Despite a tight timeline, doubts from community members and a request from Charlottesville’s Congressional representative to delay, the city says it is on track to open an emergency low-barrier homeless shelter at 2000 Holiday Drive on Tuesday, Sept. 1.
On July 17, the city announced that it would clear an encampment along the Charlottesville bank of the Rivanna River at Pantops on Sept. 1. The plan, the city said at the time, was to have an emergency low-barrier shelter ready for the dozens of people displaced from the encampment.
For the past few weeks, as the city has hustled to get a shelter operator in place, officials have offered up few details about who will run the shelter and how. That has frustrated community members living at the encampment, who are worried about going to a shelter they know very little about, run by people they are not familiar with and who are not familiar with them…