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Interfaith Sanctuary says homelessness in Boise at 'crisis levels'

Interfaith Sanctuary is calling forth action. It says the homeless situation in Boise is at 'crisis levels.'

On Friday, the shelter had to turn away people for the first time because they ran out of space.

"We're at a tipping point, it feels like. We've never seen numbers like this before. Before we responded, we had to 20 people away from our shelter on Friday night when it was really cold, and that was kind of the first reveal for us," said Jodi Peterson-Stigers, executive director at Interfaith.

Interfaith set up a temporary fix by transforming a tent into an additional sleeping area.

"We're turning this into overflow sleeping space because we just have more people needing low barrier shelter than our building can actually handle now, so this is heated," Peterson-Stigers said.

She says right now, the shelter is operating at max capacity---serving 175 people daily.

"We're full every night right now, so we're full plus we have people sleeping in a tent, so that's beyond our capacity. When we were just a normal emergency shelter doing our normal stuff before the pandemic, our capacity was 164," Peterson-Stigers said.

Since last year, Interfaith has been pushing to relocate to a bigger site on State Street because of the rapidly growing homeless population.

"We're serving about 175 people in this building which is not safe, but the alternative is to freeze to death, and so clearly, we need to expand low barrier shelf availability. We need to get more affordable housing. We need to control rent and not let it kick people out of their housing. Some of these systems are making people homeless, and we don't have enough agency to take care of that growing problem," Peterson-Stigers said.

Just two weeks ago, the Boise Planning and Zoning voted against the approval of Interfaith conditional use permit to relocate to State Street, but Interfaith says it plans to appeal to Boise City Council in March

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Noelle Montes

Update: 2024-05-02