The Trent Avenue shelter, once the backbone of Spokane’s homeless system, has closed

The Trent Avenue homeless shelter, which formed the backbone of former Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward’s approach to homelessness for two years, has closed.

While Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration says progress is being made to deal with “the very bad hand we were dealt” and stand up smaller shelters throughout the city with more robust social services, that vision remained largely unrealized as of Friday.

Brown and city executives leading the transition acknowledge there will be fewer beds where people can get off the street just for the night, including during the upcoming winter. But they argue the new system, when it is up and running, will be more effective at getting people permanently off the streets compared to the roughly 10% who successfully transitioned out of the Trent Avenue shelter, a facility with low barriers to entry meant to be a first stop out of homelessness, not the last.

Recent months have demonstrated some success for the administration’s collaborations with other providers, with 136 people successfully transitioned out of the Trent Avenue shelter since the beginning of September out of around 250 who had been staying there. Some unknown number more may have also found housing or some transitional service but declined to disclose that to the city or The Salvation Army, which has been operating the shelter.

Some components of Brown’s plan are operational , such as the Cannon Street Shelter, which closed last year and reopened this summer with 30 beds and a role as the city’s navigation center. It acts as the central hub connecting people to housing, treatment, other social services and other shelters.

The administration says it plans to fund up to 170 additional beds in its “scatter-site” model, though no contracts have been signed. The administration announced Wednesday it would be pulling $800,000 from the city’s 1590 fund, which is generally discussed as being meant for building affordable housing, to greatly expand the city’s ability to offer “surge” beds that can be added during severe weather, though this contract goes into effect Friday. The first night of freezing temperatures in Spokane occurred Oct. 18, according to the National Weather Service.

“It’s always great if things move faster than slower, but … it’s been one thing after another to put this whole thing together,” Brown said. “Having a navigation center, having shored up some of the existing system like with Hope House where there was a danger of 80 beds going away for women … quadrupling the resources available for (severe weather) … I feel like we’re doing a lot with the very bad hand we were dealt.”

Zeke Smith, president of the Empire Health Foundation, which the city has partnered with to identify and subcontract with those scatter site shelters, is considerably more willing to criticize the pace of the project.

“We’re behind the eight ball, and I don’t think painting it any other way is worth doing,” Smith said. “I think, in an effective system, we would have had service providers and funders in a room together back in June or July … we didn’t do that. We started having conversations with service providers four weeks ago.”

Smith said that his organization was unable to begin serious discussions with most organizations, particularly those that would have to create a new shelter out of whole cloth, because Empire Health Foundation’s contract to perform this particular work was only finalized Monday.

Contracts with two scatter-site shelters operated by Jewels Helping Hands, totaling 60 beds, and another operated by Truth Ministries, totaling 72 beds, are nearly finalized, Smith added. The City Council is expected to consider appropriating another $1.8 million of leftover COVID-19 pandemic relief funds to further this project in the coming weeks. Smith believes that this money would allow the city to surpass its initial stated goal of funding 170 shelter beds.

Still, it’s not clear how long it will take to open additional shelters beyond the ones identified, Smith said. He hopes to have an improved system publicly reporting the region’s shelter capacity, building on the tenuous success of the limited and infrequently updated sheltermespokane.org, in the next two weeks. Beyond that, the rest will come “as quickly as possible”

Despite earlier suggestions that the administration might reopen the shelter as a backstop during below-freezing weather this winter, the warehouse’s days under city stewardship are, in fact, numbered. The administration announced Thursday that it would be terminating the city’s lease for the shelter with owner Larry Stone; the five-year lease agreement allows early termination at the cost of eight months’ rent, or around $200,000.

The two years and two months of TRAC

The Trent Resource and Assistance Center, as the shelter was called, opened its doors on Sept. 6, 2022, as Woodward worked to prove the city had shelter space for the hundreds of homeless people staying at the Camp Hope homeless encampment, justifying the camp’s immediate closure.

The facility was immediately beset by controversy, both because it had been leased from Stone, a prominent developer, conservative activist and donor to Woodward’s election campaign, and because within weeks of the shelter opening an employee of the initial operator of the shelter, the Guardians Foundation, was allegedly found to have embezzled as much $1 million.

Before the shelter had been operational two full months, the contract with the Guardians Foundation was canceled, and The Salvation Army took over.

Conditions at the shelter also caused controversy, including a lack of permanent bathrooms, with portable toilets and showers prone to maintenance issues and unclean conditions, and foot-pump hand washing stations prone to freezing during the winter. Money was set aside to build bathrooms, but as the long-term sustainability of the facility was called into question and Stone refused to sell the building for less than $8 million, double what he had paid for it, the Spokane City Council balked and pulled back those funds.

Costs quickly became a pressing concern for the facility, which reportedly took as much as $1 million per month to operate, as the Woodward administration increased its beds from an initial 75 to 150, then 250, then 350, and occasionally exceeding 450 during the worst weather conditions. The lack of permanent amenities also added to expenses, as portable bathrooms, toilets and handwashing stations were expensive to maintain, and laundry had to be shipped off-site for an high rate.

Other once-promised improvements, such as semi-private “pods” for those staying in the open warehouse, also never came to fruition.

On multiple occasions, communication breakdowns also led to people being turned away, including during a December 2022 night when temperatures were expected to drop to 10 degrees below zero.

At no point did the city have a sustainable funding source for the facility, instead drawing down millions in federal pandemic relief money and other temporary funding sources. The Woodward administration had signaled plans to wind down the shelter, if not completely, by last summer, citing the expense. Woodward’s proposed 2024 budget only included six months of funding for the facility.

The shelter became a focal point of the 2023 elections between Woodward and Brown, with Brown arguing that it was bankrupting the city with little long-term benefit to show for it and pledging to shutter the facility.

In December, as Brown prepared to take office, the number of beds at the facility was reduced from 350 to 250.

In the end, it took until the end of September for the final stage of winding down the facility to begin and the end of October for the last people to leave. The Trent Avenue shelter stopped taking in new guests six weeks ago and worked to find its existing population their next bed, whether that was with family, in a long-term care facility or, in some cases, housing.

On Wednesday, Capt. David Cain, a corps officer and the Spokane and Stevens County coordinator for The Salvation Army, surveyed what was left of the largely empty warehouse as a small group of guests gathered at the few remaining tables of what used to be a sizable dining area. Just more than 30 people had stayed the previous night, many of whom were more difficult to place somewhere else for various reasons.

“It’s been a heavy lift, because we haven’t replaced these beds within the system in Spokane, so we’ve been looking for creative solutions,” he said.

The work in the preceding two months to make sure that everyone staying at the Trent Resource and Assistance Center had an option other than the street had been a testament to the shelter’s success, Cain argued. Some people had been easy, finishing the last steps needed to sign a lease and get into an apartment. For others, tickets to Florida or Chicago or elsewhere were purchased after family members there confirmed they were willing and able to have their relative come home.

In many more cases, it took the concerted coordination of myriad service providers and other shelters to find somewhere for everyone to go, Cain said, although not everyone accepted what they were offered.

The Salvation Army, like many aspects of the Trent Avenue shelter, had itself come under some degree of scrutiny and criticism in the past two years, blamed at least in part for cost overruns and for their part in various breakdowns of communication or conditions at the shelter. Some of that was warranted, Cain said.

“(But) I think that in a lot of cases, we found it really sad,” Cain said.

“It hurts our heart, because our team works very hard,” he added, noting that staff had foregone their remaining paid leave to make sure the facility was fully staffed in its last days. “This is a place of compassion. This is a place of intentionality. This was a place during this past winter where there was nowhere else to go, and we had over 450 people in this facility.”

Cain acknowledged the city was not in a position to continue funding the shelter and said he looked forward to seeing what the scatter-site model accomplished. But he rejected the characterization that the congregant shelter model, where hundreds came to the same space, was a waste of time and money.

“You know what’s more inhumane than housing 250 people in one place? Not having an option for anyone,” Cain said.

By Thursday morning, three people were left in the shelter. By the afternoon, they, too, had departed. If anyone arrives there on Friday, they’ll be given a bus pass and advice, but they won’t be let inside, said Dawn Kinder, the leading city executive for homelessness and housing issues.

“It’s a pretty difficult spot to just have to tell somebody they can’t stay,” Kinder said, audibly upset.

Kinder has for months maintained that the city needs to move beyond TRAC and can’t afford to keep providing the number of beds that the last administration had. But that hasn’t made the transition easy.

“I think the staff at the city and provider agencies, we have this incredible group of people focused day in and day out, being proactive and deliberate about decreasing human suffering,” Kinder said. “There are hard days we can’t solve … everyone’s just been feeling it. It’s been tough.”