Marshalling Yard shelter could get $1M extension and stay open through March 2025

The city’s Marshalling Yard congregate shelter, which currently serves up to 300 people at a time, could receive an extension from City Council to stay open until next March. An item on today’s agenda would provide an additional $1 million to Family Endeavors Inc. to continue managing the shelter while the city works to add more bridge shelters and permanent supportive housing capacity.

At Tuesday’s work session, Council members discussed the progress at the Marshalling Yard, which was converted last spring into a congregate facility to serve people who the city moved out of homeless encampments around the area.

David Gray, homeless strategy officer, explained that the Marshalling Yard has achieved a 20 percent success rate at moving inhabitants into more stable housing. While that success rate is far below the 70 percent Family Endeavors forecasted it would achieve, Gray said it is roughly double what is seen at congregate shelters in other cities across the country.

“Seventy percent for a congregate-style shelter is a great goal, but it is an estimate, and what we’ve done … is work with Endeavors when we noticed early on that we were not even close to the goal that we established,” he said. “While we were trending with national peers, we weren’t trending well enough for ourselves, is we’ve taken those steps to double that positive exit rate.”

For context, Gray said inhabitants of bridge shelter housing have about a 50 percent success rate for moving into stable housing, while those moved into permanent supportive housing provided by the city have a success rate of over 90 percent.

Council Member Ryan Alter said that the projected deficit in city budgets over the next two years should force Council and staff to examine whether the $1 million could be better spent providing rental assistance or housing vouchers to those about to lose their homes.

“Thinking about deploying these dollars in a manner that gets more people into housing, even though it’s a smaller number of people served, you could take the ($3 million) dollars left over from this contract and give 250 people rent for the next eight months and have them all be housed. Or you could do 300 (permanent supportive housing) project-based vouchers for that amount of time,” he said.

“I am struggling in this regard to look at how we are spending the dollars for the outcomes we’re getting and the outcomes that we want to see,” he said.

Gray said the success rate for the Marshalling Yard could increase by next March because the city recently added 168 bridge shelter beds at the former Salvation Army shelter downtown, and 400 more permanent supportive housing units in the coming months. Another move that could have a positive impact is a forthcoming request for proposal for vendors to help provide services and assistance to those at risk of losing their homes.

In response to a question from Council Member Alison Alter about how the city will handle the Marshalling Yard residents as the March 2025 closure draws near, Gray said the facility will reduce its intake of former encampment residents and find as many bridge shelter beds as possible.

Interim City Manager Jesús Garza likened the Marshalling Yard to a hospital emergency room, serving as an essential triage facility to help those living on the streets get medical attention, meals and other services needed before they seek stable housing.

“In a hospital system you have emergency rooms, you have step-up, which is intermediate care … and the intensive care unit. You need all those elements of the system to take care of people who need care,” he said. “The emergency room and the ICU is arguably the most expensive that you have in the system and those are the individuals with multiple comorbidities that take a lot of expense to get them well. While this is not exactly on point, you need all three. You need emergency shelter, you need transitional housing, you need permanent supportive housing.”

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