Former Children’s Inn site will house homeless families

The building that used to be Children’s Inn will be renovated to serve homeless families and provide needed office space for its new owner.

Inter-Lakes Community Action Partnership bought the building at 409 N. Western Ave. late last year, after Children’s Inn relocated to a new, larger building at the Empower Campus in east Sioux Falls.

“We own the building to the north of the Children’s Inn building, so now it will create a campus-like feel for ICAP, and we’ve outgrown the other building,” CEO Eric Kunzweiler said. “We lease several offices throughout the city.”

The move will allow most staff to consolidate between the two buildings, with housing stabilization coaches and community service workers moving into offices in the former Children’s Inn.

Most of the building, though, will be used as a noncongregate shelter for homeless families, run by the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House.

“It will allow them to move homeless families with children out of the general population out there at the Dudley, which is a win-win for everybody,” Kunzweiler said. “And it continues our mission of helping homeless families with children gain accessible housing opportunities.”

There will be 10 family suites renovated in the building, each with two or three bedrooms, living space and a bathroom. Currently, the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House in downtown Sioux Falls has seven family rooms.

“We had been looking for more space to move our families out. We’re just so cramped,” executive director Madeline Shields said. “They’re in a secure location … however it would just be much better to have them off this property and have their own space, so we had been previously looking for other accommodations for about a year, and when we got the call from ICAP and Eric, the stars aligned and it could not have worked out better.”

The rest of the building will support ICAP’s weatherization assistance program, which provides funds for income-qualifying households to make their homes more energy-efficient.

Funding for the renovation will be a combination of federal community development funds administered by the city of Sioux Falls and pandemic-related federal grant money. While the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House won’t pay rent, it will raise money to cover operating costs.

“I’m super excited,” Shields said. “That will be a much better place, and it’s already in the neighborhood where it has been sheltering families already. It’s on a bus route. We are totally blessed that they contacted us.”

The location also more easily connects the families with ICAP services, including other housing programs. It will be designed, like the Dudley, as emergency shelter and not meant for long-term stays.

“It’s just a steppingstone on their way to self-sufficiency,” Shields said. “The soonest we can get them turned around, we will move them out, and I’m sure someone else will need to move in. People are always calling, every day. ‘We have children, we’re homeless, we’re getting evicted.'”

To live in the new shelter, families will need to pass a background check, have a job and ensure their kids are going to school or child care, she said. That’s the same criteria the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House uses. Minnehaha County social workers will continue to help transition families to other housing options.

“It’s a great project,” Kunzweiler said. “To have Madeline and her staff be able to manage the space and utilize it for families with kids to get out of that situation is good for everybody.”

With the space freed up downtown, the hope is to convert the rooms to transitional housing for those who are sober and working full time, Shields said.

“They will move from the general large shelter area to those rooms, and it will be a limited amount of time they can stay until they get on their feet.”

The design for the old Children’s Inn building is being finalized, and the hope is to seek bids soon. Once construction starts, it’s estimated to be about a year before anyone can move in.

And that can’t come soon enough for the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House, which continually has been full this winter.

“It’s been terrible trying to even get our staff to work,” Shields said of weather conditions. “We don’t close, but we have to get people in the door to staff the overnight … and people were getting stranded. I’d been a ‘Lyft’ driver, and so has our operations manager, picking up people. And this weather has been deadly. We make sure everyone has a place to go. We have to. We cannot leave someone out to freeze.”