Eight Lessons from Motels4Now

Photo of Motels4Now resident by Myriam Nicodemus

Low-Barrier Shelter and Housing First Success Story Shows Us What is Possible

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog, Housing Is A Human Right

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of visiting a program in South Bend, Indiana called Motels4Now. My resulting article, Low-Barrier Shelter a Success, But Not an Easy One, is published in Shelterforce, which for 45 years has been a leading community development and affordable housing publication. Please consider reading the full article there—here is the link.

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After reading the piece, I hope you are as inspired by Motels4Now as I am. I can’t claim any expertise with the challenges of meeting the needs of our sisters and brothers who fall into the category of being chronically homeless. (Most of our eviction clients who become unhoused would be characterized as “transitionally” homeless.) But here are the eight lessons I took away from the experience:

1.     Lead With Compassion

My first-draft opening line for this article was “No one said operating a low-barrier shelter was going to be easy.” The scenes from Motels4Now include loud arguments, police runs, mental health breakdowns, and a lot of substance abuse. The residents include people struggling with alcoholism and other addictions, people who are non-compliant with their mental health medicines, and sex offenders.

The key to low-barrier shelters, and by extension the entire Housing First philosophy, is to accept and care for all these people as they are, with compassion. As Motels4Now director Sheila McCarthy puts it, the mission has to be “to see people without judgment, to love people without attachment, and let them be who they are without projecting your disappointment onto them.”

2.     Housing is Healing—But Not Always Immediately

The Motels4Now office features a beautiful print made by a local artist that says, “Housing is Healing.” But the healing does not always proceed on a convenient timetable. The majority of Motels4Now current residents are what many programs would consider failures, since they have been kicked out of Motels4Now in the past, often multiple times. (The staff prefers the term “taking a break.”)

But when a resident is asked to take a break, they are at the same time immediately placed on the waiting list to return. When they do so, they are almost always a step closer to stability. “You can see when our repeat guests come back, they are a little better each time,” McCarthy says. “When people have been on the street for years, struggling with so many mental health and addiction challenges, the healing can take a while.”

3.     Be Bold

When you lead with compassion, that means being willing to take risks and live with imperfections, both with the residents and the program itself. The Motels4Now founders admit that the program was a bit of a “Ready, Fire, Aim” urgent response to the crisis caused by the closing of congregate shelters in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Aiming continues, including plans for a new low-barrier intake center and permanent supportive housing.

But, since the beginning of the program in late 2020, 650 people have been provided dignified, safe shelter, and most of them have been successfully launched toward permanent housing. Anyone who has ever been part of a planning process could easily envision how those three years could instead have been swallowed up by endless “stakeholder” meetings, circulating attractive pie-chart slide decks, devising fundraising strategies, and consensus-building sessions. All of that work is important, but Motels4Now did not wait for it to take place before acting: they stepped up and tackled a pressing need. Which is how compassion works.

4.       Don’t Forget What is on the Other Side of “4Now”

As the name suggests, Motels4Now does not pretend that motel rooms are the long-term answer for their residents. Beyond providing immediate shelter that is an important initial step in the Housing First response for many people, the program then helps place its residents in permanent housing and provides support after the placement. Its most impressive success stories are not present onsite: they are the 400-plus Motels4Now alumni who are now safely and stably housed across the community.

5.     The Market Will Not Save Us

There is no “business model” for anything connected to Motels4Now and the needs of its residents. For people who are facing enormous challenges and usually limited to a $914 monthly SSI check for their total income, for-profit housing is not the answer.

So Our Lady of the Road, the operator of Motels4Now, is a non-profit organization. The program is largely funded through government dollars, first from the CARES Act and then the American Rescue Plan. The long-term housing placements for most residents are only possible because they have access to Housing Choice Vouchers funded by the federal government. This is a publicly-funded response, and that is how we end our housing crisis.

6.     The Dignity and Privacy of Motel-Type Shelters is Far Superior to Congregate Shelters

Filmmaker and advocate for the homeless Don Sawyer is quoted in the piece making the point supported by multiple studies: immediate shelter programs that use motels or hotels provide a far safer and more healthy response than congregate shelters. “For the first time in years for some of them, people can lock their own door, put their things away, and find a little bit of calm where they can safely breathe, where they can safely think,” Sawyer says. “And that usually allows them to move toward stability.”

7.     Religious Communities Can Help—If They Embrace Humility

Religious communities’ response to homelessness has been both life-saving and controversial. So-called “pray to stay” shelters are problematic enough that many unhoused people prefer the streets to shelter environments they find to be degrading and manipulative.

But, as this newsletter has pointed out in the past, many religious communities embrace housing as a human right—no strings attached. That is the ethic of Motels4Now, which arises out of the Catholic Worker movement. Its housing director, Eliana Armounfelder, says in the article, ““A low-barrier commitment to shelter is the same as Jesus’s approach, because it was his mission to be with the people that others shun. When our guests have been kicked out of virtually every other setting, accompanying them is clearly what the Gospels tell us to do.”

Motels4Now director McCarthy, a Ph.D. theologian, points out that this same commitment can be found in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc., etc. And Motels4Now lives out the commitment by never proselytizing to its residents.  

8.     Zero Homelessness is Possible

For me, the power of observing Motels4Now in action was that it provides a real-life embodiment of the two dozen-plus studies and many international examples showing that the Housing First approach works. It won’t always be easy and not every community has to do it exactly the way South Bend and Motels4Now are tackling the challenge. But we absolutely can ensure that all of our sisters and brothers are housed.

As McCarthy says, “It is no exaggeration to say we have ended long-term homelessness in our community.” With examples like this to follow, the rest of us have no excuse not to do the same.