By Emily Alhadeff

Last December, as protesters camped in tents outside city hall to draw attention to the fact that the city’s primary shelters routinely were filled to capacity, Spokane’s council made headlines by approving an innovative “hoteling plan” requisitioning up to 40 motel beds nightly to house the overflow. By the end of the month, amid an “arctic blast” that brought snow and freezing temperatures for nearly two weeks, the city was in the spotlight again when it opened its convention center as a round-the-clock emergency warming center, providing beds for up to 343 each night and serving more than 9,000 hot meals at a cost of $400,000 (not including an estimated $90,000 in damages to the facility as a result of vandalism, which became fodder for local TV news coverage). After that event passed, the quest to construct a new low-barrier homeless shelter—included in the city’s 2022 budget, with a $4.6 million earmark—never seemed more urgent.

“We were in a crisis, and we needed to stabilize things,” says Eric Finch, the City of Spokane’s interim director of Neighborhood Housing and Human Services. “We’re trying to really put our arms around these different categories.” Finch notes that he was surprised to find, for example, via an after-action review with those who provided services during the crisis alongside a review of data from previous surveys, that a large demographic group coming to the warming center was over the age of 55—a group that doesn’t have a clear exit path through the system and faces a shortage of long-term care options.

So far, initiatives that have borne fruit include providing more hotel rooms as safe havens for victims of domestic violence; the development of an emergency sheltering plan with “flex capacity” to expand when needed; a partnership with Habitat for Humanity to restore and eliminate “zombie homes,” abandoned houses occupied by squatters; and a centralized diversion fund that has housed 14 individuals in three months’ time for under $20,000 just by helping with expenses like moving costs.

“You have to look at the whole ecosystem, and you have to be prepared to move several levers at the same time.”

Then there’s the city’s work with the United Way Spokane, which uses a “Built for Zero” model to target a specific subset of the city’s homeless population and dedicate resources to that population until virtually every individual in that cohort has been housed. In 2017, the nonprofit launched a 100-day challenge to house 100 youth and young adults between the ages of 12 and 24 in the city that has evolved into the Anchor Communities Initiative, a partnership between the city, the United Way, and A Way Home Washington (a statewide initiative supporting at-risk youth that identify as LGBTQ+) seeking to effectively end youth homelessness in Spokane. Creating a “by name list” of every person between the ages of 12 and 24 experiencing homelessness in Spokane County, and dedicating resources to each individual on that list, the collaborative cut the number of cases from 44 to 19 from September 2020 through June 2021.

“The whole initiative is built on this idea of little victories,” says Julius Henrichsen, who runs Anchor Communities Initiative. Once they see something work, he explains, “that is a huge lift, especially for a community of service providers.”

And for a city that’s determined to address homelessness, driven by data and the help of many partners, celebrating one little victory at a time. “You have to look at the whole ecosystem,” Finch stresses, “and you have to be prepared to move several levers at the same time.”

For more information: my.spokanecity.org