CHAPEL HILL -- Mayor Kevin Foy strongly defended a proposal to move the men's homeless shelter to the county's Homestead Road campus Friday, telling seniors who oppose the plan that they must reflect on their individual responsibility to the community's needy.

"Homelessness is part of an economic, social condition that we as a community struggle with. It's a blight on all of us. The way that we respond to this issue tells us who we are as a people, as a community. I just think we need to confront that," Foy told about 100 people gathered for a community meeting on the shelter at the new Robert and Pearl Seymour Center. "This is our moral challenge."

Foy and the Inter-Faith Council have been advocating for the county to provide a space for a men's shelter for the homeless -- now at the corner of West Rosemary and Columbia streets -- on the county's Homestead Road campus, home to the IFC's women and children's shelter, but also home to the new senior center and other county services.

Some seniors -- including members of the Orange County Advisory Board on Aging and Friends of the Seymour Center -- strongly oppose that. Jan Wassel, vice chairwoman of the aging board and director of the gerontology graduate program at UNC-Greensboro, cited rates of mental illness and substance abuse that are higher among the homeless than in the general population.

"We especially do not believe that the proposed men's residential facility should be placed near three vulnerable populations -- women, children and our seniors," Wassel said.

She said whether the dangers are real or perceived, having the men's shelter on the same campus as the senior center "will obstruct the perception of the center as a safe place for seniors" and discourage seniors from using it.

Lee Pavao, president of the Friends of the Seymour Center and a former Chapel Hill Town Council member, said putting the men's shelter on the Homestead Road campus would be "terribly insensitive" to seniors who had waited 17 years for a permanent center to be built in Chapel Hill.

"Don't do it," he said. "Would you put the men's shelter next to a school or the public library?"

Chris Moran, executive director of the IFC, said the men's shelter would be modeled after Project HomeStart, a shelter for women and children that is already on the property. The roughly 50 men who would be housed there would take an active role in running the facility and deciding who gets to stay there. Plans for the building call for the men to move from large dorm rooms to quad rooms to double rooms as they transition back into society.

"What we want to do is to have a good place in the community where homeless men can call it home and it can have an impact on their lives," Moran said.

The location would give the men access to social services and health department services also located on the county campus. It is also on the free bus line, and its location near the women's shelter would allow for more efficient use of staff, Moran said.

He said the facility would not have a community kitchen that serves non-residents -- as the downtown men's shelter has -- and told the audience that shelter residents are not the same people who harass them downtown.

"I want to emphasize this: The people who are on the streets are not the people who are going to be here," he said. "The folks that panhandle downtown are not the people that we're talking about"

Abdul Sun, 58, told the group that he'd been living in the men's shelter for six months. He said panhandlers who may eat at the shelter's community kitchen -- but do not live there -- cause the shelter's residents to be stigmatized.

"We don't have no intentions of harming you," he said. "You're the least of our worries. What we're trying to do is get jobs. What we're trying to do is get back to our families. What we're trying to do is get services so we can become viable entities in society."

The shelter's current home is a former town office building. The shelter moved there 17 years ago, a placement that was supposed to be temporary. Over the past two years, the IFC has actively sought a new location for the shelter, but each time it found a site it met strong opposition from neighbors.

"The issue of the men's shelter in this community appears to be intractable," Foy said. "And I think we need to reflect on why that is."

The possibility of placing the men's shelter on Homestead Road came out of a meeting of the Assembly of Governments -- which includes the county board and the town governing bodies.

Of the remaining sites at the Homestead Road campus, one is slated as courtroom space. The Orange County Board of Commissioners has asked the Town of Chapel Hill whether it would provide courtroom space in the post office building on East Franklin Street if the commissioners slate the Homestead land for a shelter. Though Foy has supported that proposal, the town council has not yet formally responded to the commissioners.

Tim Heninger, a Carol Woods resident, rose from the audience to tell the group that he had volunteered for the IFC for 15 years.

"I agree that women, children and the elderly are a vulnerable population," he said. "I can't imagine a more vulnerable population than the homeless. They have no political voice, they depend upon charity and good will."

But many in the audience were skeptical.

Chapel Hill resident Victor Jimenez wondered whether the town was really looking at all options for a new shelter, including talking to the university about possible sites on some of its land.

Foy said that's the wrong question.

"What you just said is, 'Can't they help you?'" Foy said. "My question is, what are you doing about this? ... You need to all come to a conclusion about how best we help those who are the least fortunate among us."

"Every place that the IFC has ever looked at as a shelter, people have said, 'We support the shelter, but there's a better place for it.'"