Agencies in Boise work together to help homeless into affordable housing

Unexpected unemployment. Sudden, debilitating illness or disability. Devastating floods or fire. Any one of these things and a myriad of others can lead to homelessness. But the No. 1 cause of homelessness is housing affordability.

For years, agencies in Boise have been working together to provide resources ? from health care and financial education to temporary and permanent housing ? for those facing or in the throes of homelessness.

Affordability

Throughout the year, 2.3 to 3.5 million Americans can be homeless. In June in Boise, more than 3,300 people were facing crisis. That number can fluctuate and is only reflective of those who are seeking or receiving some form of help.

“The only data point we can use to predict across the country whether homelessness will increase or decrease is housing affordability,” said Casey Mattoon, manager of Our Path Home , a Boise-based agency that works to assist people facing homelessness and to provide housing solutions. “We know that the housing market is the primary and only data-informed driver of what will happen with a population experiencing homelessness.”

Currently, the median home price in Ada County is around $550,000 while the median household income is about $72,000 per year. It’s suggested that for a family to afford a home at the median rate, the annual income would need to be in the $120,000 to $150,000 range. The median apartment rental rate in the county is around $1,800 per month.

Jesse Tree, an organization that helps people facing eviction, receives about 400 applications each month, said Ali Rabe, the executive director. Not everyone applies for the assistance of the agency, she said, and Jesse Tree sees about 130 evictions in court every month.

“Research shows that when housing costs increase, homelessness increases in correlation,” she said. “When you look at other things like substance use or mental health or other things that cause homelessness, when those things increase, we don’t see homelessness increase.”

Rabe cited the example of West Virginia, a state where substance abuse is a serious problem, but there isn’t a homeless problem because housing is affordable. Though the cost of rent in the Boise area is still cheaper than the national average, it’s still hard for many to manage.

“Unfortunately, now Boise is in a place where many working families are unable to afford their rent,” Rabe said. “They’re paying a large majority of their income towards rent and they’re making ends meet every single month, barely scraping by. If something happens like job loss, a health care issue with them or their child, their car breaks down, then suddenly, they can’t pay their rent and they end up with us.”

Rabe said current estimates based on the growth of the region put housing needs in the tens of thousands. However, she said it’s difficult for affordable housing projects to come to fruition due to the costs associated with construction and getting financing.

“Developers are telling me that they’re literally sitting on projects, waiting for financing. There are thousands of units that can’t come online because they don’t have the financing,” she said.

A couple of years ago, Rabe said that a housing fund was created with $50 million in ARPA funds. That money was used to create 1,100 units of affordable housing. “That money was used up in one year. It has been set up as a revolving loan fund, so the money is going to go back into the fund over the next 20 to 30 years. It’s going to take a lot of time. In the meantime, there’s $0 essentially in that fund.”

One solution would be for Idaho to have a housing trust fund, Rabe said, to provide financing for those projects waiting to come online. Forty-seven states have such funds but Idaho does not.

Building solutions

Outside of people volunteering their time and effort, one essential resource that’s needed for local agencies to succeed at helping the homeless population is money.

The City of Boise recently announced the launch of a program called New Path 2.0, which is planning to build 95 new homes over the next two years for those who are coming out of a homeless situation. The project will also make comprehensive support services available to the residents such as case management, health care, mental health counseling, substance use disorder treatment and more.

Those services are made possible through the city’s partnerships with Our Path Home, Terry Reilly Health Services and others.

“There is no local issue more complex, more challenging, more demanding of true partnership than housing,” said Boise Mayor Lauren McLean. “We must ensure that people have paths into homes with supports in place to help them stay housed.”

In a partnership with The Pacific Companies, the city provided $5.5 million in gap financing to make sure New Path 2.0 gets built, and the city also committed $7.5 million as seed funding which will be matched by donations. Another integral partnership of sorts is with Idaho Community Foundation which created a supporting housing investment fund, or SHIF, to manage the funds.

It’s a process that’s been in development for some time.

“When we have a fund like this where we’re talking about an issue around homelessness, around supportive housing, the Idaho Community Foundation goes and recruits an advisory committee, and that advisory committee is [made up of] experts in the field,” said Steve Burns, president and CEO of ICF. “They are the ones saying, ‘OK, we think that we should be funding this project to this organization and this amount.”

The ICF does all the work of managing, accounting and investing the money, “but we look to that team of experts to be able to say here’s where the best use of that is,” he said. The overall goal for the SHIF is $15 million, which is seeing sizable donations through places like Saint Alphonsus and Idaho Central Credit Union among others.

New Path Community Housing, in the six short years since it was created, has provided added services such as job placement and counseling. The organization has also reportedly reduced reliance on emergency services by 4,264 days and saved $6.77 million through decreased dependency on public funding.

Though solutions are being found, the work is ongoing, Mattoon said, and more needs to be done just in Ada County alone. According to a supportive housing plan created by Our Path Home three years ago, it was determined that Ada County needs 781 additional units of supporting housing to tackle homelessness. Of that total, 302 would be developed permanent supportive housing; 215 would be scattered-site permanent supportive housing; and 264 would be scattered-site rapid rehousing.

In June, Our Path Home reported 1,058 households were on a waiting list for permanent supportive housing and 377 households were waiting for rapid rehousing.

Along with New Path 2.0’s 95 units, Boise and its partnerships are creating The Fulton, which is 50 units of permanent supportive housing, and The Sherwood, which is 48 units of permanent supportive housing for families with children.

Beyond the Treasure Valley

While the funding and other moving parts are put into place to create the needed housing, work continues to help those who need and request it. The problems persist not just in Boise and the Treasure Valley but throughout the entire state.

“This is not just an issue for the Treasure Valley or Ada County challenges around housing are occurring all across the state of Idaho, and it doesn’t matter what community you go to,” said Heidi Hart, CEO of Terry Reilly Health. “You want to begin the conversation about affordability and housing and the intersection of housing with health care. This is probably one of the consistent themes or topics all across the state is trying to figure out where it is that people can safely sleep at night and how can they be their healthiest, best self. There really is an intersection between both of those and it is not unique to the City of Boise or the Treasure Valley.”

The needs of communities around housing and health are being addressed in long-term strategic plans, Mattoon said.

“We are going to have to grapple with it as a community and our hope is to be a beacon of ‘We already know how to implement ? help us scale and scale statewide,’” he said. “Because, as we solve this for every community, it becomes easier and easier in each community to take that next step forward.”

Kendra Lutes, assistant behavioral health director of Terry Reilly, pointed out that it can be easy to miss out on the human element of the problem of homelessness.

“One of the fastest growing groups of people that are experiencing homelessness is the elderly,” she said. “How would [people] want to care for those folks who could be a person removed from their immediate family, perhaps because they’re on a fixed income and rents keep going higher? It’s important that we figure out ways to take care of these folks and it’s actually working with the team over at New Path that have boots on the ground, doing the work.”

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