A New Leaf is converting all 16 units at its La Mesa Family Homeless Shelter in downtown Mesa into affordable rental housing as it wrestles with dropping funding and the expiration of pandemic relief dollars.
The shelter units are on the same campus as the 110-unit La Mesita Apartments housed in two buildings near Main Street and May.
“We can’t sustain this shelter with the funding that we have,” said Laura Bode, the nonprofit’s chief philanthropy officer. “We’ve seen reductions in government funding. We’ve been running this program at a significant deficit — $350,000 for the last couple of years.”…