Zoning vs. the Good Samaritan
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.
Being able to give people their own rooms where they could stay 24/7 was a huge blessing, says Peterson-Stigers. The range of health care Interfaith Sanctuary could provide to ailing, elderly clients expanded dramatically. Guests weren’t having to roam the streets all day. Parents didn’t have to raise their kids in a crowded, dormlike setting.
The improvements she saw in people’s health and well-being sent Peterson-Stigers looking for a new, larger shelter location that could support the same number of people and level of care after the outfit’s temporary federal funding dried up. In early 2021, Interfaith Sanctuary purchased the Salvation Army building and surrounding two-acre lot
