Spokane City Council proposes replacing Cannon Street Shelter with respite facility for medically fragile homeless

Spokane’s Cannon Street homeless shelter will close at the end of May, giving the city an opportunity to perhaps help the roughly 60 people remaining at Camp Hope.

The Cannon Street facility has about 80 beds and is considered low-barrier, meaning it won’t turn people away for being drunk or high. It is operated by the Salvation Army. As its occupants are emptied out into other shelters this spring, City Council members are considering using its space to temporarily house disabled or medically fragile homeless people, who are regularly turned away from standard shelters.

This would provide a place to go for many of the remaining Camp Hope residents who require levels of medical care that existing shelters don’t provide, including the city’s large Trent Resource and Assistance Center. The population of the controversial encampment in the East Central Neighborhood has plummeted in recent months, from a high of approximately 650 people last summer.

A reimagined Cannon Street shelter could also provide a space for disabled or medically fragile homeless people being discharged from area hospitals.

Salvation Army officials have documented numerous instances where hospitals have “dumped” disabled homeless people at the Trent shelter, which is not equipped to serve medically fragile people. This reportedly includes multiple instances where the same quadriplegic person was sent to the Trent shelter and turned away because it could not serve someone with limited mobility, only to be discharged again to the Trent shelter the next month.

“In some of these situations, it’s clear this is more appropriate for respite-type services,” said city spokesman Brian Coddington. “Offering a night-by-night space with meals and a bed requires a different level of skill set from someone recovering after a hospital stay.”

Costs for existing shelter services continue to balloon, particularly for the Trent shelter, the city’s largest and newest. Consolidating city-funded low-barrier services into the one facility is one way that both the City Council and Mayor Nadine Woodward have proposed reducing costs.

However, cost savings from consolidating facilities won’t be nearly enough to save the city’s shelter system without new sources of outside revenue.

Even by winding down the Cannon Street shelter, the city expects to come up short for its homeless services by nearly $4 million this year and roughly $10 million in 2024.

The city can use real estate excise taxes as a one-time stopgap to shore up shelter services this year, Council President Breean Beggs said in a brief interview. But the city is looking toward the state Legislature, which is hashing out a biennial budget.

“We shouldn’t be spending what we’re spending,” Councilwoman Lori Kinnear said. “I think we’ll probably find the funding for this year, but, then, that’s it.”

Providing higher-intensity services for medically fragile people is not a cheap proposition, but council members have expressed hope that local hospitals and their foundations may help foot the bill.

Homeless patients who have nowhere to go when they could otherwise be discharged at the hospital can rack up costly extended hospital stays.

“I think the hospitals are motivated to do that,” Kinnear said. “(Homeless people) staying at the hospital is the most expensive option for the hospitals.”

There’s likely going to be some time between when the Cannon Street shelter closes and something else takes its place.

In the meantime, Beggs said he expects the rest of the city’s shelter system can absorb the approximately 76 people currently staying at the Cannon Street shelter.

There were over 110 shelter beds available Monday night, according to the city’s sheltermespokane.org site, though not every one of those beds is available to any occupant of the Cannon Street Shelter.

Beggs also noted that shelter space tends to open up in the warm summer months.