Boise proposed 300-foot minimum between homes and a homeless shelter. Then this happened

Stiff opposition to a planned homeless shelter on State Street consumed hours of public testimony this spring. Neighbors didn’t want Interfaith Sanctuary’s new shelter close to them.

But where should new homeless shelters go in Boise? City officials attempted to answer that question in the new zoning code they’re trying to write. But a change they proposed infuriated some members of the Veterans Park Neighborhood Association.

City Hall worried that a new controversy could hijack the rewrite effort and threaten its success. So Mayor Lauren McLean’s administration has decided to omit the shelter provision from the proposed code revision altogether.

“We’re kicking that until probably 2024,” Tim Keane, the city’s planning director, told the Idaho Statesman. After a June meeting of the Citywide Advisory Committee tasked with examining the zoning code proposals, the city determined, “you know what, this is going to consume an entire public process unto itself. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with the zoning rewrite,” he said.

While the conversation about shelters is “very important,” Keane said, it would be a distraction from the overall zoning rewrite, which is focused on broader discussions about land use.

What’s the zoning proposal’s timeline?

Last year, the city released a first draft of a zoning code rewrite, which began a process to overhaul the city’s rules on building for the first time since 1966.

The draft of the ordinance included a provision that shelters would not be approved within 300 feet of a residential area.

Late last year and early this year, the city has held public meetings to solicit feedback. It also created an advisory committee of residents.

During the review process, city officials determined that having that large of a buffer — around a block — was unworkable. The reason? It would make building new shelters too difficult, according to the city.

“The reality of that is it would have made it impossible to do a shelter anywhere in the city,” Keane told the City Council on Tuesday.

Last month, the city’s planning department released an updated draft of the ordinance, removing the 300-foot buffer. The new draft also included other changes, like provisions to separate the licensing of shelters from the land-use approval process.

Under the proposed changes, shelters with up to 300 beds would have needed to go to a pre-application and pre-design meeting, to obtain a business license — similar to ones that day care centers receive — and to pursue a Good Neighborhood Agreement. They’d have to invite business owners within 1,000 feet, Neighborhood Associations within ¼ mile, a minimum of two residents who live within 1,000 feet, and city staff members from stakeholder departments.

The shelters would also have to provide a phone number and point of contact to community members in case concerns arise.

How did the public respond to the new draft?

In April 2021, Interfaith Sanctuary bought the former Salvation Army thrift store and office at 4306 W. State St. with the intention of turning it into a homeless shelter.

Interfaith, whose shelter is located on River Street in downtown’s southwest corner, wanted the new property to expand its services for single men and women, families, and those with medical needs.

Quickly, neighbors began to oppose it, speaking out at public meetings and online. When the proposal went before the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, many neighbors came to the four hearings. Though city planners had recommended approval, the commission denied the shelter a permit in February.

Interfaith appealed to the City Council. Four more hearings later, the council in April voted 4-2 to overturn the Planning and Zoning Commissions’s decision and allow the shelter.

The controversy was still fresh on June 30, when the advisory committee met to talk about the updated zoning proposals. Discussion of the shelter provisions took up much of the meeting.

Casey Mattoon, the manager of Our Path Home, a partnership to address homelessness in the Boise area, said at the meeting that the new standards would ensure objective criteria were met, and that separating the licensing process would make sure that land-use issues, rather than activity-related issues, were resolved by the new zoning ordinance.

Other than the requirements the city included, “it’s really hard for zoning code to condition or regulate the behavior of individuals in the community and their interactions with it,” Mattoon said.

At the June meeting, a number of committee members had questions about the proposal. One complained that the new rules would mean the shelter approval process would become “administrative,” meaning it would not first go to public comment.

In a Facebook comment, the Veterans Park Neighborhood Association said that “neighbors should continue to have a voice regarding impacts to their area.”

In an email, the association added that the 300-foot buffer would have been “a great starting point” to mitigate the impacts shelters can have on neighborhoods.

Not all of the committee members opposed the proposed changes. Multiple members supported the new code’s specificity, and liked the idea of making shelter licensing the job of city officials.

Shellan Rodriguez, a member, said she noticed how many city resources were consumed by the extended fight over the State Street shelter.

Rodriguez said she was attempting to accomplish tasks with the city during the Interfaith hearings, and that “the amount of resources, time and money from our local government that was going into that appeal process with virtually no additional information on the table was appalling to me as a taxpayer.”

She called it a “huge tax on our capacity as a community.”

What did Interfaith think of the new proposals?

Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the executive director of Interfaith, said she liked the updates proposed in June because the public process Interfaith went through was costly, drawn out, and harmed people in the city who are unhoused.

“What has delayed us and caused us so much turmoil and friction is this long process with so much public testimony that really had very little to do with the conditional use permit and more about what (people) don’t want in a building,” she said. “It became about the person, and not the building.”

Peterson-Stigers said Interfaith had the benefit of lawyers who offered to work for them pro bono, but that otherwise local nonprofits trying to address homelessness “won’t even try” after seeing what Interfaith went through.

She also noted that the way people who are homeless were discussed in public meetings harmed them.

She said that comments from neighbors who were concerned about having people who are homeless nearby “influences how a community behaves around an unhoused population, and it makes the unhoused population much less safe.”

City drops new proposal

After the June committee meeting, the mayor’s administration decided against proceeding with the proposed changes to shelter zoning, fearing it would derail Boise’s efforts to reimagine what the city will look like in the coming decades.

“What we’re doing right now is we’re seeking to rezone the whole city in terms of how the city will grow urbanistically,” he said. “It was just kind of a distraction from the job at hand right now.”

What’s next for shelters?

The city plans to finish its zoning rewrite next summer. After that is approved by the City Council, the plan is to take up the emergency shelter issue once again, Keane said.

In the meantime, future emergency shelter applications in commercial areas will be addressed as Interfaith Sanctuary was, through the conditional use permit process, which includes public hearings.

Since Interfaith has already received approval from the city, its future shelter will not be affected by the proposed zoning changes.

Peterson-Stigers said the shelter plans to submit a design for review in August and hopes to start construction later in the year.

This month, the Veterans Park Neighborhood Association and another party have taken action in court against the city — a final effort to stop the shelter from relocating.

While she liked the zoning proposal that was withdrawn, Peterson-Stigers said Interfaith’s move to the new shelter will provide a good opportunity for the city to see how a shelter can integrate into a new neighborhood, and whether it can “not increase impacts but actually reduce impacts.”

“Let’s keep using the State Street building as a learning process moving forward for anyone who may be affected,” she said.