The Samaritan House homeless shelter, located in a former tuberculosis cure cottage at 37 River St., welcomed its first residents this week after receiving a Certificate of Occupancy from the village on Tuesday. It was the final step in what’s been a more-than-six-year campaign, led by the Ecumenical Council of Saranac Lake, to create a homeless shelter in the village.

“I’m feeling pretty good about it,” said Rich Loeber, president of the Ecumenical Council, a coalition of area churches. “We still have more to do. There’s still things in the house that need some attention, and we’re starting work on long-term financial plan so we can make sure it not only gets open but stays open.”

After considering several locations, the Ecumenical Council picked what was then called Resurrection House as the site of its transitional housing center in August 2015. It’s leasing the eight-bedroom home from the Children of the Resurrection, a St. Bernard’s Church prayer group.

Samaritan House is managed by Lakeside House, a Kiwassa Road community residence for adults with mental illness. The 3,500-square-foot shelter can temporarily house up to eight people in single bedrooms: two on the first floor and six on the second. A first-floor suite will be used as an office for an on-site caseworker.

Located at 37 River St., Saranac Lake, Samaritan House provides eight bedrooms of transitional housing. (Enterprise photo — Chris Knight)

Not long after the Ecumenical Council settled on the River Street location, however, the project stalled because there was no language in the village land-use code that allowed for transitional housing. After a lengthy debate, the village Board of Trustees ultimately approved a pair of zoning amendments for the project, which received village Planning Board approval in August of last year.

Since then, more than 200 volunteers have pitched in to help renovate the house.

“We went to all of churches in Saranac Lake and in the area, and asked if each church would like to adopt a room to get it ready for use,” Loeber said. “We’ve had, over the course of the project, an estimated 1,200 hours of volunteer work to get the house ready.

“Every surface in the house has been scraped and painted. We had a lot of electrical upgrades, a lot of plumbing work done. We had security cameras installed. We had to put in all new smoke detectors. We had two stairwells that needed to be completely rebuilt. It’s been a real community effort.”

In addition to church and civic groups, numerous local businesses donated labor and materials to the renovation, Loeber added.

“We have a lot of thank-you notes to send out,” said Lakeside House Executive Director Sally Walrath. “I’m pretty elated and extremely impressed at the community coming together around this thing. If you had seen the place when we first looked at it compared to what it looks like today, it’s night and day.”

The shelter’s first residents, a man and a woman, moved in Wednesday. Walrath said more people will likely follow, as there remains a strong need for a service like this in the area.

In prior conversations about the project with the Enterprise, Walrath described this area’s homelessness problem as something that isn’t obvious or visible, as in places like New York City.

“There’s not people sleeping on the grates out in the street,” Walrath said in January of last year. “In the summertime, there are a lot of people sleeping in tents or lean-tos just outside the village or in the woods. They spend their summer that way; then in winter (they go) couch to couch. We’ve had a few people living in vehicles, parked at different boat launch sites.”

Walrath said many people rely on the kindness of a relative or a neighbor for housing, but sometimes those arrangements fall apart. That’s where Samaritan House will help, she said.

“I think the more people started to think of this as a reality, the more it became obvious how quickly this will be filled and how often we will be getting referrals,” she said.

Most referrals to Samaritan House will likely come from the Essex and Franklin County social service departments, along with local clergy. People can stay for up to four months, although Walrath said there’s some flexibility to that guideline.

She stressed that this won’t be a homeless shelter in the way most people think of it.

“When I hear the word ‘homeless shelter’ I think of what you see on TV: a place with a bunch of bunks, people coming in and sleeping, then getting up and leaving for the day,” Walrath said. “Long lines outside, and all the stuff that goes with that, with people on the edge where you worry about violence and drug use.

“Really what we’ve built is more like a transition from that, from being unsheltered, to put someone into a permanent place to stay.”

Lakeside House caseworker Ernest Hough will manage the shelter and work with its residents to help them find more permanent shelter and direct them to any services they need.

Walrath described the welcoming of the shelter’s first residents this week as a “soft opening.” There are plans for a public open house sometime soon, she said.