Jennifer Castillo, Washington County’s director of community services, stands near an old garage on the campus of the Washington County Government Center in Stillwater, where next year a $12 million emergency homeless shelter will be built.

Washington County officials have been working for more than a decade to address the lack of adequate emergency housing in the county.

“These are people who live in our communities, and they are asking for help,” Castillo said during a recent tour of the site. “They are asking for services. They are asking for support. We are trying to help them get to a good, stable point in their lives.”

The 30,000-square-foot shelter, scheduled to open next fall, will provide short-term housing to individuals over age 18. The average stay is expected to be around 90 days.

The two-story building will have 30 private rooms — four on the first floor and 26 on the second floor — with 24/7 staffing to provide people experiencing homelessness a place to stay while county officials help them find permanent housing and employment. They’ll also have access to social-service support, well-being support, legal help and help in gathering important documents, Castillo said.

The programming that will be offered to residents is key, said Karly Schoeman, deputy executive director of the Washington County Community Development Agency.

“This isn’t people coming in who can only stay for the evening and then they have to leave during the day,” she said. “There’s programming all day long. This is a 24/7 building, and we have all of the supports available through the county for residents of this building, so if they need help with whatever barriers they’re facing to permanent housing, they have to be addressing that in order to stay. They have to be working with the program.”

The project — the first of its kind in the county — will greatly reduce the need for contracting with local hotels to provide emergency shelter, Castillo said. Some contracts will remain in place to support families and people affected by critical events.

“We have been operating an interim shelter for four years with roughly the same capacity that we will have here, and it hasn’t been an issue,” Castillo said. “All we are doing is transferring to a better location where we can have more supports that are readily available to people. It really is a positive step.”

Neighborhood concerns

But some have expressed concerns about the location of the shelter. Oak Park Heights Mayor Mary McComber said she has received a number of calls and complaints from nearby residents and business owners.

“It’s right next to a single-family residential area,” McComber said. “It should be somewhere else in Washington County.”

McComber said she is concerned that city officials in Oak Park Heights, which borders the site to the east, weren’t notified of the county’s plan. “This was pushed all the way through before we knew about it,” she said. “This just went right through Stillwater and the county. We weren’t part of that discussion.”

Chris Addington, a registered nurse who lives in Baytown Township, said she also was concerned by the lack of publicity about the proposed shelter. She feels county officials failed to properly inform people in the area.

“No one knows anything about this,” Addington said. “This project should be on hold until the required proper informed consent is made, and there is full disclosure. The people should have a chance to speak. Nothing should move forward without the taxpayers’ input. The taxpayers will be responsible.”

Addington said she supports an emergency homeless shelter in the county, but says the Stillwater site is not the ideal location.

“There is no transportation, and there are no facilities,” she said. “It’s near a school, a church, a pharmacy, a hospital and many businesses. The only thing that is open 24 hours is the jail.”

Plans call for the shelter to be built on 1.5 acres on the southeast corner of the 29-acre Washington County Government Center campus, between the Washington County Law Enforcement Center and Minnesota 36. The county purchased the now-vacant property, which originally included a house and garage, in 2019.

County officials selected the site after an “extensive search throughout the county because it was an available lot on county-owned property close to resources within the Washington County Government Center,” Castillo said. “It was within our budget.”

The Washington County Community Development Agency will be the developer of the project, officially called the Emergency Housing Services Building, which will be owned by Washington County. The county board will consider action Tuesday on final funding and the CDA will consider bids and possibly award a construction contract Oct. 22.

How it will work

Washington County Commissioner Gary Kriesel, who represents Stillwater, said helping the homeless is “a shared responsibility of the county, state and community” and the new shelter “demonstrates the county’s commitment to supporting its most vulnerable residents.”

The shelter will offer 23 single rooms and seven double rooms. Residents can stay with partners, regardless of gender, and each room will have its own bathroom. “It’s very similar to a modest hotel room,” Castillo said. “They will have space to keep their belongings safe.”

Residents also will be allowed to keep their pets on site, Castillo said. “Getting to have their pets, their companions, within reason, is a big part of this,” she said.

Among the other amenities: offices for workforce services, mental-health supports and financial assistance; on-site parking; a commercial kitchen with meals and snacks provided; an on-site computer lab; a large gathering space; and a meditation/quiet room.

The shelter’s front door will face an employee parking lot, and there will be a fenced rear yard and patio. A stormwater retention pond and a wooded area will serve as a buffer for privacy.

No walk-ups will be allowed, Castillo said. Residents will be referred to the shelter by the Washington County Homeless Outreach Services Team and must meet eligibility criteria, including being over 18, passing a criminal background check, no active substance use and agreeing to actively participate in a housing plan. Anyone accepted to the program must be physically present and unsheltered in Washington County for at least a night before their stay commences, she said.

The project has been funded through a combination of federal and state grants and the state’s Local Affordable Housing Aid program.

Some now going to neighboring counties

Because Washington County does not have any permanent emergency housing capacity for adults without children, more than 70 county residents had to seek shelter in neighboring counties in 2023. Dakota County, in contrast, has 45 rooms and Anoka County has 66 rooms.

Washington County has the highest gross median monthly rent — $1,668 — in the seven-county metro area, according to the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. The others: Anoka, $1,294; Carver, $1,583; Dakota, $1,585; Hennepin, $1,445; Ramsey, $1,367; and Scott, $1,434.

County officials currently have a contract with the Asteria Inn & Suites in Stillwater, which is just a half-mile west of the site, to secure rooms to provide emergency housing. In the past, the county has contracted with Coratel Inn & Suites in Stillwater, Woodspring Suites in Woodbury and Stillwater Inn and Suites in Stillwater.

Using hotel rooms was a response to COVID, when private rooms were needed to mitigate the virus, Castillo said, but placing people in hotel rooms temporarily “was not a sustainable long-term solution.”

Twenty-four people are now enrolled in the county’s interim emergency housing program, said Sarah Tripple, division manager of Washington County Community Services. More than half are older than 55, a trend that’s been increasing, she said. The racial breakdown of people served is consistent with the demographics of the county, she said.

Homelessness and hunger

People who live or own businesses within a 1/4-mile of county property were notified of the shelter plans, and the notification area was extended to complete neighborhoods if only part of a neighborhood was originally included, Tripple said. The county held three open houses last spring to talk about the plan.

The site is located in Stillwater’s public-administrative-offices district, which allows residential uses with a conditional-use permit. The Stillwater City Council signed off on the plans for the project in June after holding a public hearing in May.

Transportation is a challenge at the site, but “transportation is a challenge throughout the entire county,” Castillo said. “We have plans in place for that.”

Based on the demographics of people being served at The Asteria Inn & Suites, county officials expect that many of the residents of the new shelter will have access to a car, but the county is budgeting for transportation services, including car repair, ride-hailing services or tickets for Metro Transit, TransitLink or MetroMobility, Castillo said.

Members of Stillwater’s First Presbyterian Church, which is located near the Government Center, “enthusiastically support the project,” said Rev. Cader Howard, the church’s pastor.

“Our church is very engaged in the issues of homelessness and hunger,” he said. “We have encountered many, many people who are coming to our church for help who don’t have housing, so we think it’s badly needed in the community.”

The Government Center campus is the “perfect spot” for the shelter, Howard said.

“There are already many people being housed at the hotels in town, and I think they’re more vulnerable there, and people have been preying on them,” he said. “What I love about this location is that it’s right beside the county offices, so many of the agencies that they need to connect with are, I mean, literally across the parking lot. And there’s the built-in security of the sheriff’s department.”

James Cheeks, 45, of Woodbury, had been living in his Kia Rio for several months in 2022 when he received county assistance to stay in the Stillwater Inn & Suites.

“It’s really hard to maintain full-time employment if you don’t have a shelter at all,” he said. “You have no place to take a shower, and you have no way to cook or eat any food before going to work.”

He said his situation would have been less stressful if the Emergency Housing Services Building existed then.

“It’s not just having room and board; it’s the other services that are there to help me get back on my feet,” he said. “No one wants to be in a homeless shelter forever. That’s a really big plus: helping people get back on their feet and helping people find stability and move on.”