Baltimore officials have asked the neighborhood surrounding the city's winter homeless shelter to live with the facility another month, despite earlier promises it would close at the end of March.

Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration met with the New Greenmount West Community Association and asked the group to extend its agreement to host the shelter through the end of April. A permanent site will open elsewhere in May, a city aide said.

Some residents of the neighborhood west of Green Mount Cemetery said they are wary of agreeing to an extension. They are concerned the city might try to keep the facility open longer if a permanent shelter is not ready by May.

"If they can't meet the terms of the current agreement, what makes you think they're going to honor this next agreement?" asked Patricia Kelly, who lives on Calvert Street near the shelter. "The city has let the homeless down."

Debate over the shelter, which opened last year in the 1600 block of Guilford Ave., underscores the complexity of the issue. Several residents said they are sensitive to the problem of homelessness - and the city's efforts to address it - but are concerned about having their neighborhood bear the burden of a shelter serving the city's entire homeless population.

"We're going to bring it up before the membership, and they're going to vote," said Abu Moulta-Ali, vice president of the neighborhood association, which has not taken a position on the extension.

Residents and city officials outlined the terms of the shelter's placement in the neighborhood in a written agreement signed in December. In addition to vowing to close the shelter by March 30, the city promised to step up police protection in the neighborhood and not open another shelter in the neighborhood for a decade.

Sterling Clifford, spokesman for the mayor's office, said the city intends to open a year-round, permanent shelter May 1 elsewhere in the city and said the administration would prefer to move homeless residents directly to that new facility rather than putting them on the street for 30 days.

Clifford stressed that the city has asked - not forced - the neighborhood to extend its agreement with the city. He would not say where the new, permanent shelter will be located.

"We could either send these people back out on to the street for a while, or we can ease their transition into a new place," Clifford said.

But some residents said it is more complicated than that. They said they feel caught between being viewed as uncaring about the homeless and being bullied into having the homeless shelter in their otherwise residential neighborhood for an indefinite period.

Residents have long hoped the building would become the home of a Jesuit school, an addition that would help revitalize the neighborhood. Clifford said that a Montessori charter school has now committed to taking over the site after the shelter is closed but said that arrangement has not been approved by the Board of Estimates.

Earlier this year, the city released a plan that calls for ending homelessness in a decade. The administration also made news when it agreed to pay for hotel rooms for 41 homeless individuals who were removed in mid-December from an encampment under the Jones Falls Expressway.

"We hope that it doesn't become a runaway train," the neighborhood association's president, Patricia Williams, said of the city's request. "We hope that the city will keep its word."

john.fritze@baltsun.com