Motels4Now

Letter from the Board President Margaret Pfeil Outlining Program History and Vision Moving Forward:

When Our Lady of the Road opened in December 2006, we could scarcely have imagined that sixteen years later, the same friends we met over breakfast each weekend would still be in need of housing. And yet, so it is. With the onset of the COVID-19 shutdown, things grew even worse for our friends without housing. As Weather Amnesty overnight shelter ended April 30, 2020, more than 100 people were consigned to live in tents with no sanitation facilities and no potable water access on the edge of a shuttered downtown South Bend. During a long, hot summer, tents sprang up in the sweltering asphalt parking lot of an old DMV building down the street from our Catholic Worker community. At least two children were born to mothers living in those tents. 

Finding that public officials seemed overwhelmed and unable to resolve the situation, our neighborhood association invited some of them to take part in weekly Zoom calls with residents of our neighborhood and to meet with people living in the tents. The goal was to find a way forward that served the common good. After three months of such efforts, one of Our Lady of the Road’s longtime supporters offered to provide bridge funding, and his donation was immediately matched by another friend of the Catholic Worker. With this initial $60,000, we were able to move people from tents into motel rooms around South Bend, housing over 80 people by the end of September 2020. 

St. Joseph County then offered to fund this new program, “Motels4Now,” using CARES Act monies. With that support, Sheila McCarthy joined the M4N team as Director and built a staff of twenty people to run what has become northern Indiana’s only low-barrier intake center, housing 120 people at a time. 

Now, after more than two years in operation, we are humbled and amazed that over 500 people have participated in the program, with 75% being stably housed either at the motel or in other positive options. Our community mental health provider, Oaklawn, has provided wrap-around mental health and addiction recovery services, with at least 360 motel residents entering treatment for mental health and/or substance use disorder over the last two years. 

Yet, about 170 people sign up for the M4N waitlist every ninety days, and we have at least fifty residents with housing vouchers in hand but nowhere to use them due to the acute lack of affordable housing in our area, and in particular, the growing need for permanent supportive housing units. As a result of this cascading backlog, more tents are springing up around South Bend again as people wait to enter M4N and then must wait months more for permanent housing. 

Our goal is to transition Motels4Now into a permanent low-barrier intake center, building a facility specifically designed for this purpose and offering dignified accommodations. Our preliminary design, developed by Kil Architecture, calls for thirty-eight double-occupancy rooms with an additional four ADA single rooms. We have been awarded a $2.5 million grant from the Department of Mental Health and Addiction toward capital costs for the New Day Intake Center. In addition, the City of South Bend has committed $4 million toward capital costs and $500,000 in annual operating costs for this new low-barrier facility.