A Way Home — Housing Solutions: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's series on solutions to homelessness and ways to increase affordable housing. It is made possible by a coalition of funders, including the City of Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo County, the ENNA Foundation, and Kalamazoo County Land Bank.
 
KALAMAZOO, MI –  “Transition” is the key to understanding Kalamazoo County’s plan for The Landing Place.
 
The conversion of a former hotel on Kilgore Road into an 80-unit shelter where unhoused families can find support as they transition back to permanent living arrangements is urgent, say those advocating for the project.
 
And the recent word that the City of Portage has withdrawn a pledge of funding for the project will not impact its development.
 
“This is not an ‘emergency’ shelter,” says Jen Strebs, chairperson of the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners. “This is a transitional family shelter, which means that it has full, 24-hour wrap-around supports and services. And the goal is not just to house people short-term, but to help people stabilize and transition into permanent housing. It’s more than a shelter. It’s a program (leading) to stability.”
 
Kalamazoo County is continuing the conversion of the former Country Inn & Suites hotel at 1912 E. Kilore Service Road in Portage. It paid about $5.6 million to acquire the property early this year and plans to spend at least $2.5 million to convert it to help unhoused families who are already county residents.
 
Al JonesThe former Country Inn & Suites, at 1912 E. Kilgore Service Road, is to be converted into an 80-unit shelter to help unhoused local families.Recent reports that the City of Portage, which works with the Kalamazoo County Continuum of Care to combat homelessness, has rescinded a pledge of $500,000 for the project, will not sidetrack the effort, Strebs says. The project reportedly clashed with that city’s efforts to support the proposed development of a new Residence Inn not far away.
 
“Nothing has changed recently in the development of the project,” Strebs says. “Our partners ongoing are the City of Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo County Government, the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, and the Kalamazoo Community Foundation. It’s been that way for quite some time.”
 
Strebs said the working budget for the project also did not include an allocation from Portage. “So we’re not replacing any funds from them. Our budget didn’t include their funds.”
  
The end-of-year deadline
 
The county expects to have the project ready for occupancy before the end of this year. Interior work includes updating some of its infrastructure and renovating the former hotel’s kitchen, pool area, roof, and parking lot. The pool is to be permanently filled, and the pool area will be put to other uses. The kitchen needs to be upgraded and expanded to manage ongoing meal service, officials say. It will be a warming kitchen that dispenses meals that are cooked off-site.
 
“Some of the stuff is just out of date,” Kalamazoo County Housing Director Mary Balkema says of the hotel facility. “When we change the use, we have to fire-suppress the whole thing. Well, that’s really expensive. It has a 3-inch water main. We have to put in a 6-inch water main and all new pipes. ... In order to get a certificate of occupancy, we have to get through a city site-plan review. And it’s a ton of work.”
 
What is now a hotel conference room will be used for daily programming for residents. That includes supportive services such as job training, financial planning, child-care support, and other life skills. Strebs says the county is still looking for people in the philanthropic community to help support ongoing programs.
 
Al JonesJen Strebs, chairwoman of the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners, looks forward to seeing a Kalamazoo hotel converted into The Landing Place, a transitional shelter for unhoused local families.The county’s Buildings and Grounds Department is doing some of the interior demolition work, such as removing hot tubs from any of the hotel rooms that had them. And it will do painting.
 
The county will solicit bids on roofing as well as the remodeling of the hotel’s interior, the renovation of its kitchen, and the creation of a new laundry room. Part of the work will include the creation of two new offices on the ground level to serve as a permanent workspace for Balkema and the Kalamazoo County Housing Department. The department strives to develop and lead the county’s housing strategy. It then collaborates with public and private partners to address key housing needs.
 
The bidding process for construction work is set to begin during the first week of September. Bids are to be reviewed and presented to the County Board on Sept. 16. Construction is expected to begin on Sept. 17, Balkema says. The renovated property will be occupied in phases. That will allow some areas of the shelter to be used as work continues in others. Construction will likely continue into March, says Willa DiTaranto, Deputy Housing Director for Kalamazoo County.
 
“Having a phased opening will be safer for the people, safer for staff,” DiTaranto says, “And so we need to be able to make sure we can accommodate the (gradually increasing) number of people here while there’s still kitchen rehabilitation going on and all of that.”
 
She  says, “Right now, it’s a tight timeline, but every partner involved understands the urgency of this project, and so we’re trying our best to maintain that December timeline.”
 
The level of need
 
According to data from the county, 1,700 students were homeless this year in Kalamazoo County. That was a 30 percent increase from 2023. Although it did not cite specific numbers, the data indicated that Portage Public Schools reported an 82 percent increase in student homelessness and Comstock Public Schools reported a 92 percent increase.
 
Al JonesWilla DiTaranto, deputy housing director for Kalamazoo County, is helping to oversee the redevelopment of the former Country Inn & Suites.“We’re watching the level of homelessness increase in the community,” Strebs says. “… Working with this population, we’re seeing more and more families displaced from their homes and even more working families – ALICE households (Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, and Employed). Looking at what we have available in the community, emergency sheltering often causes families to have to be split apart. So they’re often segregated by gender.”
 
She says, at the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission in downtown Kalamazoo, “There’s a men’s side of emergency shelter and a women’s side of the shelter. There’s some capacity for them for family shelter, but not enough.”
 
The result is that those who want to try to stay together to live outdoors, in hotels, temporarily with family members, or in their vehicles. “So we’re looking for innovative options to move a solution forward. The opportunity to convert a hotel came before us, and it’s the right thing to do,” Strebs says.
 
Talking about the rising cost of living and saying Michigan has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, Strebs says, “We’re going to watch the pressures increase. Especially as social safety-net programs that maybe were helping keep people just above the water – like SNAP benefits and Medicaid benefits – as those things disappear, then the resources available for housing become even tighter.”
Al JonesDeputy Housing Director Willa DiTaranto shows an area that is likely to be used as dining space when the former Country Inn & Suites becomes a transitional shelter for unhoused families.
Beyond her role on the County Commission, Strebs's interest in the success of the Landing Project is driven by several factors. She says the community and local voters "ave made it very clear it is unacceptable for this growing problem to continue to not be addressed. We cannot leave suffering standing on a street corner." She goes on to say she has spent decades of her life serving people with disabilities in deep poverty. "I have stood with them in the bread lines and fought to help them maintain housing." And she has life experience that has fostered empathy for the unhoused. "As a young woman, I had to flee domestic violence and ended up unhoused sleeping in my car for several weeks. I get the fear and the cold people experience on the street."
 
She hopes The Landing Place helps area families survive.
 
Overseeing the change for families
 
Kalamazoo County Administrator Kevin Catlin explains the name of the project,  in a press release, saying, “We chose the name The Landing Place because that’s what we want this shelter to be — a safe, stabilizing space for families during one of the most difficult times in their lives.”
 
The Family Promise organization, a Summit, N.J.-based nonprofit, is being contracted to operate and staff the facility. It is creating a Kalamazoo affiliate of the organization to do so.
 
“They have like 200 different affiliates around the country, and they do a nice job at this type of work and have a lot of experience,” Balkema says.
 
The CEO of the operation will be Cheryl Schuch, who has served as chief executive of Family Promise National. She is also a Kalamazoo native who, for 14 years, led Family Promise of West Michigan (based in Grand Rapids).
 
“They understand the complexities of the unhoused population,” Strebs says. “It can often be a very complex picture.”
 
Al JonesWilla DiTaranto, deputy housing director for Kalamazoo County, and Jen Strebs, chairwoman of the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners, tour the lobby of the former Country Inn & Suites.In Kalamazoo County, the organization is expected to help establish a holistic program that provides wrap-around support for residents, including healthcare coordination and case-management, and “to not just be a safe place to be right now,” Strebs says, “but to get them on a footing and a plan so they can get into long-term, permanent, stable housing going forward.”
 
DiTaranto says some people have expressed concerns that the Kilgore Road location is too far from many of the services unhoused people typically require. But she says, “It’s important to reiterate that the services are coming here. We want to create as few barriers as possible for success.”
 
Setting up for services
 
The Landing Place will have 90 parking spots, and Metro Transit will shift a bus stop from about 200 yards down the road to the front of the shelter. School districts will be required to bus children from the location to public schools throughout the county, as needed.
 
Al JonesDeputy Housing Director Willa DiTaranto leads Kalamazoo County Board Chairwoman Jen Strebs into the lobby area of the former Country Inn & Suites.An intake process has not yet been established for those who will live in The Landing Place. But Strebs says she expects it to have multiple points of entry, and the network of service providers that work with the Kalamazoo County Continuum of Care will refer people to the appropriate programs and resources.
 
More information is available here.  
 
Through Family Promise Kalamazoo, and with the 24-hour nature of the operation, The Landing Place may ultimately create about 42 jobs, including case-management and administrative workers.
 
“This is going to be the largest family shelter in the state of Michigan,” DiTaranto, says. “But this is a model that has been in the works and working well in larger cities for a really long time.”
 
She previously worked at a shelter in Philadelphia that operated in a similar fashion.
 
Al JonesLand at the rear of a former hotel is expected to become a playground area as the property is converted into a transitional shelter for unhoused families.Balkema says, “People should be happy that the county is making a plan to have a homeless shelter, given the number of homeless kids that are in our county and in our school system. And that we’re making a really diligent effort to get it open before the snow flies.”
 
Strebs says this is one of the largest projects that local people have undertaken to address homelessness, but she does not expect it to be the last.
 
“What we’re hoping to do here in Kalamazoo County is demonstrate that not only can we effectively serve the community, but we can provide outcomes that make the programming worth it,” she says. “We have kids here who have been destabilized and unhoused. The long-term outcome for them, for school, for criminal justice involvement, without getting back on track, creates extreme costs for communities down the line. So when we can make the investments earlier in these families, get them stabilized – we’re spending money on the front end so that we’re not spending three to five times that down the line with that young person.”

Al JonesThe former Country Inn & Suites, at 1912 E. Kilgore Service Road, is to be converted into an 80-unit shelter to help families in   need of emergency housing to rebuild their lives.