Could Spokane fix its homelessness crisis by following Houston’s lead? Former mayor who led that city’s progress shares hard-won lessons

A strong mayor willing to be accountable but unwilling to cede control; a business community willing to back her vision; an infusion of federal cash and buy-in from philanthropists; and housing – lots and lots of housing.

These were some of the insights brought to Spokane on Tuesday by former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, whose success in radically reforming that city’s approach to homelessness has earned her accolades and the attention of cities nationwide.

Two years ago, Spokane political, business and community leaders traveled to Houston to learn that city’s secret sauce for addressing homelessness and see if it could be replicated in the Inland Empire.

Those efforts have been halting, and political differences have seemingly deepened.

But some saw a ray of hope Tuesday as many of the same local leaders, or in some cases their successors, gathered in a Spokane ballroom to listen to Parker.

In an event hosted by Hello for Good, a business coalition created by Washington Trust Bank in 2021 to address homelessness, Parker highlighted the keys to Houston’s success and the challenges she faced, and in so doing underscored areas where Spokane has closely followed Houston and areas where it has sharply diverged from Space City.

Shortly before Parker was elected mayor in 2012, Houston faced a major budget deficit and had to slash services and lay off hundreds of city staff, financial troubles that echo difficult decisions facing Spokane’s leaders today.

Despite this, without assistance from the state and almost entirely without new local taxes for homeless services, she managed in six years to create a system that to date has housed more than 32,000 largely by reorganizing existing federal dollars and with the backing of philanthropic heavyweight Houston Endowment.

Houston today has the lowest rate of homelessness of any large city in the country, less than one for every 1,000 people; local homeless data reporting makes it difficult to say what Spokane’s rate of homelessness is, but countywide it’s closer to four out of every 1,000.

A lot of this came down to coordination of service providers and “brute force” over who got federal funding for what purposes, Parker said Tuesday.

“I’m controlling federal dollars, and I’m going to move the dollars to the agencies that are most efficient with it,” she said. “That’s the brute force, like a two-by-four upside the head.”

Under former Mayor Nadine Woodward, one of the cornerstone efforts to replicate the “Houston model” was creating a regional homeless authority that would bring area governments and nonprofits together in the same board room, eliminating redundancies and sharing responsibility for effectively coordinating federal and state money for homeless initiatives.

There was initially momentum to form this entity, which organizers hoped would eliminate politics from how local governments handled homelessness, but those efforts quickly ran into a political brick wall amid pushback from service providers and mistrust over how the regional authority would be governed.

Efforts to form a shared governance organization of this kind persist, with Spokane Councilman Jonathan Bingle recently arguing that a regional homeless authority could have alleviated the strain on downtown businesses and suggesting that the authority would have successfully formed if Lisa Brown hadn’t been elected mayor.

Parker emphasized the efforts she made to bring businesses, philanthropists, religious leaders and outside politicians to the table, regularly presenting them with Houston’s efforts and data on its successes. She highlighted the importance of a central authority that coordinated service providers, directed funds and demanded accountability, bringing together the resources and capabilities of the city, the county and dozens of nonprofits.

But Parker made explicit Tuesday that there was no Houston regional authority on homelessness – she alone had the reins.

“I did not do a plan by committee,” she said. “I would come sit in front of them and say, ‘This is what we discovered, this is our progress, this is where we’re going’ … (but that was) accountability that they couldn’t undermine.

“The city of Houston is the closest thing to a benevolent dictatorship you can have as a mayor.”

Parker found that she had a “moment of grace,” a brief period of goodwill after a previously successful and collaborative effort to house homeless veterans funded entirely by a new infusion of federal dollars.

Houston was by far the most successful at this initiative, Parker said, noting her ability to steer the city relatively unimpeded and crediting an attitude among relevant directors in the city and county that “nobody was protecting their legacy,” and everyone was willing to spend their political capital.

By the time that first project was over, she had earned a reputation for effectively and quickly getting the homeless into housing, but also learned how the various agencies, service providers and other nonprofits operated, where the system was strong and where it failed to address the problem.

“There was a complete mismatch between what we had on the street and who (providers) wanted to serve,” she said. “Everybody wants to serve moms with children, and nobody wants to serve schizophrenic homeless men, but I needed what I needed.”

She made personal pitches to groups like the Houston Archdiocese, the local newspaper’s editorial board, business associations and philanthropists, urging them to come to the table and grade her work.

“I didn’t need them to grade my work; I was going to do it anyway, but I needed them to buy in,” Parker said.

Houston heavily incentivized developers to build affordable housing, invested in converting hotels and motels and demanded data to quantify the return on investment, Parker said.

In the first few years, the city launched 2,600 units of supportive housing for people coming newly off the streets.

Service providers were brought under a unified intake system, preventing people who entered into the system from being lost in the shuffle between services.

In some cases, it was just necessary to roust an organization or government that were for one reason or another not pulling their weight, Parker said, noting that the local Veterans Administration office had stopped distributing housing vouchers before the city got involved.

She also noted a tendency for smaller cities to foist their homeless residents onto bigger cities and refuse to help improve the system.

“They often feel that they don’t need to do anything about homelessness, because the big city will take care of that,” Parker said.

Spokane’s business leaders nodded as Parker emphasized the importance of commerce to cities like Houston, adding that she would not have been able to win the support of area businesses without robust enforcement of “civility laws.”

“You cannot put up a sleeping bag or a tent on the sidewalk – everybody owns those sidewalks, the homeless do not own sidewalks,” Parker said. “We expect a certain level of behavior, and we enforce it, but I don’t necessarily need to put those people in jail.”

But sending a homeless person to the city jail for offenses like trespassing, urinating in an alley or passing out on a park bench was not only cost-ineffective, it added to criminal records that prevented people from getting jobs and into housing, Parker said.

Instead, the city opened a sobering center where police could involuntarily detain someone for no less than four hours, taking them temporarily off the streets for a fraction of the cost.

The city of Houston did not solve homelessness. Parker acknowledged that encampments could still be found along the city’s numerous bayous, that projects have become more expensive and that youth homelessness in particular has fallen through the cracks because it’s often less visible.

A recent Houston Chronicle editorial notes that the spigot of federal money is running dry, leaving the current mayor to find new sources.

And the city of Spokane faces challenges that Houston did not. Rents are higher despite efforts to relax zoning and encourage affordable housing. Washington’s laws for involuntary detainment for substance abuse also do not allow the city to force people into a sobering facility like Houston could, Brown noted.

But Brown added that she hopes Parker’s presentation to a packed crowd might renew conversations between groups that rarely see eye to eye.

“The pushback that (the city is) experiencing can be discouraging. That is not going to stop us,” Brown said. “But I hope that this is kind of a wake-up call for renewed conversation, and not just sort of lobbing that the city doesn’t care. We would like to work with our critics on some solutions.”