Since 1977, Mountain View's Casa SAY had provided shelter to homeless youth in a converted home at 509 View Street. It was quietly closed by EHC Lifebuilders in October, despite being the only homeless youth shelter in North County.

But homeless advocates say there's still hope: If the city forks over $135,000 on March 4, the San Jose-based Bill Wilson Center may buy the property and reopen the shelter this year.

"Our intent is to have the support of the community to be able to open Casa SAY back up as a much-needed shelter in North County," said Lisa Breen-Strickland, director of donor relations for the Bill Wilson Center.

EHC Lifebuilders, a nonprofit operating a network of shelters in Silicon Valley, owned Casa SAY for more than a year before closing it to focus on core services during hard budget times. It is hoped that the Bill Wilson Center will have success where Lifebuilders did not.

"While a valuable service to the community, it carried a large deficit," said Lifebuilders CEO Jennifer Loving. "The goal was to transfer it to another nonprofit provider. It was part of an overall agency restructuring we needed to do."

The closure hit homeless youth during their most vulnerable time: the fall, winter and holiday seasons. Former shelter manager Andre Burnett, a well known local youth advocate, told the Voice in 2004 that Casa SAY sees an influx of youth in the fall and around the holidays. The shelter's policy was to never turn a youth away.

At that time, the shelter employed eight rotating staff members. Youth up to the age of 18 got an intense 30-day program focused on family reunification -- with families counseled along with the youth.

In 2006, Burnett told the Voice that the service for homeless youth "seems so simple and basic and real that you'd think people would be doing it, but they're not."

Without the eight-bed shelter, local homeless youth are being directed to the Bill Wilson shelter on the Alameda in San Jose, which housed two Mountain View youth just last week, and seven over the last year, said Breen-Strickland.

"We run our shelter here [in San Jose] and we would run Casa SAY there much like kids living in a family environment," Breen-Strickland said. "The kids all sit around a dining room table. It's very much a home-like environment."

The city says funding for the center is available from various sources, including the "county, federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act funds and TANF funds, which are federal foster care payments that group homes receive," wrote senior planner Adriana Garefalos in an e-mail. "The agency simply didn't have the money to keep it operating," Garefalos said about EHC Lifebuilders.

"It's a matter of knitting together a lot of different sources," said Judy Whittier, director of community resources at the Bill Wilson Center. "We've gotten pretty good at attracting donors -- individual donors and corporate donors. We've been doing this for over 30 years. We've done good work and we've gotten good results and that makes a difference in keeping funding."

Loving claims the eight-bed shelter was not at full capacity when it closed, but the shelter was always at full capacity in the 1990s, said Breen-Strickland, who was program director at Casa SAY before joining the Bill Wilson Center. Loving did not follow up on requests for occupancy rates over the last year, and EHC Lifebuilders has not given that information to the city either.

In 1997, Casa SAY expanded from six beds to eight. In 2004 the shelter held an open house after two years of renovations, because "with 80 to 100 teens traipsing though the house annually, it was time for a makeover," Burnett said at the time. "That's a lot of wear and tear."

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