The city of Colorado Springs has received nearly $10 million in federal coronavirus  relief funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is being used to improve services for the homeless, provide more affordable housing and retain jobs in service industries.

Some of the infusion has been disbursed to local human service agencies, and officials are still trying to figure out how to spend the remainder.

“It means if things get worse for lower-income households in Colorado Springs, we do have resources that are going to be able to help them out,” said Steve Posey, HUD program manager in the city’s Community Development Division.

The $9.8 million pandemic allotment is about double the department’s typical annual HUD budget allocation of $4.5 to $5 million, he said.

The first cycle of relief grants, awarded through an application process, went to help stave off evictions, Posey said.

Emergency shelters and others serving the homeless population received about $1 million, which came from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. Congress authorized more than $2 trillion in March to provide nationwide emergency assistance and health care response for individuals, families and businesses affected by the pandemic.

A COVID-19 isolation shelter that the city and local organizations set up in April at the City Auditorium, which will remain open through the winter months, is being paid for from the pot. The operation is expected to cost $800,000 to $900,000 during its duration, Posey said.

City officials now are turning an eye toward two new projects in using the money, which must be expended by September 2022.

The first is assisting small business owners in southeastern Colorado Springs, which has high concentrations of low-income residents.

“We don’t want to see jobs disappear,” Posey said. “We want to help businesses pay better wages by providing accounting, legal services and other professional support they need.”

The developing program will distribute $500,000 to benefit southeastern businesses run by five people or less, he said, most likely in the service sector.

“We’re very concerned about what may happen to lower-wage job earners through the rest of this year and early in 2021,” he said. 

Another $5 million of the relief funding will be put to work to prevent homelessness and provide more shelter and housing for homeless families, Posey said.

Those areas have been identified as gaps in the system by a group determining community needs, in concert with Pikes Peak Continuum of Care, a group working to end homelessness.

“We’ve got more families on the streets, particularly since COVID-19 hit and people have lost their jobs,” Posey said. “We’re not doing a good enough job with families.”

Family Promise opens Colorado Springs’ first stand-alone shelter for families with children in renovated motel

Kat Lilley, executive director of Family Promise of Colorado Springs, agrees.

“Families with kiddos usually go overlooked because they aren’t what we usually think of as housing insecure,” she said.

For example, the city’s homeless isolation center at the City Auditorium does not provide space for minor children or families, Lilley said.

Her organization has been using motels on either side of the family shelter it opened in February in a converted former motel on South Nevada Avenue to expand overnight accommodations from 16 to 25 families. The additional units also can house families who need to quarantine because of the virus.

Family Promise, which provides various types of shelter and housing for more than 200 families, has received $414,000 in CARES Act funding. Of that, $118,000 came from the city.

The dollars are helping families remain in their apartments by paying rent, utilities, security deposits and internet services for remote schooling.

The organization also is working with landlords to stop evictions under a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium, which is scheduled to end Jan. 1.

With rising rent prices, the city also is focusing on making housing vouchers more usable by offsetting the difference in reimbursement to landlords with COVID-19 money.

“A lot of folks can’t use the vouchers because the rental market is so hot,” Posey said.

Keeping families in their homes is particularly important now because federal COVID-19 relief funds cannot be used to pay for motel rooms, Lilley said.

The organization is fielding more than 50 applications a day from families seeking homeless prevention services or emergency shelter, she said.

“We’re definitely seeing more families at risk of losing their homes,” she said, adding that the impacts of the pandemic are greater than officials expected.

“We thought we’d seen a peak in August and were on the back end of it in October, but now it seems like it’s resurging and is definitely longer in duration that we’d hoped,” Lilley said.

City housing officials want to increase family shelter capacity and housing units for families moving out of homelessness by helping agencies purchase and rehabilitate existing buildings or build new facilities, Posey said.

“We’re definitely in dire need of affordable housing across the board,” Lilley said, “especially for really low-income households.”