This is the second story in our Peoples’ Priorities series, where we asked community leaders what they and their communities feel are the biggest needs to address in Spokane in 2024 and then spoke with every city elected to see how well their priorities align so they can collaborate. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more.
In the past year, the news cycle has been dominated by stories examining homelessness in Spokane. RANGE has continually updated the saga of the Trent Shelter, the largest homeless shelter in the city, which has been plagued by financial mismanagement, complaints of inhumane conditions, multiple sexual assault and harrassment reports and communicable diseases being allowed to run rampant (most recently, Shigella). After Camp Hope, once Washington’s largest encampment, closed over the summer, Spokane voters passed a sweeping anti-camping ballot measure that banned camping in 60% of the city (though the bill has yet to be enforced — another topic of debate in the new year). All the while rent continues to skyrocket.
Local campaigns were also hyper-focused on homelessness, especially in the mayoral race, where both incumbent Nadine Woodward and Lisa Brown (the eventual victor) drew firm lines in the sand. In Woodward’s “Not in my Lot, Lisa!” campaign messaging — aided by a corresponding website — she compared the two candidates’ approaches to homelessness and criticized Brown for Camp Hope. Though Woodward was the mayor for the entirety of Camp Hope’s existence, she claimed more encampments would pop up under Brown’s watch, should she win. Brown called for fiscally responsible solutions, empathetic homelessness responses, better collaboration with the Spokane City Council and a probable wind-down of the Trent Shelter. Both wanted to be involved with the creation of the proposed Spokane Regional Homeless Authority (RHA), an interlocal approach that has struggled to find its footing.
Ultimately, Brown’s pitch was more appealing to voters, landing her the job. In her first months in office, she’s already had to deal with a few major homelessness hurdles, one of which has put two of her promises in conflict: providing quick emergency shelters during an extreme cold snap is expensive. The other immediate problem for Brown is a sharp uptick in drug overdoses, overdose deaths and a lack of accessible, comprehensive, up-to-date data around them, leading to a crisis that has seemed to overwhelmingly affect unhoused people.
Commentary from citizens during the Open Forum section of city council meetings has touched on both of these issues, as service providers, homeless people, those on the edge of homelessness and concerned citizens alike have begged city officials to decisively and quickly get people out of the cold and address the overdose crisis.
A quick scan of the Facebook comments on any news story that touches on housing and homelessness may paint it as the most divisive topic in Spokane, but the electeds and community members we interviewed for our series, The Peoples’ Priorities, almost all agreed: Homelessness and housing was consistently near the top or the number one problem they wanted to address, or see their leaders address.
Jennyfer Mesa, the executive director of Latinos en Spokane, put it best: “If we want to get to all the other inequities, we gotta be able to provide housing.”
Of course, there is no consensus around how Spokane solves this complex problem. You won’t even find the answer here.
But you will find the ideas, hopes, plans and dreams of the people we interviewed. Elected officials tended to lean toward solutions, like changing zoning, housing codes and tax exemptions — technical proposals. Meanwhile, community members highlighted barriers that may not be obvious at first glance, like a lack of affordable child care options and shelters that aren’t accepting of queer people — who are statistically more likely to be homeless. Regardless of differences in ideas, folks from all backgrounds on all sides of the aisle signaled they may be ready to put away the partisan knives and rally together to tackle homelessness.
Getting upstream
Though conversations about addressing homelessness often start and end with shelter capacity, community leaders and some elected officials spoke to the importance of getting ahead of the problem with proactive policy making that focuses on preventing the conditions that create homelessness.
“When people talk about homelessness, they only ever talk about where we’re gonna put them instead of how we can stop it from happening,” said Terri Anderson, interim executive director at the Tenants Union of Washington and the director of that organization’s Spokane office. “I would hope that [elected officials] take a serious look at homelessness also identify policies that will slow it down on the front end instead of just addressing the back end.”
Anderson noted people facing homelessness would rather split up their families — one child with an aunt, another with a grandparent, and the parent couch-surfing with friends — than go to a shelter.
She said Spokane needs protections that will keep tenants in their homes. Immediately, that looks like extending warning periods for rent increases to six months. Right now it’s only two months, which Anderson says isn’t enough. The state did pass a “just-cause eviction” law in 2021, but at the last minute excluded fixed-term tenants, meaning a landlord can still evict a tenant at the end of a lease term. In these cases, the 60-day notice period still applies.
The city passed some protections in March 2023, but they haven’t been implemented. She also pointed out that the portable background check part of the ordinance hasn’t been started, either. The requirement for landlords to register their units went into effect this year, and the city received more than 1,700 applications in the first month, according to Code Enforcement.
The road to full compliance with the new laws is going to be a long one, as the city creates and adapts processes to ensure it. Anderson pointed to the importance of the law’s requirement that landlords give a packet of resources and voter registration to tenants.
“We know that renters lose their vote because we vote by mail; and, with all the displacement that happens, they lose their vote,” because they haven’t updated their registration, Anderson said. “And so we need to get renters to have the same opportunity to vote as homeowners.”
“Spokane is 50% renters — half of our entire city are renters. Yet we do nothing to make life easier for them,” she said.
Anderson also said the city needs to fight harder for rent stabilization at the state level. Because the state of Washington has sole control over rent stabilization, the city would need to lobby for any rent cap it desires in the legislature. Two bills that would modestly restrict rent increases failed this legislative session, with the final one killed last month.
However, there could be hope if citizens led an effort for more tenant protections, Anderson said. She pointed to tenants in Tacoma who were able to get an initiative for tenant protections put on the ballot and won.
“Voters are ahead of the lawmakers,” she said. “When lawmakers try, money gets in the way.”
Some of Spokane’s lawmakers, like City Council Members Jonathan Bingle and Paul Dillon, expressly said they don’t want to get in the way: they want to help. Although they might have different philosophies — Bingle is a conservative running for the U.S. House of Representatives seat formerly occupied by Cathy McMorris Rogers and Dillon is a former spokesperson for Planned Parenthood and a liberal with roots in activism — they both preached moving away from top-down approaches.
“It takes many hands to build a city,” Bingle said. “It can’t be top-down control from the government. How do we get government out of the way to allow people to develop and to develop quickly?”
Zack Zappone, city council’s president pro-tempore, also proposed creative development solutions, like continuing to turn parking lots into housing with the Pavement to People tax incentive council passed last year. Bingle wants to see rapid development and less restrictive zoning codes, with incentives for developers to build affordable housing projects.
“Spokane is fertile ground — a promised land for development,” Bingle said.
His approach seems to be geared toward creating more housing stock; building up, rather than out; and working toward a “thriving urban core.”
Dillon, who testified in support of the rent control bill referenced by Anderson, wants the city to “chart a different path,” and explore options they aren’t currently applying. For him, that starts with reconvening and finally launching the RHA, and ensuring that folks who are or have been homeless have their perspectives centered on that authority. Michael Cathcart, the other conservative council member, and Zappone also said the RHA is essential to solving homelessness. Bingle too — who was part of the original process to get that off the ground, he had a large stake in the project — aligned with Dillon, though he didn’t speak to preferences on the makeup of the governing board.
Bingle is big on effective policy making. He thinks the city could spend less time and fewer resources on homelessness while staying equally if not more effective in keeping people off the streets. He said that starts with “getting into a place where we have people who are good at what they do who are going to make good decisions on behalf of the city.”
Housing and homelessness staff have seen a high turnover rate in the last year, with high-ranking officials in the Community, Housing & Human Services and Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services departments resigning. Bingle wants to see the city doing a better job hiring and holding onto key staff members in charge of these projects.
Creative, comprehensive policy making
Before electeds can get to work solving homelessness, as everyone wants them to do, community leaders want them to understand the complexities of the issue. Homelessness often gets oversimplified, as if it’s solely a problem of addiction or lack of affordable housing. While both of those things can and do play a part, community leaders shared with RANGE some of the nuances they think electeds often miss when they start to think about top-down approaches.
Roo Ramos, the executive director of Spectrum Center, and KJ January, the advocacy and policy director, wanted to highlight the intersectional angles electeds need to be aware of. They spoke specifically about queer people, who often have higher rates of housing insecurity, and the ways that some religiously affiliated shelters, like Union Gospel Mission, can be unfriendly or even discriminatory toward queer couples and transgender people seeking services. As officials decide how to allocate funding, Ramos said, it’s important for them to make sure they aren’t leaving behind the most vulnerable community members.
January pointed out that the shelter system’s reliance on beds that are affiliated with religious institutions can be alienating for queer people, who are more likely to have had negative experiences with religion.
“We have two drastic seasons that affect our community members, from the winter cold to the blistering heat of the summer, and so how are we going to work with these communities?” January said. “How are we going to make sure there’s non-gendered bathrooms available? How are we going to make sure people aren’t facing the pressure of religion just to have a warm place to sleep at night or to get a bowl of food?”
She said many queer and BIPOC people have faced trauma in churches and can struggle to trust religious institutions to have their best interests at heart. “A lot of people also find solace in religion so I don’t want to take that away, but a lot of people have faced trauma,” she said. “And so to have most of our major resources for our houseless population come from the church can be super detrimental.”
Ramos said the way the existing system is constructed excludes a lot of people who don’t feel safe seeking resources like shelter, including queer folks, teenagers and BIPOC people.
“This is a crisis in our community,” Ramos said. “There’s just not enough cultural competence in those spaces to give people the kind of safety that they need, and so, at the end of the day, they just don’t show up to those spaces.”
Dave Richardson, the executive director of the Northeast Community Center, wanted electeds to think proactively about some of the people most at risk for homelessness: the 60% of the residents of Northeast Spokane that Richarson said are in the service industry.
“One of the main barriers to households really thriving is not being able to find adequate employment because of lack of child care,” Richardson said.
Those in the service industry often have irregular hours week-to-week or have to work swing and weekend shifts, so child care options are nearly nonexistent, which can be a barrier to someone maintaining steady employment and put them at higher risk for homelessness. Richardson wants to see more support for a proposal currently in the works for an all-hours child care facility in northeast Spokane that would hope to address this facet of the problem.
Walter Kendricks, a founding member of SCAR and pastor of the Morning Star Baptist Church (one of the churches partnering with Jewels Helping Hands to create shelter space), touched on some of the same issues as Ramos. He wants to see more investment in upstream homelessness prevention tactics, and less funding for the police.
“When we look at the police overtime budget, why aren’t we putting some of that into unhoused services?” Kendricks said. “Why can’t we put it into proven endeavors?”
‘Somebody has to be the adult in the room.’
Homelessness and the intersectional issues tied to it can be divisive. Community leaders worried people living on the streets are getting caught in the crossfire as politicians snipe at each other from their political battle lines. Many of them said they want to see across-the-aisle collaboration on homelessness and housing issues from their electeds.
“I think somebody has to be the adult in the room,” said Barry Barfield, longtime administrator of the Spokane Homeless Coalition and a campus minister at Gonzaga University. “I’m very hopeful that not just our majority of left-leaning leaders, but also the conservatives try to collaborate.”
Politicians feel that pressure, too. As Brown told RANGE, things like potholes aren’t political — you propose a solution and a budget for fixing a pothole and “nobody’s going to tell you that’s a Democrat or a Republican issue.”
When it comes to homelessness, she sometimes feels like purely technical solutions get sidelined by partisanship. She said one of her priorities will be to see what’s working in other cities and to try to find an effective, nonpartisan approach everyone can get behind, like trying to maximize the amount of federal dollars Spokane is getting, and stretching those as far as they can go.
Bingle has some advice for Brown. While he thinks homelessness is a huge priority for policy makers, he thinks they should tackle it early and effectively.
“You don’t want to spend 90% of your time focusing on homelessness,” he said. “She could focus on a lot more issues in the city that have been neglected for some time, not because of a lack of care, but a lack of time — every ounce of effort has gone into one issue.”
The Trent Shelter and what to do about it was the frequent subject of some of that partisanship, with battles shaping up last year between the liberal-majority city council and the Woodward administration. Community members think that issue should never have been partisan and instead should have focused on getting people off the streets. They hope that some of the politicization stops affecting homelessness policy now that the mayor’s administration and the council seem to be more aligned.
“I’m just hoping they will provide shelter that’s not in a warehouse,” Anderson said. “And that provides running water and sanitary facilities and a place that people would want to go to.”
When it comes to the Trent Shelter, city council members across the political spectrum have been relatively aligned in the new year, asking for more oversight and greater transparency from the operators of the shelter. Now, it’s looking like Brown’s administration may wind down the shelter and look into more flexible options that don’t suck as much money and function more like a “true navigation center,” according to Dillon.
Covering homelessness and housing issues in Spokane is always a rollercoaster ride. Between the politics of it to the practicalities — contracts, RFPs, service providers, shelter operators — there’s so many nuances and rapid developments to track. Maybe no one has all the answers, but with electeds in better alignment, there is hope from the community that this year can be a transformational one.
Aaron Hedge, Valerie Osier and Luke Baumgarten contributed reporting.
Editor’s Note: Erin Sellers was formerly employed by Spectrum Center and is the former colleague of the executive director and advocacy and policy director interviewed here.
