In Chinatown, plans for a women’s homeless shelter rise from the ashes.

Salinas’ Chinatown, which has long been the county’s mecca for the homeless, could use a few miracles. In March, in the most unexpected way, it got one.

On the evening of March 18, a three-alarm fire tore through a vacant brick building at 45 Soledad St., causing much of the building to collapse onto itself. Just next door with an adjoining wall is Victory Mission, a homeless shelter and transitional recovery program founded in 1959 on the principles of Christianity. It survived the fire unscathed.

Sitting in his Chinatown office April 3, Victory Mission Executive Director Ken Cusson marvels that the mission’s building escaped the fire, and he doesn’t think it was by chance.

“This has been in God’s hands from the very beginning,” Cusson says. “The building’s burning down next door to us, and a wind comes and blows the flames away from the mission.

“We thought it was gone. We could see those flames coming 10 feet over that roof – we’re sharing a wall,” he continues. “But we weren’t even touched, no smoke damage, no water damage, you couldn’t even smell it in here when you came in on Sunday.”

That miracle helped lead to another: Nav Maharaj, the agent for the building’s owner, Rann LLC, approached Cusson about the possibility of Victory Mission purchasing the Rann property, which the company bought in 2014 for $120,000. City fire officials say the building was not covered by insurance, and damage is estimated at $325,000.

Maharaj did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but according to Cusson, they inked a deal April 1 for Victory to purchase the property for $60,000, and it is now in escrow.

Victory plans to build an emergency shelter for women there, which would fill a dire need: Overnight services for area homeless women are scarce.

When Victory was founded in 1959, homelessness was almost entirely a male-only issue, but that has since changed dramatically.

“The largest demographic group of growing homeless is women over 65 years of age,” Cusson says. “When you realize that, it’s horrible.”

Victory’s plan – the details of which still need to be hammered out – is to build a multi-story building where different floors would house a shelter for women and women with children, a women’s recovery program and a shelter for men. The existing men’s shelter at the mission could then be used to expand the recovery program, and possibly house a thrift store with things like small appliances.

Everybody involved hopes it will happen quickly: The city of Salinas has imposed deadlines on Rann to demolish the building and clean up by early May.

“It’s a dangerous building right now,” Salinas Building Official Joseph DeSante says. “We need to get going.”

Cusson estimates the cost for the new building could be $1 million or more, but it’s too early to say. But he adds that the fire reminded people in the community that Victory is still there, and many have been coming out of the woodwork with offers to help. Several churches in the area, he adds, have already promised to contribute to funding a women’s shelter.

“This is like a steamroller, it just keeps going and going,” he says. “It’s a lot of money, but bigger miracles have been accomplished.”