Part hotel, part homeless shelter: A change is coming to Boise’s Red Lion Downtowner

Part hotel, part homeless shelter for people in need of quarantine or medical care, or for families with children. Since 2020, that’s been the model of the Red Lion Downtowner Hotel , which leases about 40 hotel rooms to Boise’s Interfaith Sanctuary .

These days, about 100 people live in the hotel shelter, which has served nearly 1,000 people since 2020. The shelter has joined with local medical providers to care for people who were “not sick enough to stay in the hospital but … too sick to release to the street or back” to Interfaith’s main shelter just off Americana Boulevard, Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the shelter’s executive director, told the Idaho Statesman by email.

Funded mostly by federal COVID-19 relief dollars and other grants, the partnership started as a temporary solution to the pandemic and its attendant concerns about social distancing.

As those funds dry up, and as Interfaith breaks ground on its new shelter on State Street — which will include a medical dormitory — the time has come to “scale down” the use of the hotel as a shelter, Maureen Brewer, the city’s senior manager for housing and community development, told Boise’s City Council.

But the seven-story, 182-room hotel at 1800 W. Fairview Ave., which opened in 1960, won’t stop being a shelter just yet. City Council members have agreed to use the city’s remaining federal pandemic-relief funding — and about $250,000 of city funds — to extend the shelter’s contract with the hotel until September 2025, rather than March, when current funding was set to run out.

The new funding will be a “bridge” until Interfaith’s new shelter’s planned opening in October, Brewer said. That “longer runway … best positions us to exit folks to housing” rather than to another shelter, Brewer said.

At least in the short term, the Boise Rescue Mission has agreed to take in many of the residents in need of medical care, she said.

“Boise Rescue Mission is coming to our rescue on this one,” Council President Colin Nash said during the July 16 meeting.

“Interfaith Sanctuary took a huge sigh of relief” in response to the decision, Peterson-Stigers told the Statesman. She told the City Council that the extension would allow her team and its partners to re-house residents “in a responsible way.”

The cost of running a shelter in the hotel for five years — from May of 2020 until next spring — was about $8 million, but only 14% of that funding came from city funds, Brewer said. The hotel charged $75 a night for each room it leased to the shelter, though there were additional insurance and operational costs. (For regular guests, the hotel’s nightly rate for a room with two double beds was $136 in July.)

Ignite Hotels bought the Red Lion in 2018, promising a $10 million overhaul of the hotel, which was last updated in 2006, the Statesman reported in 2019. That renovation never came to pass.

Gurbir Sandhu and Philip Camacho, the hotel’s owner and general manager, did not respond to emails or a phone call seeking comment about plans for the hotel.

The city’s new contract with the hotel will be significantly scaled down, Brewer said, including only 15 rooms and incorporating greater flexibility to downsize as the hotel stops accepting new residents in the coming months, and current residents move out.

The move comes amid Boise’s push to get more permanent supportive housing and affordable housing online. In July, the city announced a partnership with an Eagle-based real estate firm to finance 95 new apartments for people exiting homelessness at New Path 2.0, part of a housing complex at 2200 W. Fairview Ave. that provides supportive housing and case management. The expansion would more than double the number of permanent apartments to house chronically homeless people.

“Ensuring more homes for more people at Boise budgets has been a relentless and central focus at the city,” Mayor Lauren McLean said in a July news release.

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