In Brief:
- Many communities used hotels and motels as emergency homeless shelters during the pandemic.
- Some have moved to make those shelters permanent or redevelop them as low-income housing.
- Results have been mixed, but the model has caught on.
The former La Quinta Inn on Valentine Road in Ventura, Calif., is gradually being reoccupied. Not with guests, but with residents.
The new tenants, who began moving in last fall, are formerly homeless residents of Ventura County. In order to pay for operations, the San Buenaventura Housing Authority is using a combination of federal housing vouchers and state funding for behavioral health services. To finance the purchase and renovation, it used a combination of city and county loans and grants, with the biggest chunk, $32 million, coming from California’s Project Homekey, a pandemic-era program that helps localities convert hotels and motels into shelter and affordable housing.
At the height of the pandemic, cities and states scrambled to find housing for homeless individuals, motivated in part by a desire to get them out of shelters where disease could spread fast. Taking over hotels hasn’t worked everywhere but advocates say what was initially a rushed experiment has proven to be a durable and useful approach.
Ventura is a good example. To make the project successful in the long run, the housing authority will have to navigate uncertain funding for housing and social services in the coming years. But it’s already having an impact. “If the quality of life of the people living there is improved, if we can help them build a community where we feel this is their home, that will be a success,” says Jeffrey Lambert, the housing authority’s CEO.
After buying the hotel in 2023, his department set about refreshing it. The authority replaced the Spanish tile roof and outfitted it with solar panels. It filled in the pool and landscaped the courtyard. It built a new wheelchair-accessible ramp at a nearby bus stop. And it began converting the hotel rooms into studio apartments, with kitchenettes including induction cooktops, microwaves and full-size refrigerators.
“We gutted the rooms,” says Lambert. “They were brought back to the studs.”
Dire Needs
In the early days of the pandemic, homeless advocates and service providers pressed governments to find places for unhoused people to stay where they could quarantine and slow the spread of the coronavirus. Existing shelters tended to offer congregate settings, where people slept in close quarters with each other. An obvious place to turn was motels and hotels, many of which were suddenly empty as people stopped traveling.
California launched Project Roomkey in April 2020 as an emergency measure, using federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act money. It was one of a series of temporary housing measures around the country, including a program that housed around 9,000 people in hotel rooms in New York City. Two months later, California created Project Homekey, a more permanent measure designed to help California communities buy underutilized hotels and motels to create housing outright.
Since its inception, the program has awarded billions in federal and state funding to create more than 15,000 housing units across 259 projects, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
While it blew up during the emergency phase of the pandemic, the model of buying and renovating run-down hotels to serve as shelters and low-income housing had been developed by service providers and nonprofits in the decades prior. It has since spread around the country with efforts big and small, temporary and permanent, including one-off acquisitions by localities and state-run grant programs like California’s.
Montgomery County, Pa., for example, recently allocated about $670,000 to lease 62 rooms at a Days Inn for six months as part of an encampment-clearing effort. New Castle, Del., meanwhile is redeveloping a property it bought in December 2020 into long-term housing for families with a suite of services including medical and pediatric care.
Putting Properties to Use
Many communities view buying motels and hotels as a way to address homelessness while also revitalizing underused commercial property. But there have been ups and downs. Missoula, Mont., bought a Sleepy Inn at the edge of its downtown in 2020 and quickly put it to use for unhoused people. Given the property’s location, in a part of downtown that the city was hoping to revitalize, the city’s initial plan was to redevelop it as a long-term affordable housing complex.
“We decommissioned it as COVID was winding down and pretty quickly had a lot of undesirable behavior going on in the buildings,” says Ellen Buchanan, director of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency.
The property has sat vacant since the city demolished it in 2023. There’s been a slowdown in development around the city amid high interest rates and growing construction costs, Buchanan says. The redevelopment agency is now planning to simply sell the property.
“Right now, the property is not on the tax rolls,” she says. “It’s owned by the city and sitting vacant. I think we need to just get it redeveloped.”
Some communities have also faced resistance from neighbors to developing new shelters. Other efforts have fallen short, with one partnership between a nonprofit and for-profit developer failing to complete a series of projects after receiving tens of millions from California’s Project Homekey.
Where It’s Worked
But there have been many successful efforts, including in Western states, which are home to a disproportionate share of America’s homeless population.
Oregon’s Project Turnkey, for example, has used $125 million in state money to create 1,400 units in 27 cities, according to a 2024 report. The “vast majority” of those projects are still in use as shelters, says Megan Loeb, a senior program officer at the Oregon Community Foundation, which administered the Project Turnkey grants.
But some are being redeveloped for longer-term housing needs, including a property in Corvallis that a local organization bought with Turnkey funds. It was used as a shelter temporarily, then later demolished while additional funding was raised to build a permanent supportive housing complex.
Although Oregon’s Project Turnkey was launched because of a confluence of crises, including the pandemic and a devastating wildfire season in 2020, it’s resulted in projects that can help solve an ongoing problem, Loeb says. “We are here five years later with a pretty incredible asset in our state, which would not have existed if our legislature had made different decisions back in 2020,” she says. “We used one-time dollars in the face of a crisis to create an evergreen investment.”
