At the end of a week of uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Interfaith Community Shelter (also known as Pete’s Place), a shelter serving Santa Fe’s homeless population for more than 15 years, the City of Santa Fe has officially declared via press release that it intends to terminate the homeless shelter’s lease at 2801 Cerrillos Road, if the Governing Body votes to approve the plan at a June 3 meeting.
“In recent years, it has become apparent that the impacts of this shelter have outgrown the capacity of [Interfaith Community Shelter],” the press release says. “The homeless problem has expanded and the nature of the impacts on the neighboring community have become intolerable.”
The press release cites public safety along Cerrillos Road as the No. 1 concern that led city staff to this conclusion, noting that last year alone, police responded to more than 3,200 calls for service in the area surrounding the shelter, and responded to 1,350 calls between January and April this year. The Santa Fe Fire Department has also responded to more than 1,300 calls in the past two and a half years for overdoses, injuries and other medical emergencies at the area surrounding Interfaith.
“There is a lot of data and history that shows that we really are already responding pretty significantly to the challenges at that site, and it's overwhelming and untenable in the current status quo, and that's what has pushed the city to take considerable steps to make things better,” Community Health and Safety Director Henri Hammond-Paul tells SFR.
Andy Lyman
The Interfaith Community Shelter at Pete’s Place offers rows of bunk beds.
If the Governing Body approves the city’s recommendation to end Interfaith’s lease on Tuesday, Hammond-Paul says the city will replace Interfaith’s services through a one-year, $1.5 million emergency contract with Urban Alchemy, an organization known for its “track record of success” in managing homeless shelters with a focus on public safety in cities across the country, including Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland. The shelter would operate at the same location that Interfaith currently occupies.
“This will be a one-year contract, and during that time, the city is going to work incredibly diligently to evaluate whether the shelter should remain in that location, or if and how a new location can be established,” Hammond-Paul says.
The city planning to phase out the shelter’s current location is not new—Mayor Alan Webber announced the city’s new Homelessness Emergency Action Plan in October last year to address public safety concerns from residents and business owners along the Cerrillos Road corridor.
However, leadership at Pete’s Place have been critical of the sudden decision, and the lack of involvement the city has given the shelter in closed-door discussions. Deputy Director Beverly Kellam says the direction the city has taken has left her with a feeling of “profound disappointment.”
“We've been operating on $150,000 a year from the city. This other organization is able to walk in with $1.5 million from the city, and that just feels almost cruel to us,” Kellam says. “What we could do with even half of the funding that they're offering this other organization—it pains me to think of it. We've implored, even begged the city for more funding for things like security and other things that we think might help the situation.”
Kellam also notes that while Interfaith has been working to address public safety concerns surrounding the shelter, she feels prescribing the problems that come with a growing homeless population and continuing drug epidemic as being caused by the shelter’s existence as misplaced.
“The shelter exists to help people who are homeless, but we didn't create the fentanyl crisis, we didn't create homelessness in Santa Fe and we didn't create the housing crisis,” Kellam says. “It's way too simplistic to say, ‘The reason there are so many homeless people on Cerrillos Road and in Santa Fe is because there's a homeless shelter here’—that's backwards thinking.”
SFR File Photo
Korina Lopez
Additionally, Interfaith Executive Director Korina Lopez noted at a May 28 meeting that Interfaith had only found out about the city’s planned discussion of officially terminating the shelter’s lease when she saw it on the agenda a few days before the meeting. At the May 28 meeting, the Santa Fe City Council met in a private session to discuss the termination of Interfaith’s lease and voted against disclosing the contents of that session after returning to the public.
Hammond-Paul says the city has met regularly with Interfaith “for years,” and met with shelter leadership in October last year to transition the organization to a month-to-month lease at the property on 2801 Cerrillos Road, “with the very clear understanding that a month-to-month lease is not a sustainable term for an organization.”
“There have been previous discussions about these intentions,” Hammond-Paul says. “What we have to do is present recommendations to the Governing Body for them to direct…that's the background on why this has played out the way it has. A lot of it is the bureaucratic process that is identified in our city charter and code about how these kinds of decisions are ultimately made.”
Kellam says the threat of lease termination looming over Interfaith means 26 employees are at risk of losing their jobs, and that when Interfaith met with the city Friday morning, “there was no commitment whatsoever” to Interfaith’s employees.
“They said [they] hope that interfaith will be able to employ them, but I don't know how they would expect that to happen when we don't even have a location for an overnight shelter,” Kellam says. “It's been heartbreak. We have employees who have been with the shelter for 15 years. They are profoundly committed to the mission.”
The Friday press release states that if the Governing Body votes according to the city’s recommendation, the city will not reduce capacity or cut any services during the transitional period between Interfaith and Urban Alchemy.
“The City is committed to preserving—if not expanding—the number of low-barrier shelter beds in our community,” the press release says. “No one will be left without a place to go. This transition is about making sure the City can adequately shape our homelessness response system to meet the needs of our whole community.”
Adam Ferguson
Steve Albert (pictured on the left) says the situation around the Pete’s Place shelter on Harrison Road has gotten “exponentially worse” in recent months.
Kellam, however, says that replacing Interfaith’s services with another organization’s would hurt Santa Fe’s homeless population, and the relationships Interfaith has built with them.
“We know the people who have been staying at the shelter by name, and not only do we know them by name, but we have been working with other community providers to get them the help they need,” Kellam says. “One of the basic tenets of providing services to people who are homeless is the idea that they have experienced extreme trauma, and anyone who thinks that this wouldn't be another trauma upon all of their trauma is fooling themselves.”
Kellam says that ahead of the Governing Body meeting scheduled at 5 pm on June 3, she encourages supporters of Pete’s Place to sign up to speak at the meeting, share support on social media or call their city council representative.
“We're focused on doing everything we can while remaining positive for [the lease termination] not to happen,” Kellam says. “It's still a matter of the city council vote, and there are some people who think it's a done deal, but our focus right now has been on June 3.”
