Gerri-Lynn Graves has lived in Boise, Idaho, nearly all of her life. But after progressive back pain and a botched surgery caused a series of medical issues, walking became excruciating, and she lost her job. Bills mounted and she could not pay rent. With a small suitcase in hand, in November of 2021, she went to the Interfaith Sanctuary, a homeless shelter in downtown Boise.
Surrounded by a busy highway, businesses and warehouses, the low tan-and-blue brick building is the only “low-barrier” shelter in Ada County, where Boise lies. Unlike other shelters in town, Interfaith does not require sobriety, employment or ID to enter. For a year and a half, Graves stayed at the shelter, leaving each morning per the shelter’s rules. Sometimes, the shelter lacked enough beds for everyone, even on bitterly cold winter days.
Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the shelter’s executive director, longs for the day she can offer more. “You’re giving them a safe place to sleep, but knowing that every night they’re going to come back after trying to navigate the world outside all day long is heartbreaking,” she said.
Since 2021, Interfaith has sought to relocate and expand. The new site, at a former Salvation Army thrift store and warehouse in Boise’s Veterans Park neighborhood, would be able to house roughly 200 people, 24 hours a day. It would include areas for daytime use, a playground, a medical dorm and hospice rooms, along with classrooms for mental health and addiction recovery programs.
But a recent Idaho Supreme Court decision may complicate matters. On Jan. 22, 2025, the court ruled in favor of the Veterans Park Neighborhood Association (VPNA), a community group that sued to oppose the shelter’s move to their neighborhood. Over the past four years, it has repeatedly tried to block construction, citing concerns that the shelter would bring crime, lower property values and dilute public resources in a low-income neighborhood.
Local opposition to emergency shelters and affordable housing is nothing new. But “it is getting worse,” said Eric Tars, an attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center. In almost every Western state, local neighborhoods have exploited housing codes to oppose the construction of homeless shelters. In the last decade, neighborhood opposition has blocked or significantly delayed homeless shelters in San Francisco, Denver, Portland and dozens of other cities. This opposition comes even as the shortage of shelters across the U.S. grows. Between 2023 and 2024, the number of community housing and homeless shelters rose by just 2.2%, while the homeless population increased 18%. And given the recent funding cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more shelters could shutter.
Lawsuits like VPNA’s are making it even harder for places like Interfaith to serve this growing population. “We haven’t been big enough for so long,” Peterson said. “Every night, we have a waitlist.”
“You’re giving them a safe place to sleep, but knowing that every night they’re going to come back after trying to navigate the world outside all day long is heartbreaking.”
IN 2021, VPNA PRESIDENT Katy Decker submitted a 170-page report to the Boise Planning and Zoning Commission, the body in charge of issuing the conditional use permit for Interfaith. The shelter would have too many negative impacts, bringing crime and noise and straining emergency services, the VPNA wrote. Decker told High Country News that the shelter should either stay downtown or move to another neighborhood — arguments similar to those used by neighborhood groups in other Western cities.
VPNA members also testified at public hearings of the Planning and Zoning Commission, which denied Interfaith’s permit. Interfaith then appealed to the Boise City Council, which reversed the commission’s decision. The neighborhood group then sued the city of Boise, and the case went to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the City Council’s decision, effectively rescinding Interfaith’s permit in January.
Decker said building a shelter in an already overburdened neighborhood is the wrong solution: “Why should this small and poor neighborhood bear the brunt of all of those negative externalities and substantial impacts?” She pointed to studies showing that concentrating poverty can worsen outcomes and prevent upward mobility for the neighborhood’s children. While the group describes Veterans Park as a low-income neighborhood, it is growing wealthier: Family median incomes have increased 25% between 2020 and 2023, according to census data.
The Veterans Park group has also cited data showing that after similar shelters were erected in residential Salt Lake City neighborhoods, the number of 911 calls within half a mile of them increased significantly.
Advocates — and even critics like Decker — agree that shelters play an important role in solving the housing crisis. But on a local scale, the relationship between crime and emergency housing is complicated, Tars said, and the issue is still under study. For instance, the Salt Lake City shelters VPNA referenced opened shortly before the pandemic, when crime was trending upward not only in those neighborhoods but across all of Salt Lake City, as well as nationwide. And while one academic study found that property crime and vandalism rates are higher within a half-mile radius of a homeless shelter, another found that low-barrier shelters have no correlation with crime in residential neighborhoods. The impact of homeless shelters on property values is similarly unclear, with reports showing mixed results.
The data doesn’t change the disconnect between the need for more shelters and local opposition to building them. “You can bring people the facts about all of this and people will say, ‘Yes, I agree with you on all of those things. Just do it somewhere else,’” Tars said.
“Why should this small and poor neighborhood bear the brunt of all of those negative externalities and substantial impacts?”
Due to the ongoing permit battle, Peterson-Stigers declined to comment on the shelter’s next steps, but despite the Idaho court’s decision, construction at Interfaith’s new site started in April 2024 and is ongoing. Peterson-Stigers is hopeful that it will open this October as planned. Interfaith’s case may make it easier to secure shelter permits in the face of future opposition, too: the Boise City Council is considering a rule change to give the council more power over appeals to overturn the Planning & Zoning Commission’s decisions.
There are policies cities can adopt so that neighborhood opposition doesn’t impact shelters, Tars said. Shelters are typically required to obtain a zoning permit, but a 2008 California law requires municipalities to remove that requirement in designated areas, making it easier to build shelters in some cities, though that hasn’t stopped neighborhood opposition. Cities can also remove conditional use permit requirements for shelter or housing, said Geoffrey Wardle, Interfaith’s attorney in the VPNA lawsuit, something that other cities in Idaho, like Nampa and Caldwell, are already doing.
Graves recently moved into permanent housing with her son, who has treatment-resistant epilepsy. She survives on $150 per month, which she gets from writing for and distributing a newspaper that Interfaith publishes. With the help of the staff at Interfaith, she is working on obtaining Social Security. She said that the shelter changed her outlook on life.
“We’re just a bunch of people coming from all walks of life that suddenly find ourselves in unfortunate circumstances. We’re no less deserving of your empathy and your understanding than your next-door neighbor,” Graves said.
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This article appeared in the April 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “No helping hand here.”
