The Salvation Army of Las Vegas has broken ground on a new chapel to be built on its West Owens Avenue campus, and if all goes to plan it will be finished in spring 2008 and rise from the middle of the Army’s service-oriented complex. “It’s symbolic,” says Major William Raihl. “It’s the center of everything we do.”
At the heart of the Valley’s homeless corridor along Owens Avenue and Main Street, the Salvation Army’s campus consists of 12 buildings, providing services such as meals, emergency beds, vocational training and rehabilitation for mental and physical infirmities to the needy. And the chapel, Raihl says, represents the Christian organization’s end goal.
Yet contrary to a long-standing prejudice among many homeless people who say the Salvation Army requires that they pray or attend church to receive services, the Salvation Army says they take a “housing-first” approach in which their clients’ primary needs are considered before all else.
In fact, the chapel has been the last to go up of the buildings master-planned for construction six years ago, Raihl says. Construction prices skyrocketed back then, and the charity could not afford to raise all of their intended buildings.
“We had to delay the chapel,” says Raihl, who has been at the head of the Salvation Army in Las Vegas since 2002. “We couldn’t cut the dining-room facilities or emergency beds, or things like that.”
In any case, Raihl says, “No one’s forced to go to service.”
Dwayne Boston, a three-year veteran of the Las Vegas streets who recently stayed in the Salvation Army’s dormitories, concurs. “Nah,” he says, “they don’t require you to do nothin’. They good folks over there, good fellas.”
According to Boston’s friend and fellow homeless man Greg Rucks, the problem with the chapel is that the Salvation Army is one of the few charities in the Valley that caters to the legions of homeless people, and so Rucks and his peers wish the Salvation Army would muster as much food and shelter as possible with their available space and money.
“They’re over there building a new chapel while we’re sleeping in the cold,” says Rucks, who admits that on some nights he tries to provoke the cops to arrest him just to escape the unbearable weather.
According to the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition’s 2007 homeless census, there are about 11,500 homeless people in the valley, and only 3,800 of them, or about 33 percent, are in shelters. In total, there are roughly 4,000 available beds. The Salvation Army has fewer than 200.
“All I can tell you is that there are a lot of people without housing out here,” says
Linda Lera-Randle El, an advocate for the homeless for nearly three decades who works outreach in the streets. “Even if we ushered them all to the homeless corridor, there’s just not sufficient room.”
Homeless advocate Gail Sacco says this is the reason homeless people have made several public parks their place of stay. “There’s not enough beds for men to begin with, and even less for the women,” she says.
“The whole system is more dysfunctional than the people they’re supposed to help,” says Lera-Randle El. “And now the state is talking about cutting back from services that are already insufficient. It’s ludicrous!”
And so the critical question becomes: With so many homeless individuals sleeping on the streets of Las Vegas, and with so few shelters and such insufficient resources to cover their primary needs, is it an appropriate time to erect a chapel?
The Salvation Army says it already puts 83 cents for every dollar it raises toward services that provide for clients’ bodily needs—food, socks, cots to sleep in, disaster relief, to name a few—and of the projected $1.7 million the new chapel will cost, says Raihl, $1 million was donated by a local foundation that wishes to remain anonymous.
In any case, the Salvation Army is primarily a faith-based organization whose tradition from the beginning has been, as stated in the SA Soldier’s pledge, “sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, and in His name caring for the needy and disadvantaged.”
This is what Raihl means when he says the chapel in the center of campus is symbolic.
Raihl says the chapel will be about 5,000 square feet, “not overly churchy,” and geared toward prayer and solitude. It will feature a waterfall.
As of now there is an old, small chapel on campus, and volunteer church groups hold services there on a nightly basis.
“In the winter—when it gets cold—you’ll see a lot of us go to those services,” says Ruck. Boston agrees: “They’re good folks, the Salvation Army.”