Editor’s note: We spoke with city leaders throughout this reporting process, but the administration further clarified their communication strategy after we published. That clarification is included below.
Winter in Spokane is dangerous — temperatures sometimes drop as low as -10 degrees Fahrenheit, like it did last January. These conditions are particularly dangerous for the at least 2,000 unhoused people who have no reliable way to escape the cold.
Other factors can make a dangerous winter worse.
RANGE spoke to Tyler, a disabled man who suffers memory loss from a traumatic brain injury and has been in and out of homelessness in Spokane for 20 years. His disability makes it harder for him to do things like schedule (and remember to keep) appointments with service providers, and he fears he’ll have trouble accessing shelters.
“I’m really going to be screwed because I don’t have an electric wheelchair,” Tyler said, noting that going anywhere in the snow without an electric wheelchair is “impossible.”
By September 30 each year, the city is legally required to publish an emergency shelter plan that will dictate how the city will respond to potentially deadly weather conditions. These shelters are required to activate in three situations: when temperatures drop below 32 degrees, when they rise above 95 degrees or when the Air Quality Index reaches 201 or higher.
The city’s plan is supposed to include:
- The name(s) and location(s) of center providers and similar resources
- The capacity and scalability of all emergency centers, by type and population(s) focus (if any)
- Activation criteria
- Cost and funding source
- Partnerships
- A communication and publication plan
The details are all important, but the final item on that list is vital: emergency shelters aren’t effective if no one knows they exist. These emergency shelters are to be open to anyone, and often people who are housed but on fixed incomes, or whose homes don’t have adequate heat or cooling use them as well. Unhoused people by the very nature of having no fixed address are the hardest to reach of those at risk.
Today is October 9, so we asked:
Is there a plan or not?
On Monday, October 7, service providers and concerned citizens held a protest outside City Hall, waving signs that read “Mayor Brown. You promised something different than the Woodward Administration. What is different? Engagement? Transparency? Are our unhoused friends better off? Are our downtown businesses better off?”
The protest was organized by HT Higgins, who has been volunteering with service providers like Barry Barfield from the Spokane Homeless Coalition and Julie Garcia of Jewels Helping Hands. Higgins was joined by both Barfield and Garcia in front of City Hall, and told RANGE he believes there hasn’t been a clear plan. Higgins told us he had donated to Lisa Brown’s campaign and PDC records confirm he gave the mayor’s campaign $1,200, the legal maximum for an individual donor. He told RANGE he expects better from Brown.
“To me, it’s all about process, and Mayor Brown has been absent for the past nine months,” Higgins said. “There is still no confirmed warming center plan … people will potentially die on our streets when the weather changes and there’s no sense of outrage.”
The lack of an inclement weather sheltering plan isn’t a new issue. The city council passed the emergency shelter law in 2021, and by the end of last October — just its second year in effect — then-Mayor Nadine Woodward had yet to publish a plan. Instead, she said the city would “leverage the existing shelter system and associated infrastructure.”
Woodward faced backlash too, with media attention and some comments at city council meetings.
But Brown’s team says the difference is they do actually have a plan.
Erin Hut, Brown’s spokesperson, told RANGE a plan was presented to relevant boards and committees in late September — just in time for the cutoff — and further details were presented publicly at a CHHS Board meeting on October 2.
So what’s in the plan?
The city plans to approach emergency sheltering differently than the previous administration. Instead of standing up new shelters or buildings, which the city cannot currently afford to do, the Brown administration plans to expand capacity at existing facilities in the city.
Using the $250,000 emergency shelter budget Woodward proposed in 2023, Brown says the city can afford to add approximately 100 beds a night for 38 nights of emergency activation. Those 38 nights have to last the city a full year, from November 2024 to the end of December 2025. During just two months last winter, there were 43 days that would have triggered emergency shelter beds.
The administration estimates the extra beds cost an average of $70 a bed per night, and will likely be spread across six sites and operated by four providers: Family Promise, Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington, Salvation Army and Revive. The city says these beds will be ready no later than November 7.
Dawn Kinder, the city’s director of Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services, told RANGE that there are actually more inclement weather beds available than the city can afford — hypothetically, if there was more money, they could stand up a total of 357 beds per night in addition to a year-round shelter. She also acknowledged community frustrations that the plan wasn’t available earlier.
“We would have loved to move sooner, as is always the case in this field,” Kinder said. “But I think we do feel really confident that there is a plan, and that plan is in the middle of being executed.”
Problems with the Plan
What Brown’s administration presented was certainly more detailed than what we received from Woodward last year, which included no service providers, shelter locations or bed count details, but some remain frustrated.
Higgins pointed to the section of the Spokane Municipal Code (SMC) that requires the city to list the addresses of all emergency shelters. Currently, the city’s plan does not have this information, because there are no approved contracts with providers yet.
The numbers and providers remain hypothetical. City processes can be arduous, and though Hut says the administration knows who they’re likely to work with and how many beds will likely be available, the city has until October 20 to receive formal applications from service providers for inclement weather sheltering. Contracts recommended by the administration could go to the city council for approval on October 28.
Higgins said he won’t consider it a real plan until it meets the city’s legal obligations.
And while a plan was presented in a public board meeting, it wasn’t widely publicized by that September 30 date.
The law states the city must “publish and disseminate,” the plan, though there are no real details on where it should be published or how it should be disseminated, but it is crucial that service providers and community members know where warming shelters are located.
City Council Member Paul Dillon, said that while there should have been press conferences, media releases and better outreach earlier, he’s seen robust communication between the administration, the CHHS board and service providers like CHAS, Veterans of America, Revive, the Salvation Army and Empire Health Foundation.
“The work is happening. I don’t think the criticisms are completely fair,” Dillon said. “But there’s certainly more that [the city council and mayoral administration] can be doing to get this information out there.”
In a text to RANGE, Hut said “We recognize that we should probably put it in a blog post moving forward, which we’ll do when those (contracts) have been awarded.”
The city responded after we published this story to clarify that they have been communicating their plan with affected people: “We know that the best way to communicate with our unsheltered population is through word of mouth and that is why we have been working directly with providers to inform them of our inclement weather sheltering plan,” Hut said in a text. She noted that in addition to communicating the plan in multiple public meetings, her team holds a monthly provider call and has conversations with individual providers. For the general public, their primary form of communication is through press releases and news outlets, blog posts and social media, which is how they will communicate awarding upcoming funds.
A blog post might reach service providers, it almost certainly won’t reach unhoused people without additional effort, likely from service providers. According to three unhoused people we talked to this week, they only know where to access emergency shelters by word-of-mouth.
“I don’t have a TV,” said Jay, who has been unhoused in Spokane for nearly two decades.
His shelter plan is to sleep in his car — though it just broke down and won’t start — because at least the doors lock.
Candace, who has been unhoused off and on for 19 years, said she is in the process of securing housing and is optimistic she’ll be off the streets for the winter. Other than through word of mouth, she said she knows she can find shelter through Spokane Transit Authority buses, which give free rides to warming shelters and often provide a list of the nearest locations to their route.
The 250-bed Warehouse in the Room
For Barfield, though, the problem isn’t just the winter homelessness sheltering plan. It’s Trent Shelter — the warehouse owned by businessman Larry Stone and operated by Salvation Army with no running water or indoor bathrooms for residents, which has been marked by fraud, sexual assault allegations, rampant illness, overdoses and constant budget overruns. The city has hemorrhaged almost $17 million on shelter operations alone over the two years it’s been operating.
The Trent Shelter has a normal operating capacity of up to 250 people. During inclement weather conditions in the past, the capacity has been increased to 350, 400 and 500 beds.
During her campaign, Brown promised to close the Trent Shelter. Her administration has been ramping down available beds since September, moving instead to a scatter shelter site model, and intends to fully make good on the promise by the end of October.
Hut and Kinder told RANGE they had an individualized list of names of regular Trent Shelter residents and were trying to “aggressively place people,” moving them into other shelters, transitional or permanent housing or, in other cases, encouraging them to “reconnect with family or friends they can stay with.”
Currently, 95 people are staying at Trent Shelter.
For the last few weeks, Garcia, Barfield and other folks in the service provider community have been sounding the alarm about the shelter’s closure, worrying about the safety of the people currently staying there.
“Brown is not as good as Woodward. Woodward had 500 folks in TRAC last winter,” Barfield wrote in an email to RANGE. “While I appreciate Mayor Brown’s efforts. She well knows that this winter hundreds, probably thousands, will be outside when temperatures are below 32 degrees and she settles for promoting a band-aid on a gaping wound.”
It remains to be seen how many fewer beds the whole system will have, but just having beds doesn’t mean people want to use them. Since it opened in 2022, RANGE has interviewed dozens of unhoused people who have refused to stay at Trent, citing safety, hygiene and other concerns.
This week, Tyler, Jay and Candace all told RANGE similar things: that regardless of how cold the winter gets, they’re not going to the Trent Shelter. They cited multiple reasons: it’s far away, it’s hard to get to and, most importantly, “it’s shady.”
Jay said he’d heard multiple unhoused people had their possessions stolen at the shelter. Candace said she’d heard similar rumors and didn’t feel comfortable there.
Tyler, who is a wheelchair user, pointed to the absence of disabled access showers, and stories of sexual abuse that he’d heard from friends who are women. He told us he has stayed there once before for a few days, and that he won’t go back.
Dillon, who was on the city council for a month of Woodward’s last winter as mayor, said he sees a huge difference in transparency, communication and the level of compassion for unhoused people, with Brown coming out the clear winner. He said the Trent Shelter has always been a “money pit,” with inhumane conditions for the people living there.
He added that while government processes can be complex, long and difficult to understand, he’s confident Brown is putting in the work to safely decommission the shelter.
Brown’s administration has also made it clear over multiple interviews with RANGE that there simply isn’t money in the budget to continue paying for services there, though they are stuck in the lease for another three years. Woodward had kept it afloat by dipping into one-time pandemic relief funds and the city’s savings.
Instead, Brown wants to pivot to smaller shelters scattered throughout the city, coordinated by the Empire Health Foundation, which will allow them to get spun up quicker with fewer bureaucratic hurdles and without needing city council approval on each individual subcontract.
Zeke Smith, the president of Empire Health Foundation, told RANGE in an interview last week that they have existing contract with the city for $750,000 and $1 million that can be spent on the scatter site system through June 2025. This pot of money is separate from the emergency sheltering budget. They anticipate additional funds from the city may be available soon.
Smith anticipates this money will allow the scatter site system to host the same amount of beds that currently exist, including Trent, after Trent closes. He stressed that EHF’s focus is on not destabilizing the current shelter network.
This new system is still coming into view, though. Neither Hut, Kinder nor Smith could say exactly when the new locations will open, where they’ll be or what capacity each will have. RANGE is actively tracking these details and will report them out once we know more.
