Alamosa has halted plans to build a second homeless shelter following broad concern from residents that the project would add more people to the San Luis Valley city’s already growing unhoused population.
After considering the combination soup kitchen and shelter proposal for more than two years, city council members voted unanimously on Nov. 6 to return $145,000 in grants awarded for planning costs for the $2 million facility.
“The community spoke loud and clear,” Alamosa Mayor Ty Coleman said in an interview with CPR News. “When you have a segment of the population that don't want to abide by the rules and regulations … and people who don't want to receive help — I think that's where they draw the line.”
According to Lance Cheslock, the executive director of local homeless services organization La Puente, plans for the facility began following an uptick in the use of their downtown soup kitchen.
“The numbers were really high,” Cheslock said, and his team began work with the city to relocate the soup kitchen out of the densely populated downtown to “bring relief to the neighborhood” from disturbances caused by the unhoused population. The site of the new food kitchen would have been near the St. Benedict campsite, a two-acre plot on the city’s south side that the city approved for tent encampments in 2020.
“We already have a soup kitchen, so just relocating the same service wasn’t really helping more people and that would be a very expensive facility,” Cheslock said in explaining an eventual change of plans between La Puente and the city. Among other things, it would have expanded the scope of the facility to also include an emergency weather shelter for use in the coldest months of the year.
Finding qualified workers to staff such a shelter for short-term, several-month contracts was deemed unfeasible, so La Puente sought to further expand the proposal to a year-round low-barrier shelter to provide housing for those unable to stay at La Puente’s existing 45-bed shelter. The facility would have served people under the influence of drugs or alcohol or those with certain behavioral health problems.
“They were wanting this facility to allow for those behaviors that the community just at the end of the day decided is not the best benefit of the city of Alamosa,” Coleman said.
Cheslock estimated that about 140 people in the city are unhoused. A low-barrier shelter is still needed, he said, adding that he was grateful for other assistance the city has provided his organization, like providing grant funds to both help open a new Alamosa food pantry and to bolster La Puente’s homeless employment program.
“I really feel like we will be able to come back to the city in the future at some point and make our case for the hundred people that don't have a safe place to stay,” Cheslock said. “It was 17 degrees the other night, and that's what people have to face with being out there.”
