Shawn Vestal: The tables have turned on Spokane in the tale of the bused-in homeless

There is a long-running fable about homelessness in Spokane that goes something like this: We are suffering from a crisis that has been exported from the urban hellholes on the coast.

In this narrative, Seattle, Portland and other cities have packed up their unhoused people and bused them here, DeSantishly, where they thrive due to our excessively compassionate services.

This is poorly supported by common sense as well as annual surveys of the homeless population, which show that a large majority of them last lived in a home right here in Spokane County.

But on this subject, and in this era, fables are often more powerful than facts.

The notion persists that homelessness in Spokane – a city that has for decades had a large population of people living in and near poverty – cannot be a home-grown problem largely made up of our fellow citizens, but is a result of a pernicious conspiracy from afar or from within.

These fables help people detach themselves from the problem, dehumanize people living on the streets, and flee from any sense of responsibility to pursue solutions. It’s not really our crisis, in this formulation – it’s created elsewhere, nourished by the wrong politics, and we should answer it by making life harder on the homeless in order to force them to go back to wherever they came from.

Now, though, several years into a crisis for which Spokane has become regionally infamous, this fable has grown a new chapter.

In this one, we aren’t the recipient of the bused-in homeless.

We’re the exporters.

The mayor of Wenatchee, Frank Kuntz, was recently quoted by NewsRadio 560KPQ saying his town’s growing homeless population was boosted recently by people bused in from an unnamed city in Eastern Washington.

In an interview this week, Kuntz clarified he was talking about Spokane. He emphasized he can’t say exactly how he thinks this transfer occurred, and isn’t accusing the city government of doing it – but he thinks the closure of Camp Hope is very … suggestive.

“Where did all the people from Camp Hope go?” he asked. “Camp Hope was there. Camp Hope isn’t there any more.”

Kuntz seemed to view this as a strong case, on its face. He said his city has had about 40 homeless people with whom its outreach workers have close contact, and about 30 new people showed up in early July, almost overnight.

He said these newcomers apparently told other homeless people they were from Spokane, and these other homeless people told outreach workers the newcomers were from Spokane, and these outreach workers told Kuntz, who told the radio station, “They took their problem and sent it to us.”

Evidence for this assertion is in short supply. Camp Hope closed about a month before the Wenatchee claim was reported, and camp organizers say they never sent a group of people on a bus to Wenatchee or any other city.

Julie Garcia, who started Camp Hope and helped oversee the movement of camp residents into housing, said the camp did sometimes buy tickets for individuals, but only if they had confirmed housing at the destination. Garcia says the camp purchased 12 tickets for individuals during its closing, and she was emphatic there was never a group of homeless people bused to Wenatchee or anywhere else from Camp Hope.

City spokesman Brian Coddington said neither the city nor the Salvation Army bused anyone to Wenatchee from the Trent Avenue shelter. Rob McCann, CEO of Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington, said no one in his organization bused people out of town or heard of it happening. He said stories about homeless people being bused into and out of Spokane have thrived for years and years – but he has not yet come across a case where it was true.

Other organizations that work with the homeless here did not respond to requests for comment this week, but have in the past described programs similar to that at Camp Hope: purchasing bus tickets for individuals if they had a place to go.

It’s possible, of course, homeless people from Spokane wound up in Wenatchee. We have a growing population of unhoused people, many of whom move about of their own volition. You might imagine certain well-to-do anti-homelessness activists in the city taking on such a project themselves, though no one I asked had heard of such a thing.

And if you’re looking at our city from the outside, you might remember that our former sheriff – in his unhinged, personal attacks on the people trying to bring Camp Hope to a humane end – claimed he was going to clear the camp quickly by spreading around bus tickets.

But the Ozzie-fication of the camp never happened. And – while I remain open to evidence to the contrary – the idea that someone in Spokane has employed a mass homeless-exportation strategy stretches credibility.

People believe a lot of silly, cruel things about homelessness. It helps, it seems, to avoid confronting the challenging reality of the crisis, and it helps public officials let themselves off the hook for their own failures.

A recent example: Mayor Nadine Woodward said in a recent Spokesman-Review story that the effort to close Camp Hope was deliberately dragged out in an effort to make her look bad on the issue of homelessness.

As if it would take $25 million and eight months to do that.

There are, I’m sure, plenty of people who wish we could bus our homeless crisis out of town. But for Spokane, Wenatchee and all the cities big and small who find themselves facing this challenge, the solutions won’t be found in fables.