City of Boulder officials hosted an online meeting this week with North Boulder residents over a proposal to expand the nighttime Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, the city’s largest homeless shelter, into a day services center. The meeting marked a major step in a two-year effort to enhance services for the growing number of homeless people in the city.
Initiated at the request of the Boulder City Council in January 2022, the goal is to create a space where homeless people can receive help with housing and access basic services and providers during the day.
The majority of meeting attendees opposed the plan, expressing concerns about potential loitering, trash and a reduction in their property values. In response, shelter officials said the proposal was designed to get more people into homes, thereby reducing the impacts of homelessness on the community.
“The shelter’s mission is to focus on housing,” Spencer Downing, the shelter’s chief housing officer, said during the online meeting. “Why we’re really excited about offering day services is because there are people who are — for various reasons — resistant, reluctant or unable to come into congregate shelter and get connected to what we do so well, at offering people a chance to get out of homelessness through housing.”
The “good neighbor meeting” was required under city code. Residents will have little power to stop the expansion. But their feedback may influence the final version of the shelter’s management plan, the document laying the groundwork for the establishment of the new day center. The city is hoping to open the day services center as soon as late winter 2024.
The previous city council made creating a day services center one of its top priorities for filling gaps in the city’s services for homeless people.
The city is proposing to add new services to the shelter, including peer support, housing navigators, behavioral health clinicians and respite services for people coming out of the hospital. The shelter, currently closed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (except under certain weather conditions), is proposed to open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As the project nears the finish line, it remains unclear whether councilmembers will be satisfied.
“I want to make sure we don’t pat ourselves on the back and move on. Because I don’t consider this complete,” Councilmember Matt Benjamin, one of the proponents of creating a day services center, told Boulder Reporting Lab.
Benjamin said he was hoping the day services center would be located in a new building. This would expand the city’s overall sheltering capacity, he said. During a recent cold snap in January, the city opened a temporary shelter at the East Boulder Community Center, in part due to the city’s limited shelter space.
He said he also wanted a day services center with a “low or no barrier” to entry. The North Boulder shelter is three miles from the city’s downtown, where homeless people congregate during the day. The shelter enforces several rules, including no drugs or alcohol, limited exceptions for dogs, no loitering and behavioral expectations. City and shelter officials said people using the day service center would likely need to complete a process known as coordinated entry, a questionnaire with dozens of questions designed to tailor and coordinate services for homeless people.
Other critics of the plan similarly question whether the shelter has the physical capacity to operate around the clock. Currently, the shelter does not have enough lockers for everyone who is sleeping there. Residents of the shelter have complained about the lack of hot water for showers and having to pay for laundry. On some nights, the shelter, which typically has the capacity of 160, does not have enough beds to sleep everyone who shows up for one.
“I don’t think that shelter could actually go 24 hours without becoming a massive mess,” Echo Star, 35, who recently slept at the shelter, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “I think the only real way to do this well is to open a day shelter [in a different building] so when they are kicking us out at eight o’clock, someone is welcoming us in.”
The Boulder City Council is planning to discuss the city’s overall plan for addressing homelessness on Feb. 8. Benjamin said he plans to continue advocating for another location for a day services center.
Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer, who has also advocated for a day center, said she is interested in creating some additional shelter space in the city. But she has not called for the city to begin searching for another location for the day services center.
“I would like to see how things go here before pre-deciding on what should happen next,” Speer told Boulder Reporting Lab.
The city has already reviewed more than a dozen locations for a day services center. Many were either too expensive, too far from downtown or bus stops, or too close to schools, according to city officials. The city had previously identified a property on Folsom Street for a day services center. But the developer, Element Properties, pulled out of the tentative deal, according to city officials. Neighboring residents and businesses were also sounding alarms, highlighting the challenges to expanding homelessness services in a relatively central location.
Kurt Firnhaber, the director of Housing and Human Services, told Boulder Reporting Lab that the city is trying to use its limited money to create a day services center without having to buy and invest in a building. That would cost several million dollars, Firnhaber said.
Firnhaber said the city is currently working on creating a budget with the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. He said this may include adding more bus lines between the city’s downtown to the shelter. Some money may be used to upgrade the hot water heater or add lockers and other amenities. The shelter is also seeking to expand its bed capacity from 160 to 180.
“I think Boulder Shelter not only effectively uses a current community asset, but it allows us to implement a program that can take a significant amount of funding,” he said. “The more money we put into buildings, the less money we actually have to serve this population.”
The shelter, which opened at its new location about 20 years ago, is primarily focused on getting people into homes. In 2023, it placed 93 people into homes, the shelter said. The city recently received a grant from the state to provide 30 housing vouchers, which subsidize rent, through its coming day services center program.
