(SMART CITIES) February 7, 2022

In the spring of 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic was exploding, Missoula, Montana, made a decision to buy the Sleepy Inn, an 80-year-old downtown motel. 

Its purpose was twofold. In the short term, the city would use the property to offer private living space to people experiencing homelessness, alleviating crowding at existing shelters. The motel would also provide a place where people infected with Covid-19 could go to isolate. In the long term, the city planned to redevelop the property as permanent apartments to help ease its shortage of affordable housing. 

Officials figured the emergency phase might last a few months at most, says Eran Pehan, the city’s director of community planning, development and innovation. But over the last two years, more than 600 people have stayed at the site, for as little as one night and as long as four months, Pehan said. The motel has been used to house people such as the chronically homeless and refugees and students who have had nowhere else to quarantine. 

“The pandemic has outwitted us all and it’s still very much full as a non-congregate shelter,” Pehan said. 

When the public health crisis does finally end, Missoula will have options for how to put the property to use for its housing needs. “It was a great example for us of making a deeper investment and making a riskier move, both from a political perspective and a financial perspective, and reaping the benefits of that down the line,” Pehan said.

Other cities are in a similar position. Using hotels and motels for emergency housing was an early adaptation state and local governments made as the Covid-19 pandemic set in. It provided safe places to stay for people experiencing homelessness and housing instability, and it gave hotel and motel owners a stream of income as tourism and other travel tanked. Studies suggested that these programs helped slow the spread of the virus in some places.

Now, heading into the third year of the coronavirus outbreak, strategies are evolving. Some states appear more poised than others to make the programs permanent. But, to some degree, it appears hotel and motel housing initiatives will outlast the pandemic and become part of the arsenal cities and states have as they battle housing shortages and try to assist people experiencing homelessness.

Source: Smart Cities