How New Castle County's Hope Center is closing funding gaps with emergency hotel vouchers

It was a Friday morning in August when Tameka Alexander was told she’d need to leave the New Castle County Hope Center by noon that day.

The 41-year-old’s emergency motel voucher from the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services was spent, and there was no longer any funding to cover Alexander’s stays at the emergency shelter off Airport Road near New Castle.

“Right now, I honestly have nowhere to go,” Alexander told Delaware Online/The News Journal at the time. “I was going to go against doctor orders … but now that I almost had a stroke, the doctor wants me to take care of myself.”

Many houseless individuals and families who come to the Hope Center run into a similar issue.

While pandemic relief money helped keep families at the center for over a year – and in some cases, over two years – the additional funding has been exhausted, and now officials must find ways to bridge the funding gap left by motel vouchers reverting back to a maximum payout of $1,200.

The vouchers are one of several different sources that funding can come from to house families at the Hope Center, which also offers medical services on-site.

The Hope Center charges $50 per day for stays at the homeless shelter, making it financially advantageous to send households with a voucher there. Other motels that provide emergency shelter can charge more, with some costing around $100 per night.

HOPE CENTER FUNDING: Former-hotel-turned-shelter gets $750K in federal money to fix roof, transport residents

SHELTER BACKGROUND: 'I'm not scared anymore': New Castle County's hotel-turned-homeless shelter gets underway

At the Hope Center, the voucher can stretch 24 days, but even then, county officials recognize that isn’t enough time for houseless individuals and families to find safe, permanent and affordable housing.

“You are barely breathing at 24 days. We really believe if we could get 90 days, most of our individuals could be rehoused,” said Carrie Casey, manager of the Division of Community Development and Housing for New Castle County. “We’ve been trying to find creative ways to fund a longer stay, and that is part of our sustainability plan.”

Making the Hope Center sustainable

The gap in funding from the motel vouchers is a critical challenge for the Hope Center, which will work with individuals who have exhausted the voucher’s funds to accommodate longer stays but often at a cost to the county, Carey said.

Referred to as a “comp,” New Castle County will extend a family’s stay if they are actively participating in the program by doing things like seeking gainful employment or going to substance use meetings and medical appointments, she said. The center also has rules people must follow like abiding curfews and treating center employees with respect.

“After that 24 days, the county gets absolutely no revenue for that person’s stay,” Carey said. “There have been times when half our clients are in that situation.”

Alexander’s stay has been “comped” since her voucher was exhausted.

The 195-room former Sheraton Hotel can house up to 500 people and offers adjoining rooms that can accommodate larger families – a growing subset of those facing housing insecurities that are often challenging to shelter in emergency situations without having to split up the family unit.

During the height of the pandemic, the New Castle County Hope Center housed upward of 480 people – more than half of them children – who may have otherwise had no place to go when communal shelters became a COVID-19 risk.

In its first years, the Hope Center was financially boosted by federal COVID-19 emergency funds and operated by third-party contractors. Now, the pandemic relief money is gone, and the county has taken the reins.

SHELTER CONTRACTOR: Did the Delaware Center for Homeless Veterans misuse pandemic money meant for Hope Center?

The Hope Center now has about 350 people living in the former hotel, with half of those being children.

It costs between $4 million and $4.5 million annually to operate, Carey said.

The county hopes to release a sustainability plan for the Hope Center this fall, Carey added, which aims to tackle the funding gap.

Challenges with closing the funding gap

Delaware Department of Health and Social Services officials say there are several hurdles to closing the funding gap with the motel voucher program.

It currently is structured such that houseless individuals can access the $1,200 motel voucher only once every 12 months, a cap that was established by the Delaware General Assembly in 1998 and hasn’t changed since.

“Anything we do around increasing the cap will have to be supported by our friends in the Legislature,” Health Department Deputy Secretary Daniel Walker said, adding that he wasn’t aware of any proposed legislation to adjust the cap at this time.

The program is also at the mercy of hotels and motels accepting the voucher payment, much like tenants are at the mercy of landlords in their willingness to accept federal housing assistance for rent.

BEYOND SHELTER: 'Helping all of us have a future': Hope Center focuses on vaccinating those most vulnerable

“The other challenge for the program outside of the imposed cap and the coalition of the willing, is we also have a major affordable housing shortage across the state and quite frankly across the country,” Walker said. “Recent studies have come out with about 22,000 units short of affordable housing in the state of Delaware alone. That is a challenge for us as well.”

Given those challenges, state health officials said they’re looking within the program and its existing funding to see how longer stays can be accommodated. The question is how long of a stay is appropriate, Walker said.

“There is a balance between how much we provide in terms of the length of stay and what is effective in navigating the ecosystems to find housing,” he said.

Got a tip? Contact Amanda Fries at afries@delawareonline.com, or by calling or texting 302-598-5507. Follow her on X at @mandy_fries.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Hope Center looks to close gap in Delaware hotel voucher funding