Challenges ahead as Spokane pivots from warehouse for the homeless

A Trent Avenue warehouse that housed upward of 400 people and served as the backbone of Spokane’s homeless response under former Mayor Nadine Woodward is expected to wind down by the end of October.

By then the city will have begun its pivot to Mayor Lisa Brown’s signature alternative, a more decentralized, personalized and, her administration believes, more effective model of sheltering the homeless with a central “navigation center” connecting people instead to small dispersed shelters and other services, such as addiction or mental health treatment.

Brown’s plan, which her administration says is informed by research and data, is that this new model will get more people currently sleeping on the streets into housing and using the long-term services needed to keep them housed.

But in the short term, at least, it may mean that some people currently sleeping in shelters will no longer have a bed available to them.

Many in the business community have raised alarms over the consequences if these people end up back on Spokane’s streets. Darin Watkins, who serves as government affairs director for the Spokane Association of Realtors, urged the city council to consider the repercussions Monday.

“On a personal note, I want to warn you that… with the closing of the shelter spaces, one operator said, you’re going to see Fallujah,” Watkins said in reference to the Iraqi city leveled in 2004 during battles led by the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army.

Watkins wrote in a text Friday that he had been referring to comments made by Rob McCann, president and CEO of Catholic Charities Eastern Washington.

McCann, also via text, wrote that he actually supports decommissioning the Trent shelter and Brown’s transition to a new model and believed that Watkins was intentionally misrepresenting his comments to advance a political agenda.

“… I am fully supportive of the Mayor and the City’s efforts to address homelessness and I am more hopeful now than I have been at any time in the past 5 years … ” he wrote.

Emilie Cameron, president of the Downtown Spokane Partnership, an organization that advocates for downtown businesses, said in an interview that the partnership’s members worry about the people currently sheltered on Trent Avenue who will no longer have a bed.

“Spokane cannot decommission Trent without having a plan for every person who is currently there,” Cameron said.

Asked whether the city was committed to preventing anyone staying at the Trent shelter today from being involuntarily pushed out onto the street, Brown initially said yes during a Friday interview, but later walked that back, clarifying that the city will try to connect those people to alternatives but could not promise every one of them would have a bed available.

“Like with any transition, there might be some short-term challenges,” she said.

There will be fewer beds in the shelter system during and after the transition toward a new model, not only as the Trent shelter is decommissioned but also as other shelters are seeing fewer available funds, said Dawn Kinder, Brown’s cabinet official tasked with, among other things, overseeing homeless services. With the end of the pandemic-era funding that propped up that large congregant shelter, the city cannot afford to continue operating at the capacity that it had been, she said in a Thursday interview.

“There is an unfortunate reality here that we will lose beds as a system,” Kinder said, adding in a follow-up text that the administration plans to ask the city council to amend an existing law that prohibits the reduction of city-managed shelter beds.

By the time the contract to operate the Trent shelter, which currently houses up to 250 people, is finished at the end of October, Brown’s administration expects to have launched its navigation center, possibly at the site of the current Cannon Street Shelter, and a couple of its smaller “scatter site” shelters, Kinder said. A few more of those smaller shelters are expected to come online in the months after.

How many beds will be available in each shelter will depend – a site taking in higher-needs people might only be able to accept 20, while another may be able to take up to 30 – but with current plans to create five to eight such shelters, there won’t be enough standard beds at these new shelters to house everyone currently staying at the Trent shelter.

With the launch of a navigation center, Kinder expects to be able to more efficiently get some of the people currently on the streets or in the Trent Shelter onto their next step, whether that be a scatter-site shelter or something further along the path out of homelessness, such as a supportive housing program like the Catalyst Project or an Oxford House recovery program.

And while Brown expects by November to be out of the city’s contract with the Salvation Army to operate the Trent shelter, the city is still stuck in a five-year lease for the facility. That facility could be used in a variety of ways, including as surge capacity for the shelter system Brown added.

Despite the possibility of near term difficulties during the transition, Brown has argued that the new system will be more effective. She noted that the city would have been forced to shut down the large congregant shelter in any case as operating that facility, which costs up to $1 million per month, was not financially sustainable without the massive influx of COVID-19 relief funds that were previously used, particularly as the city faces budget problems.

Entering a multi-year lease for the former trucking warehouse and operating it as a shelter that housed as many as 400 people in one building was one of the worst fiscal and policy mistakes of the prior administration, Brown argued on the campaign trail last year.

Brown also argued Friday that the previous model was solely designed to absorb enough people that the city could freely enforce its laws to prevent the homeless from sleeping on public property. About 6% of those who have stayed at the Trent shelter are confirmed to have moved forward out of homelessness, whether into housing or some kind of transitional facility, according to data provided by the city.

While Brown said the city is committed to enforcing its laws more frequently than before she took office this year, she also believes that the new model will more effectively get people off the streets for good.

The launch of Brown’s new model will initially rely on two grants totaling roughly $8 million that will fund operations for a year, and her administration hopes that this pilot will convince the state to provide more funding and to convince other local governments in the region, such as Spokane County, that the model is worth duplicating in their communities.

It’s not yet clear where the city’s small, dispersed shelters will be located, as those decisions still need to be hammered out with providers, Kinder said.

The city’s guiding documents for development call for smaller shelters to be spread “evenly throughout all neighborhoods,” and Kinder said the city is trying to be mindful not to place shelters in areas that already have disproportionately borne some of the burden of nearby services. As was the case with siting the shelter that ultimately was created on Trent Avenue, the city also has to navigate significant pushback when considering sites.

“Citing these is incredibly complicated,” Kinder said. “There’s incredible pressure to have (these shelters) and an incredible disinterest in them existing near most people. So we’re in a battle there in many cases.”