It was almost lost amid the blaze of attention focused on the primary elections, but something else of enormous importance to this community happened last week.

On Monday, officials announced that UNC and the Town of Chapel Hill had formed a partnership to move the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service's shelter for homeless men to a new long-term home. The shelter will move from its current location, in the old municipal building on the corner of Rosemary and North Columbia streets, to a site off Homestead Road, next to United Church of Chapel Hill.

The announcement comes as very welcome news. It has been obvious for years that the shelter must find a new home. The Rosemary Street building was never meant to be a residential facility (except for, um, involuntary residence; it used to house the Chapel Hill jail), and the town has made clear that it intends to reclaim it for municipal purposes in the not-too-distant future.

Every previous proposed site for a new shelter met with opposition, often vehement opposition. A shelter for homeless men is classic NIMBY bait. Let's face it, not many people are crazy about the idea of a shelter going up next door.

United Church, to its credit and true to its calling, is an exception. The church was among the partners that helped IFC establish the shelter in the first place, back in the early 1960s; the shelter's first incarnation, in fact, was in the church's fellowship hall (the church at that time was on Cameron Avenue). The Rev. Richard Edens welcomed the new plan, calling it "a sign of hope and goodness in this community."

The proposal calls for a new residential building with significantly more capacity than the current one, along with programs to provide access to job training, financial planning, health care and other services.

The Community Kitchen, which serves free meals daily to anyone who walks in, will not make the move to Homestead Road. IFC intends to keep it somewhere in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro downtown area, although it hasn't yet been determined exactly where. IFC has long wanted to combine its Food Pantry and Community Kitchen operations under one roof, and the shelter move will provide that opportunity. The food operations need to remain downtown to provide easy access for the many people who use them every year.

All the parties involved -- the town, IFC and UNC -- deserve credit. Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy, especially, has been bold in taking on the thorny problem of the shelter and refusing to let go of it until a solution was found. The university is buying the 13-acre tract from Duke Energy and will rent 1.5 acres of it to the town for IFC's shelter, for $1 a year.

There will no doubt be some complaints. There always are. Some will argue that the site still is too close to other people. Others, paradoxically, will argue that it is too remote to allow its residents easy access.

Relative to the advantages the site and partnership offer, those are quibbles. No site is going to please everyone. The only perfect place for a shelter for the homeless is nowhere; in a perfect world there would be no need for one.

Seeing as how we haven't quite reached perfection yet, we'll settle for pretty good.