Support Interfaith Sanctuary homeless shelter while working on a housing first strategy

Dear Boise city leaders:

I recently had the honor to serve on the city’s Shelter Better Task Force. Based on what I learned there, and my own professional experiences, I am asking you to approve Interfaith Sanctuary’s conditional use permit for its site on State Street and then work toward implementing a housing first model in Boise, so five to 10 years from now, there is no need for large emergency shelters in the city.

I am the chief medical officer for the Family Medicine Residency of Idaho and represented health care on the Shelter Better Task Force.

For decades, FMRI physicians have cared for hospitalized homeless individuals at Saint Alphonsus. We often discharge still somewhat sick, medically complicated patients to Interfaith Sanctuary, as it is the only low-barrier shelter in town. These patients often cannot go to the Boise Rescue Mission because they have violated the Rescue Mission’s substance use policies, don’t want to be separated from their partner or don’t want to participate in religious services.

For these patients, it is vital that Interfaith’s 200-plus low-barrier shelter beds do not disappear. Otherwise, we will be discharging these medically complicated patients to the streets. And we actually would not do that, so in reality what would happen is many of these patients would remain in Saint Alphonsus for days to weeks until they are completely safe to discharge to the streets. As you can imagine, this clogs up hospital beds in a system that is already almost at capacity, as well as raises health insurance premiums as hospital prices are paid solely for shelter.

Let me take you back pre-2005 Boise, when Interfaith was founded literally because homeless individuals were freezing to death on the streets. This is a reality for this population. I was rounding at the hotel for COVID-positive homeless individuals recently,this week, and one of the guests was telling me she could not move fast because she had lost parts of both feet. I asked her if she had diabetes and she replied, “Nope, frostbite.”

Interfaith has to move out of its current building by the summer of 2022. There is literally nowhere else for them to go but the State Street location. Only four of the city’s 24 zones are zoned for emergency shelter. When the city in August 2021 looked for parcels for sale that met Interfaith’s quite reasonable specifications, two showed up. One was next to the Walmart on Overland, a site that is unsuitable because it has no public transit to it. The other was a small parcel on Front Street that has no preexisting building, so Interfaith would have to build one from scratch, resulting in a more expensive project. And the site is very small, meaning the shelter would remain very cramped, as it is now.

There has been talk of trying to put multiple shelter beds in multiple smaller sites around the city. This is wildly impractical and is not likely to be in place by the time shelter beds are needed in the summer of 2022. First, it is expensive to buy all these sites and expensive to provide services to disparate sites. Second, zoning laws would need to change, as emergency shelters are currently banned in many parts of the city. Third, every neighborhood where these sites are located is going to object to them.

In addition, creating multiple shelter sites would pull money from what the city should be investing in, which is a housing first solution. Under housing first, homeless individuals are first found housing, then supportive services work on their other needs, such as employment, mental health care and/or substance abuse treatment. This approach has been successful in cities throughout the United States and is best practice in homeless services currently. Housing first would eventually negate the need for large emergency shelters, which would take care of the very legitimate concerns raised by the State Street neighborhoods to having a shelter next door.

Finally, I want to clear up one misconception about the Shelter Better Task Force. The task force did not decide not to vote on a site for Interfaith Sanctuary’s shelter. We never took a vote for this. This decision was made for us by Courtney Washburn, the mayor’s chief of staff. At our second to last task force meeting, Courtney Washburn, the mayor’s chief of staff, announced we would not be voting on a site. In addition, task force members were never given the opportunity to have conversations with each other about the issues at hand. Everything was done through a moderator — questions were asked anonymously on index cards. I sincerely believe if had the task force members been given a chance to interact, the majority of us would have voted to locate Interfaith’s facility on State Street while working on a housing first solution.

Thank you for taking time to read this and for your service to the city,

Sincerely,

Penny Beach, MD