The St. Joseph County Council unanimously voted Tuesday night to extend the Motels4Now homeless shelter program until March 2023 at a cost of $1.65 million.
The one-year extension was given a favorable recommendation by a council committee in January. The funding is coming from the county’s share of federal COVID relief dollars through the American Rescue Plan.
Created in August 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Motels4Now provides low-barrier shelter for the chronically homeless in the Knights Inn on South Bend’s west side.
The program is coordinated by the nonprofit Our Lady of the Road. South Bend is paying for mental health and addiction treatment services from Oaklawn, and St. Joseph County is paying for staff operating costs and the rooms.
Motels4Now director Sheila McCarthy said 75 percent of the 450 people who have gone through the program since August 2020 have found stability at the motel or moved on to better options, such as permanent housing, addiction treatment or placement with a family member.
“The generational impact of this program is tremendous — in the next year, we expect to have ended chronic homelessness in St. Joseph County,” McCarthy said.
“The hope that is in someone’s eyes when they are able to have a place from which to move forward from, when they’re able to get a job for the first time in many years, when they’re able to really think about having a place of their own is something tremendous,” she added.
During the January committee meeting, Our Lady of the Road executive director Margaret Pfiel said Our Lady of the Road is in the early stages of developing a $7.2 million plan for a permanent 120-bed low-barrier intake facility.
As of January, the organization has raised $40,000 toward that effort and spent most of it on a series of meetings with Kil Architecture, motel residents and neighbors to develop infrastructure and design proposals.
Pfiel said Our Lady of the Road expects to have a draft plan for the permanent facility within the next few months and is also in early talks with Portage Manor to potentially use some land there to build it.
During the Tuesday meeting, the council approved several other ARP projects including a $3.75 million appropriation to the United Way of St. Joseph County.
The money will be used to help fund the construction of three new community centers — one in Mishawaka, another in Walkerton and a third in northwest South Bend — and create four social innovation hubs providing childcare, health and wellness, youth programming, affordable housing resources and coordinated social services.
The United Way’s total project cost is $38 million, and the organization had already secured $11 million in private donations as of January.
Other major ARP appropriations Tuesday included $1 million to Cultivate Care Network for building two new truck docks and a larger freezer, which will be used to create a shared cold storage area for local food pantries and soup kitchens.
The Center for the Homeless also received $1 million for renovations to increase shelter capacity to accommodate 200 people per night with improved social distancing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contact Jakob at jlazzaro@wvpe.org or follow him on Twitter at @JakobLazzaro.
If you appreciate this kind of journalism on your local NPR station, please support it by donating here.
