The clear light of Umpqua Valley streamed through the Douglas firs and the cedar trees. This view surrounds people who seek to escape violence through motel-based housing provided by Peace at Home. Peace at Home has advocated for people experiencing family violence, sexual assault, stalking or human trafficking for more than 40 years.
I couldn’t think of a better illustration of how important housing is to a person’s safety than this 32-room motel. Executive Director Melanie Prummer and Program Director Shelly Holt led the tour and discussed their 40-year history.
I’d traveled 180 miles south to Douglas County, curious to see another one of the motels supported by Project Turnkey. The Oregon Legislature allocated $65 million only a year ago to transform motels into shelters that could, in turn, be transformed into housing.
With the Oregon Community Foundation stewarding these projects, they happened fast.
Peace at Home applied last December to run one of the Project Turnkey projects. By April, they had it up and running.
Melanie credits the role the Oregon Community Foundation played in the speed at which they could move, including assigning them a property acquisition manager.
More and more, Peace at Home’s advocacy for people seeking safety from violence means actually providing housing, even if it’s temporary.
They have operated a shelter for two decades, but in recent years, began expanding into transitional housing.
“In our world, survivors have enough barriers and challenges as it is to housing, much less overcoming the results of domestic violence and how that has created barriers,” Shelly explained to me.
Like so many other places in Oregon, housing is too expensive in Douglas County, and there is too little affordable housing available. But in addition, “there are a million barriers” to housing, Shelly said. Those barriers include the documentation struggles for people who have immigrated to the United States, the lag time of social security benefits and the theft of identification papers by the people perpetrating abuse.
Over the past decade, Peace at Home bought an apartment building, and then added a duplex, two tiny homes that were built by and for veterans, and now the 32-room motel. All of this is in Douglas County, including its biggest city of about 25,000 people, Roseburg. Peace at Home is striving to provide housing rapidly to people for whom there are too many barriers.
And now, this motel provides more privacy than a shelter model. Private rooms provide safety not just from past perpetrators, but also, from violence that can emerge when people are pressed together in congregate shelters, Melanie explained, such as when white women ganged up on Black women in a shelter.
Additionally, “this model in my heart just makes it so much safer for a trans person because they have absolutely their entire space,” Shelly said. “They don’t have to worry about any of the safety concerns while they’re in their private space.”
“You don’t have to share even a doorway which is kind of a blessing,” Melanie added.
And yet the downside of privacy can be isolation, so they are building a communal kitchen in the motel, as well as a children’s room, a meditation space, a computer room and some patio spaces. Last summer, Shelly, who stays onsite at least a few days a week, made a pot roast, and soon, residents began adding onions, carrots and other offerings.
It was kind of like stone soup, Shelly said, referring to the fable in which a person begins only with a stone boiling in water, but as the community brings their offering, ends up with an aromatic soup.
And that gets at a lot of what Peace at Home is trying to do. They got the motel up and running quickly, but are adding to it, collectively.
Residents move in, stabilized at least a bit with secure housing, and together, they can build what it means to live and heal in proximity to each other.
“We all have a stake in it,” Shelly said.
I’ll write about more of these Project Turnkey motels around the state. It’s a model in which liveable spaces can be quickly opened as safe housing, and invested in over time to create as quality of conditions as possible. It’s clearly a model that shouldn’t stop with that one-time legislative funding. We need to keep going — more funding, more commitment, more housing.