‘The rug pulled out from under us’: Families forced into shelter system as housing soars
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Affording Boise: Rental housing
Soaring rents. Skyrocketing home prices. The double-digit rates of increase in the costs of Boise-area housing create increasingly urgent problems for low-income, working-class and even moderate-income Idahoans who need places to live. Affording Boise is a series of Idaho Statesman special reports on housing. This collection focuses on rental homes, including apartments. A separate collection focuses on homeownership.
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Virgil Hunt was standing outside his apartment building one morning when a neighbor pointed to smoke billowing into the sky.
“Where’s that coming from?” she asked.
As Hunt hurried back to his apartment to check on his 17-year-old son Dylan, who has autism, he saw fire coming out of the apartment above them.
“It was engulfed,” Hunt said. “There was flames just roaring and then I went to turn to go back to the house to wake up my wife and then I heard the glass shatter. And it just pulled the fire right in. I was trying to get my family out.”
Twelve families were displaced by the accident caused by a cigarette butt. At age 62, Hunt became one of a growing number of people in the Treasure Valley who are experiencing homelessness for the first time.
Hunt, who grew up in Nampa, spent eight years in the Navy working as a sonar technician and can still picture the 25-foot swells he used to encounter in the North Atlantic.
Eventually he returned to Nampa, where he worked in roofing and construction. He sees himself as a hard worker, not someone who would find himself homeless. His role as Dylan’s caretaker is the most important thing to him. It’s taken years to figure out Dylan’s needs and the best medications. Even as Hunt talked, he made sure he had his phone notifications on, in case the school called.
City launches temporary solution
Hunt, his wife and two teenage sons spent a month living in one room at the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Nampa until their funds were nearly depleted. They were living on fixed incomes, a combination of Social Security and Hunt’s Navy pension.
He and his wife went into “crisis mode” and began making calls. Dylan’s social worker from school, knowing how necessary stability is for Dylan, was able to connect them with Interfaith Sanctuary.
Soon they were living in another hotel. Interfaith rents out 53 rooms on three floors of the Red Lion Inn Downtowner. Seventy guests live in them.
The funding comes from the city of Boise. Originally, the hotel program was set up in 2020 to quarantine homeless Boise residents who contracted COVID-19 or to protect those who might be at risk.
As local virus numbers have declined, the hotel rooms have been used to offer beds to vaccinated homeless people who need more stable living conditions than Interfaith can offer at its River Street shelter. One floor has remained designated for COVID-19 quarantine but is empty.
In September, the City Council approved up to $796,778 to extend the program with funds for which city officials anticipate being reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The Hunts began their search for new apartments immediately after the fire, but it has been difficult to find anything they can afford. The ones they could afford were competitive. They’d think they’d gotten one only to lose out to someone else.
“Every chance we got we’d get the door slammed in our face, the rug pulled out from under us,” Hunt said.
When they moved into their three-bedroom Orchard Street apartment in Nampa eight years ago, rent was $750 per month. At the time of the fire, it had gone up to $1,200, and the owner was already asking for $1,300 to renew the lease. The owner sold it a couple months after the fire. Today, their remodeled place goes for about $1,500.
Two years later, Hunt and Dylan are still living in the Red Lion hotel room.
Hotels provide stability, small spaces
Interfaith case worker Selena Carsiotis was able to get him signed up for a veteran housing voucher through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program. The veteran voucher allows veterans to pay a maximum of 30% of the veteran’s income to the program and covers anything beyond that amount. The trick is getting a place that accepts vouchers. The family is on four waiting lists, two in Boise and two in Nampa.
Hunt’s wife has gone with their other son to live in a friend’s apartment in Nampa, leaving Hunt in the role of sole caretaker of Dylan. He’s tried to apply to a few jobs but has not been able to find any that offer the flexibility that being Dylan’s caretaker entails, such as working only during school hours.
The hotel program requires recipients to attend life-skills classes. Hunt recalled how he had recently tried to attend a cleaning class at the hotel. He thought it would be safe to leave the room because Dylan was asleep, until he heard his son’s shouts.
“He was awake and I wasn’t there,” Hunt said. “And he was just on the verge of going nuts. I came through the door because I heard him squawk. … I said, ‘I’m out here, son.’ I gave him his badge and fed him and everything and he was still squirrelly, his eyeballs twitching and stuff. So I had to stay.”
Two people in a single hotel room can feel cramped. There’s not much privacy and not a lot to do. Because they don’t have kitchens, Interfaith drops off donated meals for them. There are rules to follow, like weekly cleaning checks.
“I think living in a room is the biggest thing,” said Carsiotis, who works in an office at the hotel. “There are two double beds. At first everyone is excited, because everyone wants to live in a hotel, but after a while it’s small.”
At the same time, the hotel program has offered stability. Dylan finds even the smallest disruption of routines distressing, according to Hunt. Something like a staff member at school going on vacation for a day will alarm Dylan unless Hunt begins warning him days in advance.
“He had a tough time because he felt his routine had been destroyed by the pandemic, by the fire, and then us moving around,” Hunt said “This has been a lot of stability for him right here. And that’s what he needs.”
Housing crisis puts strain on families
Carsiotis says the most important benefit of the hotel program is allowing families to stay together. There is no Boise shelter that allows children to stay with single fathers.
“The biggest thing is reuniting families,” Carsiotis said. “I can’t imagine if I was a single father who would lose my child to foster care because I couldn’t afford housing. I know the fathers here are very aware of that fact. Some of my (clients’ children), who have learning disabilities or are disabled, it would just be so traumatizing that I don’t know how or if they would bounce back easily.”
For Hunt, the desire to reunite has been the biggest motivator for finding a new place. It has been difficult for Hunt to be apart from his 18-year-old son, Dustin. Though his needs are not as great as Dylan’s, Dustin also has mental health and behavioral diagnoses. Both boys lived at the hotel temporarily but did not do well in such tight quarters together.
“The biggest challenge right now is half of my family is in Nampa and the other half is here,” Hunt said. “I really miss Dustin. I miss my lady, too.”
Hunt isn’t sure when they will all be together again. He remembers how high rental prices in the Treasure Valley seemed in 2020. It’s been a shock to see how much they’ve climbed since.
In that time, Boise rent grew at a faster rate than any other city in the country. It is up 32.4% since the pandemic started in March 2020, according to Apartment List. A three-bedroom apartment typically rents for $1,500 per month, while a two-bedroom apartment goes for $1,183, Apartment List’s monthly report for March found.
“It was a trip, because (rent prices) would go up and up and up,” Hunt said. “And now it’s worse than it was then.”
Hunt is hoping something will turn up soon. The hotel program’s funding is set to end in September.
Carsiotis said she isn’t sure what will become of her clients living at the Red Lion. The rooms rented by Interfaith contain vulnerable homeless residents, from residents on hospice who are considered “medically fragile” to a family with five kids. The youngest guest is a baby who was born while her mother was in the hotel, and the oldest is an 85-year-old former nun.
“There’s no housing. Some of them have a lot of barriers,” Carsiotis said. “I’m not sure what they’re going to do.”
This story was originally published April 24, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
