Day center close to securing new location in downtown Rochester

Rochester’s daytime homeless shelter plans to buy a building downtown and relocate from its current location at the Silver Lake fire station.

The Landing MN announced the news Wednesday morning to its community partners. The new center will be at 426 Third Avenue SE, in the former National Pawn Shop building.

Dan Fifield, the organization’s co-founder, described it as a multi-million dollar expansion, which will help them deliver a broader array of services.

The Landing’s current lease with the city for the Silver Lake site is up at the end of April, and Fifield said he hopes there will be no interruption of services to clients between the two locations.

While the space between the two facilities is comparable at 5,000 square feet, the new day center will offer far more in the way of storage area.

“You can appreciate that people who are homeless don’t have a place to store their items,” Fifield said. “So, they can drag it all over town or secure it at our location.”

Fifield started The Landing with his wife, Holly, as a street outreach unit from the back of a Ford Edge in November of 2018. He had totes of clothing and essential items ready to hand out to the homeless community in Rochester. He even gave up his ER nurse job to pursue what he said was “a big leap of faith, with what we thought God wanted us to do.”

“We walked away from half of our income and founded The Landing, and it’s been going strong ever since,” he said. “We realized there are a lot of resources in Rochester but it’s hard to connect somebody who doesn’t understand how to get access to those resources. We knew we’d have to build good relationships with people experiencing homelessness. Because they hadn’t been looked at before. They’d been looked down on and cast aside. They needed to be able to trust somebody, and our goal was to be that somebody to trust.”

In February of 2020, Fifield expanded from street outreach to a mobile outreach truck, which he still operates today. The Landing has tried to buy a building before, but struck out. Recently they tried relocating to the former Whiskey Bone’s building in north Rochester, but the proposal was met with scrutiny from neighbors as well as city officials, who were concerned the space would be too disconnected from other social services.

Currently, The Landing employs 13 people part-time and has hundreds more volunteers. In 2021, The Landing reported working with 900 unique individuals, which encompassed 22,000 visits. Fifield said it’s an arduous job for staff, and one that’s a challenge to do full time. 

“It gets very emotional,” he explained. “In order to do this you have to have a heart and you have to want to help people. It’s a struggle for our staff. It’s a struggle for me to not really get involved with some of our clients because they just need that.”

On March 10, The Landing will host a forum at Christ United Methodist Church, 400 Fifth Avenue SW, at 6:30 p.m. The event will feature a guest speaker who has experienced homelessness, and a panel discussion with The Landing’s board members and others. The event is open to the public and will be hosted virtually on Zoom, as well.

“The individuals we work with are great people who suffer from a variety of different issues, from alcohol dependency to substance abuse disorder to mental health issues, severe trauma, PTSD, social anxiety disorders,” Fifield said in an interview. “On top of that we have pre-existing criminal histories that make it difficult to find housing.

“We want to give them a space where they feel safe and appreciated and, quite honestly, loved. We make it our goal as an organization to show unconditional love and grace to these folks because they don’t get it otherwise. Then we start having conversations about ‘Where do you want to go from here? Housing? Treatment?’ Whatever that is, or just a place to go for the night.”

Fifield predicts the new location downtown will “exceed 2 million dollars,” though he wasn’t willing to put an exact price tag on the cost of the project.

Fifield said his hope is the new center will help The Landing continue to “grow and expand, and to allow us to care for a population that needs the services that we provide and the ones we want to provide.”

Renee Berg is a longtime local freelance writer. Away from work, she enjoys baking, watching movies, and hibernating at coffee shops.