SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio homeless shelter hopes it won’t completely lose public funding, despite the city’s plans to halt funding.
“We hope that we are able to compel the city, and candidly, the county as well, to continue to invest in this as a resource for the community because we don’t want to see it go away,” Nikisha Baker, the president and CEO of San Antonio Metropolitan Ministries said.
SAMMinistries has operated the 313-room Holiday Inn at Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Santa Rosa Avenue since 2023 as a “low-barrier” shelter geared toward helping people with disabling physical or mental health conditions, who have experienced long-term homelessness, on the path to permanent housing.
Individuals at the shelter do not need to be sober, participate in a drug screening, meet residency requirements for the city or have a clean criminal record.
However, due to a nearby childcare center, they can’t allow registered sex offenders.
In the first two budget years, the shelter served 526 people, according to city budget documents, and more than half of them had “positive exits” to positive housing, like vouchers, reunification with family, long-term medical care or other assistance.
Baker says they’ve served another 340 people since the beginning of this fiscal year in October.
The City of San Antonio formerly paid for the shelter using pandemic-era federal relief dollars through the American Rescue Plan Act. This year, the city put $4.8 million from its own budget toward lease costs, while SAMMinistries funded the operations.
That lease ends on Oct. 31, and the city has no plans to continue funding it.
The city’s future plans to tackle homelessness include leveraging bond dollars to build shelter capacity, but those plans also assume the continued existence of the 300-plus beds currently at SAMMinistries.
“I think what we’re working with SAMMinistries and the homeless response system to be able to absorb, at least temporarily, what’s in that location today‚" San Antonio Chief Housing Officer Mark Carmona said two weeks ago.
Baker said she doesn’t know where the shelter’s beds would be absorbed.
They currently use about 150 to 175 of the rooms, Baker said. As of Tuesday, they only had 106 people on site because they don’t know what will happen with the shelter.
“Is it the most responsible thing for us to take in a new client tomorrow that we don’t have a solution for in 90 days, and then they have the potential to be displaced?” Baker said.
SAMMinistries is pursuing $7.5 million in non-competitive funding from the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs for capital costs which could acquire, build, or rehabilitate a permanent site
Its application is due in early July, and Baker expects to hear in August or September “whether or not that could be a viable opportunity for us.”
Baker estimated it would still realistically take nine to 12 months to start operating at a new, permanent site.
Baker said SAMMinistries has been proactively looking where it could temporarily relocate its operation, but the shelter can’t continue to operate a site of the current size without outside support.
“Maybe if it’s 50 units,” Baker said. “Maybe if it’s 75 units that we can figure out how to continue to fund and operate with the community of partners that we have.”
Running 175 shelter units without city or state funding is “not reasonable” for SAMMinistries, Baker said.
The end of city funding has been expected though. San Antonio City Manager Erik Walsh told council members “it is not a long-term sustainable option for us,” after he presented a draft of the current budget last August.
“The city can’t expect that there are beds available without making an investment in that," Baker said. She also mentioned the city’s request for proposal process this year included an emergency shelter component.
“So while they’re indicating that at council that they don’t want to continue to fund the lease, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t fund some other mechanism to facilitate low-barrier shelter,” Baker said.
Both the city and Bexar County are in a budget crunch, but Councilwoman Sukh Kaur (D1), who represents the downtown area where the shelter sits, expressed support at a recent discussion for adding it into the budget “at least until we have a bridge.”
“If this is the number one thing that our community is telling us that we need to do, shutting down our lowest barrier shelter, I think, is a mistake,” Kaur said, referring to homeless services’ place at the top of residents’ list of service priorities.
The shelter does not currently receive funding from Bexar County, but County Judge Peter Sakai is open to consideration.
“We’re going to have to just balance the budget,“ Sakai said. ”We’re gonna consider everything. Just remember that the homelessness issue — the issue with the unhoused — is a top priority. And so we’re gonna try to make sure that the least of us in our community are protected."
Both the city and county fiscal years begin on October 1. They’re both expected to pass budgets in September.
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