SPOKANE, WA – The Trent shelter is just one step closer to being a real possibility for the homeless population in Spokane.
In 2018 Spokane created a city-wide policy to stop homeless people from sleeping in certain parts of town. It was enforced for about a year until a court case out of Boise said it was too broad. Since then, there’s been a lot of confusion about what officers can and cannot enforce.
“As long as they keep them clean, they don’t mess with them,” Oliver Stuart, who has been without a home in Spokane for 5 years said. “The city comes on this walk, they look and they leave cause it’s clean. But a lot of the blocks, they don’t spend as much time as they used to, I know that.”
Stuart knows what it’s like to keep moving around.
“I abided the no sit and lie hours so 6 am all this stuff is broken down even in the middle of winter,” he said. “Rules are rules. Really they are.”
But those rules keep changing.
“The situation we’re in now is that there is no enforcement,” Spokane City Council Member Michael Cathcart said.
“It just kind of whose mood what the mood is of the supervising officer or the mayor’s office or the latest story,” Spokane City Council President Breean Beggs said.
The new homeless shelter opening in Spokane goes hand in hand with the camping ordinance.
If there are shelter beds available, camping is banned everywhere, including spaces like Camp Hope.
If there’s no shelter space available, the city can’t enforce the no-camping ban.
However, there are two proposed revisions to the current ordinance.
One says even if there aren’t enough shelter beds, camping would still be prohibited, near downtown railroads, any city-owned park, on any land near the Spokane River or Latah Creek, or in places where safety is a concern.
The second revision basically just expands which areas would be off-limits.
“Those include city properties, that includes downtown, that includes that half-mile radius around shall congregate shelters,” Cathcart said. “And then also included in there as the 1000-foot distance around education facilities, schools, that sort of thing. And so, what that does is it narrows the scope enough to allow us to be in compliance.”
The second option also allows for enforcement during daytime hours in business districts
“There is a lot of homeless people that really don’t cause a problem, a lot of them are good people, a lot of them offer to help out here a lot. But what comes with that, there is a lot who cause problems, cause fights, break the law, they’ll trespass,” Sunset Grocer’s Manager, Dillan Shaules, said he’s dealt with a lot over the years. “For years they were doing nothing.”
He thinks a stringent set of rules will help.
“If they’re providing options, why not take those options,” he said.
Stuart tells me he is good with the rules, but only if it’s communicated.
“A lot of us don’t have access to know, it’s all hearsay,” Stuart said. “Police say it’s just our job, as citizens to know. One way or another, we have to find out.”
The Trent shelter is supposed to open Aug. 1.
The big question now, is if this shelter opens, will our homeless population go? And if they don’t and we start really enforcing this illegal camping policy, what will that look like?
These two revision ideas are just ideas as of now.
The Department of Commerce did recently announce that they’re going to provide up to $24 million to rehouse the homeless population, including those in Camp Hope.
The city is now scrambling, with a 30-day clock to try to get that plan and contracts.
Right now, there isn’t enough shelter space available to move the over 500 people just at Camp Hope. The city is looking at options like a hotel that would house 100 people, another more secure encampment that’s fenced, managed places where people would park their RVs and cars away from the freeway, with bathrooms, and even finding ways to get more space out of existing shelters.
