WHEN INTERFAITH SANCTUARY purchased an old Salvation Army building on State Street near downtown Boise, Idaho, in early 2021, it seemed like a dream come true. Everything about the property made it a perfect fit for the nonprofit's new emergency homeless shelter.
The only thing the organization needed to turn that dream into a reality was a conditional use permit from the city. That required talking to the neighbors. And that proved to be a problem.
The visceral opposition of nearby residents to Interfaith Sanctuary's shelter plans turned what should have been a permitting process of a few months into a bitter conflict that stretched out for over a year and put the entire project in jeopardy.
We are stuck, Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the executive director of Interfaith Sanctuary, told Reason in February. All of these hopes and dreams are written. The architects have designed the whole thing. We have a contractor. We have complete estimates. We have a security team. We have everything we need to move forward except for the conditional use permit.
The loss of the new shelter building would be a real blow to Interfaith Sanctuary and the people it serves.
Even before COVID-19, the organization had been bumping up against the limits of what it could do with its existing cramped emergency shelter. The sudden appearance of a deadly infectious respiratory virus didn't help the situation.
We use every nook and cranny and this pandemic has made it very difficult, says Peterson-Stigers. The shelter had to slash its capacity from 164 people to 140 just to allow some modicum of social distancing.
A temporary influx of federal homeless funding, however, allowed the heretofore privately funded Interfaith Sanctuary to house those displaced from the shelter at a rented out Red Lion hotel. Soon enough, it had placed over 100 people there.
This story is from the July 2022 edition of Reason magazine.
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This story is from the July 2022 edition of Reason magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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