Much of Teresa Strait’s belongings fit in three backpacks and two plastic boxes. On a recent Thursday afternoon, she lugged them and one bicycle into her new apartment. She plopped the bags on the floor and surveyed the small studio. Full-sized bed. Kitchenette with a two-burner stove. Bathroom with a walk-in shower and sink.
“It’s a lot different than a tent,” Strait said.
At the start of the pandemic, Strait lost her job cleaning hotels in downtown Austin. No longer able to afford her house north of the city, Strait left and slept where she could, usually in the woods or under a highway overpass. Sometimes in a tent.
The 59-year-old caught a break earlier this year during a hospital stay. Strait met a case manager who helped her look for housing.
Six months later, she was hauling her bags and boxes down a bright yellow hallway and into her apartment on the third floor of Pecan Gardens, a new 78-unit apartment complex in Northwest Austin for seniors who have been homeless.
The campaign to open Pecan Gardens took almost as long as Strait’s journey to find housing. In 2020 and 2021, the City of Austin bought four hotels with the intent of turning them into housing for people living on the streets. One of these hotels, Candlewood Suites, became Pecan Gardens.
The idea was simple. Take existing hotel rooms and turn them into apartments. It would be quick and cheap, elected officials said. However, opening Pecan Gardens was anything but.
The fight over converting hotels to housing
The City of Austin bought its first hotel in 2019. The Rodeway Inn, off I-35 in South Austin, was turned into a temporary shelter for people experiencing homelessness. It became part of a larger plan between the city and Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, to buy hotels and motels and turn them into housing.
Then the pandemic hit. Very few people were traveling and suddenly the city’s and ECHO’s plan seemed incredibly prescient. Now they could take businesses shattered by the pandemic — in this case, hollowed-out hotels — and turn them into housing for Austin’s growing number of homeless.
“It’s a lot less expensive and a lot more efficient to be able to do it in hotels this way,” former Mayor Steve Adler said in 2021.
Initially, as COVID spread across the country, some of these hotels were used to help people living on the streets quarantine from others. And the need for housing for those living on the streets seemed less pressing. Even as real estate prices in Austin rose quickly during the pandemic, eviction moratoriums kept thousands of people in their homes.
But once bans on evictions ended, the city’s homeless population began to rise. Since 2021, the number of people sleeping on the streets in the Texas capital on any given night has doubled to about 6,400.
But with each hotel or motel purchase by the city came opposition — especially when the city moved to buy Candlewood Suites. One of the biggest objections was location. The hotel is in far Northwest Austin. So far, in fact, that it’s in another county, Williamson County. Most of the people living there would not have cars and public transportation is unreliable. The nearest large grocery store, H-E-B, is a 25-minute walk away and requires crossing a major highway.
“There are other places in our city that would be a better fit,” Scott Carson, who identified himself as a neighbor, said over the phone during public testimony at a city council meeting in February 2021. Others who called into the meeting said housing people without homes in this building would increase crime and negatively impact the value of nearby homes. (In the vast majority of studies, researchers have found the opposite to be true.)
Residents opposed to the purchase blasted what they said was the city’s lack of communication.
“We received little to no notice about the city’s action to move forward with this decision,” Elesha Samad said. “I keep hearing about how purchasing this location is good for the homeless, but not much concern for the [current] residents … and how it affects us.”
Even state officials weighed in. State Sen. Charles Schwertner, a Republican who represents a district that spans Central and East Texas, wrote a letter opposing the purchase, saying city leaders had not been transparent and open about their plans. He co-authored a bill later that year that would have required a municipality to get approval from the local county before buying property to house people who had been homeless. The bill did not pass.
Even before that February meeting, neighbors had started lodging their opposition. They formed Stop Candlewood, a group intended to halt the purchase of the hotel. Owners of property nearby complained about existing homeless camps and feeling unsafe in their neighborhood.
A day before the city’s first meeting about the purchase, people gathered at a nearby intersection, holding signs that read, “Bad Investment, Bad Idea” and “Save our community”. They shouted at drivers: “Say no to Candlewood” and “Save our children.”
A man named Atlas Castillo knew nothing about this fight. Castillo grew up in East Austin and had been living on the streets on and off for 20 years, he said. Like Strait, he lost his job during the pandemic.
“I stayed with different people and then eventually get booted out. Then I go to somebody else. Then I ran out of places to go,” Castillo, 65, said. “It’s like trying to swim then you drown.”
Castillo said he slept outside in downtown Austin. He saw office buildings emptied out by the pandemic and wondered why he couldn’t sleep inside them, especially when it was raining or cold. Eventually, he said he got connected to The Other Ones Foundation and moved into one of the non-profit’s temporary homes near the airport.
Last week, Castillo moved into an apartment in Pecan Gardens. He hauled big, black garbage bags full of pillows and blankets into the building’s elevator and to his apartment.
Like other renters, those living at Pecan Gardens will sign a lease. Castillo said he worried about rules he had to follow or risk getting evicted, rules he didn’t have to mind when living on the streets.
When told about the opposition the building faced when it was first proposed, Castillo defended himself.
“I’m just like them except bad luck happened,” he said. “They oughta put them to the test and let them go camp out for about two years. See how comfortable they’ll be. See how they’ll weather the storms.”
Those protesting Pecan Gardens continued to fight in the years before Castillo and others moved in. Rupal Chaudhari, whose family owns the hotel next door, sued the city, arguing that building housing on this site was in violation of a private agreement restricting the land to only businesses. Williamson County commissioners argued the same thing in a separate lawsuit.
But these legal arguments went nowhere and judges tossed both lawsuits.
In August 2021, the City of Austin finalized its purchase of Candlewood Suites.
Converting a hotel wasn't as easy as it seemed
Lawsuits, protests and public opposition were just some of the hurdles Pecan Gardens faced.
In May 2022, before extensive renovations started, several people broke into the hotel and ripped copper wiring from inside the walls, TVs from the rooms and brass peepholes from the doors, according to an Austin Police Department report. Police said people had been living inside.
The vandalism set the city and Family Eldercare, the nonprofit managing the building, back on renovations — but construction, overall, was already tough. In the first years of the pandemic, builders across the country and in Austin struggled to finish projects on time, beset by labor shortages and supply chain issues.
“It’s been a rough two years to build anything in Austin,” said Walter Moreau, executive director of Foundation Communities, a nonprofit that builds and maintains affordable housing. Foundation Communities has converted several hotels into subsidized housing, including most recently a hotel in North Austin purchased by the city.
Whereas converting offices into housing has proven to be complicated because there’s a lot of interior space without plumbing and windows, hotels and motels generally have en-suite bathrooms, exterior windows and doors. They already look, to some extent, like apartments.
Renovations were a bit more complicated because the City of Austin planned to turn Candlewood Suites, and other hotels, into what’s called permanent supportive housing. That’s housing where there are typically services on-site, such as mental health counselors and social workers. Some bedrooms need to be converted into offices and meeting rooms.
“I’ve walked through a lot of hotels looking at — could this building work for housing?” Moreau said. “A hotel doesn’t have mailboxes, a laundromat … hotels don’t often have resident services spaces.”
The cost of renovations continued to balloon. The city’s original contract in 2022 with Family Eldercare to renovate the building was $3.9 million. The city amended that contract last year, upping the amount to $6.6 million.
When all was said and done, the city spent roughly $205,000 to turn each hotel room into a studio apartment. It wasn’t much less than what it might have cost to construct a brand new building. Last year, Foundation Communities finished an apartment building for people who had been homeless. Built from the ground up, the project cost about $275,000 per apartment.
“There was a philosophy that [hotel conversion] should not cost as much,” said Jamey May, housing and community development officer with Austin’s Housing Department. “[Yet], the internal conversion costs about the same as constructing a whole new building.”
More permanent supportive housing is on the way
On a recent afternoon at the start of August, four people sat at a U-shaped conference table in a carpeted room in Pecan Gardens. The apartment building’s manager, Sherri Williford, stood at the head of the room.
Williford spent an hour going through several sections of a rental lease each person was about to sign. There was a part about bed bugs (check your sheets), another about smoking (not allowed). Sign here, she said. And also here. Strait was among those seated in the room.
Those living at Pecan Gardens pay about a third of whatever income they have, including Social Security or disability benefits, towards rent. The rest is covered by local and federal funds.
For years, the number of apartments in Austin for those who have been chronically homeless has stayed relatively stagnant. Experts stress that it takes time to respond to housing demand. It can take an hour for someone to be evicted from their home and thrust into the streets. It takes years to build an apartment building.
The city is beginning to catch up, though. From now through 2026, about a thousand apartments of permanent supportive housing are set to open in Austin, including more hotel conversions. According to city numbers, that represents about a 600% increase in the number of homes for people who have struggled with homelessness.
At Pecan Gardens, Williford explained how the laundry cards worked. She went over how tenants should use the key fobs to open the front door. She then went person-to-person, handing them keys to their new apartments. “Welcome home,” she said each time. One woman, who was moving into an apartment down the hall from Strait, started crying.
Strait smiled shyly when she got the key to her new home. She began moving her belongings into the studio apartment with the help of her case manager. In addition to a bed, TV and small kitchen, Strait’s room also had a white, plastic laundry basket full of items she would likely need: pots and pans, a new set of sheets, laundry detergent.
Strait considered the items in her basket. She decided she would try to take a bus to the grocery store and get some food to cook. Maybe enchiladas. Maybe something else. She paused. The decisions she had to make later that day, she said, seemed so small. Small compared to the decisions she used to have to make daily.
“If I can get through weather, creeks, other stuff, I think I can get through it,” Strait said.
