown pallet shelter village welcomes first residents

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The 64-square-foot houses are intended to provide transitional housing for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Georgetown.
Paul Kiefer

Residents began moving into Georgetown’s new pallet shelter village Monday, setting in motion an experiment in transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness in Sussex County.

The village was originally intended to open last fall, but a series of logistical challenges pushed the move-in date to January.

A majority of the village’s more than 40 residents come from an encampment a half-mile down the railroad tracks from the village; many have been neighbors for months or years.

One woman, who asked to be called Jackie, says the village will help keep the community that formed in the nearby encampment partially intact. "A lot of us became a family back there," she said.

Encampment residents have worked for weeks to prepare for the village's opening. Jackie, for instance, sanded down sharp edges in the prefabricated 64-square-foot houses; on the other side of the village, her partner helped build a foundation for the village's soon-to-be community center.

Jackie also took part in a weeks-long effort to clear abandoned tents and other garbage from the several acres of forest that has housed the encampment since 2018.  She adds that she will still need to pack her own tent before moving into the village later this week. "By the time I finished cleaning up other people's stuff, I was just too tired to get my own place cleaned up," she said.

Not every resident of the encampment will move into the pallet shelter village this week. Some opted not to apply for houses in the village, while others — namely a small group of men on the sex offender registry — aren't eligible to live in the village. Of the roughly 70 people living in the encampment this winter, about two dozen will remain unsheltered for the foreseeable future.

But the groups responsible for the village's creation — the Georgetown-based nonprofit Springboard Collaborative, in partnership with First State Community Action Agency — hope that the village will provide residents enough stability to move on to permanent housing, eventually opening spaces for new residents from nearby encampments.

Aside from offering a more secure place to sleep, the village will also act as a service hub, with plans underway to connect residents to behavioral health counseling and treatment for substance use disorders as needed.

Georgetown Mayor Bill West also made an appearance at the village on Monday, doubling as a booster for the project and a carpenter.

West previously invited his counterparts from Milford, Seaford and elsewhere in Sussex County to tour the site of the village, which he hopes will become a model for Delaware towns adapting to the statewide increase in unsheltered homelessness.

He says that Georgetown's pallet shelter project will likely benefit from the well-established relationships between the village's leadership and residents, and he advised other towns and cities to build similar relationships with their unhoused residents as a starting point for their own responses to the homelessness crisis.

"Any town that has a population like this needs to find out who they are first," he said. "And then start making a list of what resources you need. A lot of these people don’t have a license, don’t have IDs, don’t have a birth certificate."

West adds he is searching for opportunities to develop additional affordable housing units in Georgetown — a necessity if the village is to provide transitional housing as intended.

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Paul Kiefer comes to Delaware from Seattle, where he covered policing, prisons and public safety for the local news site PubliCola.