Motels converted to house families at capacity, new homeless intake center expected to hit limit

Clark County officials estimate nearly 400 families have been diverted from the child welfare system since 2021 when they began housing families experiencing homelessness in motels converted into shelter. 

Brenda Barnes, a senior management analyst with the Clark County Department of Families Services, told commissioners on Tuesday that while a common reason families enter into the child welfare system was for neglect, “we noticed that the neglect had more to do with our lack of community resources and in many cases housing instability.”

“We saw an opportunity with vacant hotels and created an innovative way to keep families together and address the root cause of why they ended up in our child welfare system,” she said.

Clark County commissioners on Tuesday received an overview of the various properties that have been converted into non-congregate shelters, which provide private or individual rooms opposed to a dorm-like setting of emergency congregate shelters.

The county began securing master leases for entire motels throughout the valley to house seniors and families during the pandemic and most recently it converted another Motel 6 in Las Vegas into the “Navigation Center” as a 70-bed homeless intake center for unhoused adults without children. 

The new center, which opened in July, served 161 people in its first 45 days.

In an email, the county said 45 people who stayed at the property went on to transitional housing, a temporary housing placement with supportive services, while six were able to get their own place.  

Also among the list of converted hotel properties discussed at the commission meeting included the Rodeway Inn, which houses seniors, and two former La Quinta properties, one which focuses specifically on families. 

The model of converting motels into shelter space, officials said, has helped address underlying issues of homelessness by providing housing and individualized case management, but the county needs more of them. 

“All of these locations are at or near capacity, especially our families and Rodeway Inn location,” Barnes said. 

‘…as opposed to one big venue’

Commissioners want to expand their efforts to convert more hotels into shelters with individualized case management even as the state passed legislation designed to create a large campus.

Assembly Bill 528, a bill introduced and passed within the final days of this year’s legislative session, establishes a $100 million matching fund to build a centralized campus based on the Haven for Hope model in San Antonio, Texas.

The bill, supported by the resort industry, would create a “transformational campus” similar to the Courtyard Resource Homeless Center in the City of Las Vegas.   

Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick asked Barnes if there was benefit to having individual navigation centers “as opposed to one big venue.”

“I struggle with the thought of putting 2,000 people in the same place at once without the wrap-around services,” Kirkpatrick said. “The wrap-around services are truly making the difference.” 

Kirkpatrick said she’d rather hear Barnes’s take rather than a “plethora of experts that have their own agenda, to be honest.” 

“I think we need navigation centers across the valley so they are accessible to everyone, and everyone who is ready to accept services are able to access it,” Barnes said. 

In a previous interview, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom said instead of the initiative passed by state lawmakers, he would rather the funds go toward building additional navigation centers, saying “we don’t want a $100 million courtyard.”

On Tuesday, he again questioned the legislation and said the county is working to see if the bill could instead support its efforts to convert motels into more non-congregate spaces. 

He said the approach to homelessness and whether to build another campus as opposed to converting motels will be a “a huge philosophical discussion we need to have in the next couple years.”

“Hopefully our attorney can work with that legislation and figure out how to fund our navigation centers,” he said. “I like the navigation center and diversifying it around the valley to smaller places where we don’t impact the neighborhood, but that’s going to have to be the debate we have in the next couple years.”

Alarming data

The county’s approach to addressing homelessness comes as recent reports show Southern Nevada saw the sharpest spike in its unhoused population in nearly a decade. 

“We are housing a (larger) nontraditional homeless population than we were five years ago,” said Clark County manager Kevin Schiller.

The 2023 Point-in-Time Count, an annual snapshot of homelessness on one particular night, counted 6,566 people, a 16% increase from 2022 when 5,645 unhoused people were identified.

The data estimates 16,251 people will experience homelessness at some point in the year compared to 13,972 a year prior.

The results were most alarming among families experiencing homelessness, which had a 54% increase. The data showed 794 families were experiencing homelessness, about 12% of the entire homeless population and up from 516 in 2022.

Initially, families were housed at the Rodeway Inn in 2021, and then at one of the La Quinta properties in November 2022. 

The county has housed 640 families in non-congregate shelter motels since 2021, which includes 784 adults and 1,491 children.

Barnes said 358 families were diverted from the child welfare system. 

Commissioners were briefed at a meeting earlier last month on efforts, and barriers, to recruit foster homes in order to deal with the roughly 3,000 children in foster care in Southern Nevada.

The county’s Department of Family Services at the time said that in addition to a rise in the number of cases with neglect, they had seen an increase of people entering foster care due to homelessness and inadequate housing. 

Families who stay at the La Quinta site are able to get case management, access workforce development and child care along with housing assistance, such as applying for Housing Choice Vouchers, often referred to as Section 8. 

“Once someone was able to retain their voucher, they were able to move out and we were able to close that child welfare case,” Barnes said. 

The county, she added, has also been able to close out child welfare cases just because families are staying at the facilities. 

“They don’t need to be involved with child welfare if poverty is the only issue,” she said.

The Navigation Center, located in East Las Vegas, is the county’s latest project. 

The center allows single childless adults experiencing homelessness to stay consistently housed for up to 30 days as they begin to figure out the next steps to fully exit homelessness. 

In addition to meals, showers and a place to sleep, the center helped 69 people access medical services and medications, and 27 received access to mental and behavioral help services. 

 “We had some move on and they were able to get their own place,” Barnes said. “Others are moving into our transitional housing non-congregate shelter location and receiving ongoing assistance waiting for documents so they can then move on throughout the continuum of care.”

In an email, the county said 45 beds are currently occupied at the Navigation Center. They anticipate hitting the 70-bed capacity this month. 

One of the biggest challenges, Barnes said, is helping people who lost identification and birth certificates.

“They lose their IDs when they are incarcerated and don’t get them upon return,” she said. “We hear that a lot. A lot of them don’t have them.”

The county on Tuesday didn’t outline additional efforts to bring more motels online.