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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spokane opens new addiction recovery homeless shelter, partially replaces beds for families

Whitworth University student and volunteer Trillium Bristow helps out by cleaning toys at the Family Promise shelter at 2002 E. Mission Ave. on March 15, 2022.  (Jesse Tinsley/The Spokesman-Review)

Two more small-capacity shelters have been added to the city of Spokane’s homeless service system, including one focused on families with children and another for people actively trying to recover from addiction.

Mayor Lisa Brown made the announcement in front of Family Promise of Spokane’s headquarters Tuesday morning, continuing the rollout of her signature “scatter-site model” decentralizing away from the large congregant shelter that had typified her predecessor’s approach to giving the homeless a place to sleep and receive other services.

“(Homelessness is) not a one-size-fits-all issue,” Brown said Tuesday. “There are people in our unhoused community with different challenges and varying needs, so we are working towards a model that is more personalized and focused on specific populations and their challenges, matching providers, faith communities and resources to people and their needs.”

The new facilities include a 15-bed shelter operated by Family Promise of Spokane and an at least 20-bed shelter operated by Compassionate Addiction Treatment, expanding the city’s scattered shelter model to seven facilities, including the Cannon Street Shelter meant to serve as a hub between many of the others.

Family Promise has operated emergency homeless shelters for families with children for many years, and the 15-bed expansion announced Tuesday only partially replaced 45 beds that were lost last year, largely due to a loss of funding from the city and county, said Joe Ader, the organization’s CEO. The partial re-expansion brings the organization’s total capacity to 70 beds.

That organization has been experimenting with the “scatter-site” model of shelters for five years, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, and has operated as many as four facilities at a time to reduce the number of families sharing the same space and try to tailor services to families with different needs, Ader said. For instance, one facility caters to families with newborns, he noted.

All of the recently added beds are already full, signaling a strong need for shelters for families, though Ader claimed his organization was particularly efficient at quickly moving families into permanent housing, cycling the beds for the next group.

“We get more people housed than anybody else,” Ader said. “We’re very, very focused on housing rather than the shelter beds.”

For Compassionate Addiction Treatment, on the other hand, operating a homeless shelter is largely new, with the exception of short-term management of a cold weather shelter last year.

“We’re still working out the details,” Burchinal said in response to differing reports of how many beds their site would maintain. “We won’t be doing (drug screenings) as a prerequisite for entry, because there are already locations in town that provide shelter with that as a prerequisite – we’ll be working with people actively engaged with services to stabilize and stay in recovery.”

Burchinal added that their clients will not be allowed to have or use drugs on the property or surrounding neighborhood, but that “we understand total abstinence may not occur until someone has a stable place to sleep.”

“I want to be clear, our other goal is to be very much a positive presence in our neighborhood,” Burchinal said. “I know the structure of this, along with our housing case management, will only bring more positive results without bringing a negative presence to the neighborhood.”

Their entry into the often controversial space of operating a homeless shelter is notable, given the heated opposition the organization has faced from various groups that have blamed CAT for the crime and dysfunction of the troubled downtown intersection of Second and Division.

Last summer, when Compassionate Addiction Treatment had proposed moving a sobering center from downtown Spokane into the Chief Garry Park neighborhood, a successful petition was started to oppose the effort. Spurred by Andrew Northrop, an associate director of the conservative lobbying group Spokane Home Builders Association, the petition calling CAT a magnet for disorder garnered the support of hundreds of neighbors and dozens of businesses and other lobbying groups, like the Spokane Business Association led Larry Stone, the developer, major political donor and owner of the building that once housed the city’s Trent shelter.

Stone and other developers such as Sheldon Jackson, of Selkirk Development, called for the total defunding of CAT and blamed the organization for the drug use and homelessness that proliferated near their old downtown location, which Jackson has claimed largely disappeared after the organization moved a mile east to Third Avenue.

“They move nine blocks east and the drug addicts on Division disappear,” Jackson wrote to a cohort of hundreds of other mostly business and property owners in a Jan. 14 email.

Burchinal rejects that the organization, which works to get those struggling with addiction off drugs and off the streets, was what caused the area’s issues. She has previously claimed the opposite, that the disruptive issues in that area had interfered with the organization’s mission, prompting them to move elsewhere.

“Are we concerned that (launching a shelter) will give opportunity for wealthy developers to attack us again? Yes,” Burchinal said. “But we are committed to our mission to help people exiting homelessness.”

“I would ask people to be curious, to learn about us, rather than accept the stories they’ve been told,” she added.