The brand-new five-story brick building on El Camino Real near the Town and Country Shopping Center is hard to miss. But instead of selling flowers or seafood, this facility’s aim is to reach out to the hundreds of community members in need.

The Opportunity Center of the Mid-Peninsula combines a wide array of services for unhoused community members as well as 88 units of affordable housing, opened its doors on Sept. 17, the culmination of $24 million in fundraising and eight years of leadership by the nonprofit Community Working Group (CWG).

Sophomore Josie Valenzuela toured the Center on its first day of service, Sept. 11, with her Sophomore College class, “The University as a Local and Global Citizen.” Valenzuela said she was overwhelmed by the wide range of resources at the Opportunity Center.

“I couldn’t believe how comprehensive the whole thing was,” Valenzuela said.

The ground floor of the building features hospitality services, with showers, laundry machines, Internet access and snacks. There are also health care and supportive services such as job training, housing referral and legal aid.

Apartments fill the second through fifth floors. Seventy of these permanent housing units are for singles, while the remaining 18 are separate and for families. Each floor also shares a common area with couches and a television.

Lauren Finzer, a sophomore in the same SoCo class, noted the natural light of the gathering spaces. “I really liked how open it felt,” she said.

When El Nino flooded the Red Cross building in 1998, the Urban Ministry Drop-In Center — which previously provided limited, outdoor services for Palo Alto’s unhoused population — was left scrambling for a new location.

Donald Barr, a Sociology Professor and president of the CWG , and the group embraced the task of finding a permanent facility to provide and expand these services.

With the opening of the Center, the CWG has appointed InnVision and Property Management to manage the services and administer the housing units.

The housing units have been in great demand. The Opportunity Center received over 200 applications for the 88 available units.

Sophomore Nabill Idrisi compared the Center’s comfortable facilities to that of a hotel, which he said helped to normalize the lifestyles of the residents.

“I really like the idea that the Opportunity Center enables people, helping them to get back on their feet and become mainstream citizens again,” he added.

Barr said that seeing the Opportunity Center come to fruition was very rewarding because it provided a model for a University and community partnership.

“There was a commonality of interest around this focused project, and we’ve been successful in knitting together a partnership that has been crucial to our success,” he said.

“The project made me extremely proud of our community,” said Linguistics and Philosophy Prof. Tom Wasow, vice president of the CWG. “It’s quite amazing to me that we’ve encountered so little opposition; there were unanimous votes in favor of the Center every step of the way. We were in a lucky position to be able to catalyze.”

With the completion of the Opportunity Center projeeffortct, Barr and Wasow have already turned to another project with a new nonprofit called the Community Housing Alliance.

“What we learned was that the social and political capital that developed [from the Opportunity Center project] was far too valuable to leave idle,” Barr said.

The organization, a logical extension of the Opportunity Center, aims to create more than 50 units of very low income housing in Palo Alto, about a block away from the Opportunity Center.

According to Barr, the housing hopes to attract families earning between 30 and 35 percent of the area median income, is between $30,000 and $40,000 for a family of four in Palo Alto.