Echo Village, Providence pallet shelters to officially open Wednesday

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — The long-awaited pallet shelter housing in Providence is ready to open.

Echo Village, on Victor St. behind the Foxy Lady, will officially open Wednesday and can house 45 people in an effort to address Rhode Island’s homelessness issue.

The temporary shelter has been a long time coming.

“It’s really a strange place to be to want to mark the celebration of an opening of a shelter,” House of Hope Executive Director Laura Jaworski said. “There’s been a lot of hard work that has gone into this project, to get here to where we are today, I quite honestly never believed that we would make it.”

Each unit is 70 sq. ft. and equipped with a bed, fire suppression systems, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, as well as heating and cooling.

“We are proud that Providence was able to allocate nearly half a million dollars of our ARPA money, separate form the state’s funds, to help ensure that this operation had the funds it needed to open and to run,” Mayor Brett Smiley said.

The state faced multiple setbacks along the way to opening Echo Village like issues with electrical, heating, fire systems, and alarms.

“We’re a few months behind from where we wanted to be but looking forward, you have multiple years of actually helping people,” Governor Dan McKee said.

House of Hope will operate the shelter and will move 10 to 15 people in at a time over the coming weeks, but Jaworski said more work still needs to be done to address and help the state’s homeless community.

“We’ve been working with our street outreach teams to talk to them about what those barriers have been in the shelter system so far, where they have ‘no’ told to them,” Jaworski said. “So, it’s simple things, like, I’m in a couple and we only have one couple shelter here in our state. So the fact that someone can stay with their partner is a very significant part of our work.”

Governor McKee said Echo Village is the latest addition to more than 1,300 shelter beds in Rhode Island.