Long-term residents scramble for housing as Boise vacates 2 hotels on airport property
It’s Friday afternoon, and Rachel Church, co-manager at the Airport Inn in Boise, is helping her husband and their two children pack all of their belongings into a gray SUV.
“My family lives here, as much as we don’t want to live here,” Church told the Idaho Statesman. “There is a lot of activity around here that’s not desirable. It’s just become a really unsafe place. But it’s home.”
The Airport Inn, at 2660 W. Airport Way, was served Thursday with a three-day notice to vacate the premises, which includes the eviction of residents. A similar notice was delivered to the nearby Rodeway Inn, at 2799 W. Airport Way.
Both hotels are located on Boise Airport property and pay rent to the city. The eviction notices said the businesses, and tenants, had until Monday to vacate and surrender the properties.
But long-term residents like Church say they have nowhere else to go, especially on such short notice.
Stormy Robles, another employee, said the Airport Inn’s nine full-time employees live on the backside of the hotel. Most haven’t seen a paycheck recently, Robles said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Robles told the Statesman. “I literally don’t have anywhere to go. I have no money to move out.”
The owner has fallen behind on payments to the city, according to airport spokeswoman Shawna Samuelson. But that’s not why the business is being vacated.
Samuelson said by email that a recent investigation by Boise police found that the two properties are associated with calls for emergency services, including for drug overdoses, suspected drug sales, violent crime, theft and runaways. The Airport Inn, in particular, is connected to a 400% increase in calls for emergency services to the area over the past year, Samuelson said.
“From outward appearances, both the Airport Inn and the Rodeway Inn were seemingly reputable businesses,” Samuelson said. “Both hotels have passed fire inspections and had clean, serviceable public areas.”
But she said the airport’s property management team visited the Airport Inn on Nov. 1 to post a notice for lapsed payments and found several discrepancies that raised concerns.
So the city directed law enforcement to the area and began conducting surveillance on both properties. Samuelson said police found evidence of stolen vehicles, as well as the use and sale of drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Si Banga, manager of the Rodeway Inn, which sits just off South Vista Avenue and is located closer to the airport than the Airport Inn, told the Statesman he was baffled by the city’s allegation that the Rodeway Inn is a hotbed of illegal drug activity. He said the hotel only offers short-term stays and that 90% of its clientele are out-of-state travelers.
The Rodeway Inn is owned by Choice Hotels, a nationwide chain based in Maryland.
“We run a really tight ship,” Banga said. “We have certain policies in place for when there are any incidents, whether it’s trip related, whether it’s emergency situations, whether it’s fire or anything like that — we have to file incident reports. As far as the claims from the city of Boise saying we have drug activity at the property, I dispute that.”
Banga said the hotel has only had a couple of incident reports within the last year, and when it does have an incident, it contacts authorities right away.
He said he’s working with a legal team to navigate the sudden notice.
The city said in its notice to vacate that if the properties are not surrendered by Monday, it will initiate eviction proceedings in court, through an “unlawful detainer” action outlined in Idaho law under section 6-303(5), which relates to the delivery, production or use of controlled substances on a leased property.
The eviction notices posted by the city said “the foregoing illegal activity is not subject to cure,” meaning it won’t offer any opportunity for the businesses to remove or correct the problems.
Banga said anyone who rents a room from the Rodeway signs paperwork holding them liable for any damage or illegal activity that might occur in the room. He said Friday that he requested more information from the city on what it purports to have found.
“When we rent rooms, we don’t do so under the impression that this person’s going to destroy our room or anything like that,” he said. “We don’t discriminate against anybody, and we don’t know what their intentions are, whether they just come to party in a room or whether they’re just here for the night, flying out. There’s so many different scenarios. I mean, every hotel in the industry has to deal with that.”
Banga, who works full-time running the hotel, said it hasn’t had any drug-related issues. He said the Rodeway Inn is being unfairly associated with activity that occurs at the Airport Inn down the road.
Church, the co-manager at the Airport Inn, said there is some drug activity at the Airport Inn, and that some of the hotel’s staff and long-term residents have been working to “clean up” the place, to no avail. She estimates about 75% of the hotel’s clients are long-term guests.
“A lot of them are struggling. A lot of them, when they got here, weren’t going to put up with not being paid,” Church said, referring to the hotel’s employees. “But then, we’ve all just become one big family. I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do.”
She said her family is charged $800 a month for the room they live in, and the cost is supposed to be deducted from her paycheck. She said she hasn’t received a paycheck since January 2022.
The city directed long-term residents of the property to CATCH, or Charitable Assistance to Community’s Homeless, a nonprofit that works to house people experiencing homelessness in Ada and Canyon counties.
But Robles, who’s recovering from an addiction to heroin, said she doesn’t want to move to one of Boise’s shelters.
She wants to stay clean so she can get her 2-year-old daughter back, who she said was taken by child protective services six months ago because Robles had methadone in her system, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder. She said she was legally prescribed the drug by Raise the Bottom, an addiction treatment center with clinics in Boise and Nampa.
She said the housing situation in the Treasure Valley is tough, and the Airport Inn has been a home for people with nowhere else to stay.
“It’s not exactly the Best Western,” Robles said. “It doesn’t look perfect. That still doesn’t mean it’s riddled by drugs and everything. Anytime we’ve had a guest that has OD’d, we’ve done CPR and called the ambulance. So it’s not like we’re trying to hide the fact. We have two old ladies here who take care of their mom, who has dementia, and they’re good people.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2024 at 4:00 AM.
