On Soledad Street, where junkies and angels reside, a clash is coming.

Salinas’ Soledad Street has been a refuge for the hungry and homeless for more than two decades. The area across the railroad tracks from downtown is still called Chinatown because of its roots as a neighborhood of Asian immigrants. But now Chinatown is better known as the city’s hub for street-level drug dealing. It is also the home of a charitable institution that serves the city’s neediest residents.

As the area slowly tries to reinvent itself, the question is clear: Where do we draw the line between the hungry and the drug thugs?

Anyone can walk into the day room of Dorothy’s Place and—so long as they follow a few posted rules—be served a hot meal, take a shower and do their laundry. The brightly painted soup kitchen, which doubles as an overnight shelter for women, serves more than 200 meals a day, breakfast and lunch.

The refuge’s use permit is up for renewal next month. Overcoming this hurdle would allow the Franciscan Workers to continue providing services under the roof of the city-owned building. But the area’s stakeholders are challenging the way the Salinas-based community group does business.

The Oldtown Salinas Association, an influential business group working to redevelop the downtown area, has requested that guests at Dorothy’s be required to show an ID before getting food. The association wants Dorothy’s staff to strictly enforce codes of conduct, report all criminal activity to the police and use restraining orders against violent or threatening people.

Frank Saunders, a downtown property owner representing the Oldtown Association, says these measures are necessary because Dorothy’s Place has become a haven for drug dealers.

“If they can get free food and buy drugs in the same place, to me this is an enabling atmosphere,” Saunders says.

The conditions recommended by the association contradict the open-door (and open-heart) policy of Robert Smith, director of Dorothy’s Place. The gray-bearded, soft-eyed man has been doing this work since he began handing out egg salad sandwiches to homeless people on Soledad Street in 1982. Since that time, he and the rest of the Franciscan Workers have run Dorothy’s Place less like a shelter and more like a hotel, offering hospitality and dignity to all who check in.

“We’ve always believed essentially that love and community is the first step in recovery,” Smith says. “We’ve wanted everyone to come in so we can engage them in positive, creative ways to try to change their life.”

He fears that changing the rules at Dorothy’s to discriminate between troublemakers and the harmless needy could unravel the trust that the Franciscan Workers have built in Chinatown over the last 24 years.

The expiration of Dorothy’s use permit has resurfaced a fight over how and where to serve Salinas’ marginalized individuals.

The conflict follows a year of progress in the neighborhood, a year that saw the planting of a garden and the opening of a community center.

And just this week, the Redevelopment Agency is expected to move forward on the purchase of four parcels on Soledad Street, land that will be set aside for the construction of affordable housing.

Although there is little risk of Dorothy’s Place being shut down, the question of the permit has divided some of the area’s key stakeholders.

The soup kitchen is getting resistance from the Confucius Church, a Chinese congregation on neighboring California Street. Sun Street Center, a drug and alcohol recovery program for men, wants new plans to curtail the area’s narcotics trade. There is free food on Soledad Street, yet crack is for sale on the corner. These conflicting worlds cannot continue to coexist