Change Coming to Boise’s Red Lion Downtowner

Part hotel, part shelter for homeless people in need of quarantine or medical care, or for families with children. Since 2020, that’s been the model of the Red Lion Downtowner Hotel, which rents about 40 hotel rooms to Boise’s Interfaith Sanctuary.

Since 2020, Boise’s Interfaith Sanctuary has housed families with children and people deemed medically vulnerable at the Red Lion Hotel in downtown Boise instead of the open-air dormitory on River Street. The hotel rooms offer more stability, privacy and home-like medical care.

Today, about 100 people live at the hotel, which has helped nearly 1,000 people since 2020. The shelter works with local medical providers to care for people who were “not sick enough to stay in the hospital, but … too sick to be released to the streets or returned” to Interfaith’s main shelter, just off Americana Boulevard, Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the shelter’s executive director, told the Idaho Statesman in an email.

In 2023, Jimmy Coonce was a resident of the Red Lion Hotel through a partnership with Boise's Interfaith Sanctuary. Coonce needed medical care that would have been impossible in an open dormitory. — In 2023, Jimmy Coonce was a resident of the Red Lion Hotel through a partnership with Boise’s Interfaith Sanctuary. Coonce needed medical care that would have been impossible to provide in an open dormitory.

The partnership was largely funded by federal COVID-19 relief money and other grants and began as a temporary solution to the pandemic and associated concerns about social distancing.

Now that funding is running out and Interfaith is beginning construction on a new shelter on State Street, including a medical dormitory, it’s time to limit the hotel’s use as a shelter, Maureen Brewer, the city’s senior manager of housing and community development, told the Boise City Council.

But the seven-story, 182-room hotel at 1800 W. Fairview Ave., which opened in 1960, won’t stop being a shelter anytime soon. City Council members have agreed to use the city’s remaining federal pandemic-relief funds — and about $250,000 in municipal funds — to extend the shelter’s contract with the hotel through September 2025, instead of March, when current funding was set to expire.

The new funding will be a “bridge” until the planned opening of Interfaith’s new shelter in October, Brewer said. That “longer runway … best positions us to send people to housing” rather than to another shelter, Brewer said.

She said the Boise Rescue Mission, at least in the short term, will take in many residents in need of medical care.

“Boise Rescue Mission comes to our aid in this situation,” Council President Colin Nash said during the July 16 meeting.

“Interfaith Sanctuary breathed a sigh of relief” in response to the decision, Peterson-Stigers told the Statesman. She told the council the extension would allow her team and partners to rehouse residents “responsibly.”

In 2023, Chris and April Kuper, along with daughter Jesse, 8, and son Shawn, 15, lived at the Red Lion Hotel as part of the Interfaith Sanctuary program for medically vulnerable individuals and families with children. April was diagnosed with breast cancer the same month she and her family lost their home.

The cost of running a shelter at the hotel for five years — from May 2020 through next spring — was about $8 million, but only 14% of that funding came from city funds, Brewer said. The hotel charged $75 a night for each room it rented to the shelter, though there were additional insurance and operating costs. (For regular guests, the hotel’s nightly rate for a room with two double beds in July was $136.)

Ignite Hotels bought the Red Lion in 2018 and promised a $10 million renovation for the hotel, which was last renovated in 2006, the Statesman reported in 2019. That renovation never happened.

Gurbir Sandhu and Philip Camacho, the hotel’s owner and general manager, did not respond to emails and a telephone message seeking comment about plans for the hotel.

Brewer said the city’s new contract with the hotel will be significantly smaller, with just 15 rooms and more flexibility to scale back as the hotel stops accepting new guests in the coming months and current guests leave.

The move comes amid Boise’s push to bring more permanent supportive housing and affordable housing online. In July, the city announced a partnership with an Eagle-based real estate firm to finance 95 new apartments for the homeless at New Path 2.0, part of a housing complex at 2200 W. Fairview Ave. that offers supportive housing and case management. The expansion would more than double the number of permanent apartments for the chronically homeless.

“Ensuring more housing for more people within Boise’s budget is a relentless and central focus of the city,” Mayor Lauren McLean said in a July press release.

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